What to upgrade on Macbook Pro purchase?

[YOTR]

I'm sure this question has been asked a million times but I am struggling somewhat with what to upgrade on a soon to be MacBook Pro purchase. My wife is starting graduate school soon and she doesn't have a computer other than her work one. I am leaning towards the new 13" MacBook Pro 10th gen I5 configuration that apple sells. I am thinking 16 GB will be more than enough along with the 512 GB SSD but then I start going back and forth on whether I should upgrade those (or even pay a little more for the I7 processor). A little background, she is in Education so it isn't like she will be running anything crazy. Probably just doing research, writing papers and using google docs. I work in IT so I think it is more me being OCD with thinking I might need to increase some of the options.I plan on adding Windows 10 on it also so she has both options in case that is needed down the road (and office).

This also needs to last 4-5 years because she might be doing her doctorate right after graduate school. I had looked at the 16" MacBook Pro also but I think it would be to big in the long run for her. I am also planning on getting her an ipad pro 11" with this purchase so that would ramp up the cost quite a bit (unless someone has an argument for the 16" MacBook Pro, lol).

Thank you in advance!

 

[azentropy]

Don't think you would benefit from i7 at all. You said putting Windows 10 on it, by running it in VM (VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels) or by BootCamp? If using bootcamp then more disk space might be more of a priority since you will be partitioning your drive that then could only be used by one or the other. If running in VM then additional RAM would be more the priority since then the memory would be shared since you would be running them at the same time (ie 8gb/8gb). Disk space not quite as much as if you create a virtual drive it can be resized easily and ideally only grows dynamically. But honestly you are probably fine with both as is (16/512).

 

[YOTR]

Don't think you would benefit from i7 at all. You said putting Windows 10 on it, by running it in VM (VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels) or by BootCamp? If using bootcamp then more disk space might be more of a priority since you will be partitioning your drive that then could only be used by one or the other. If running in VM then additional RAM would be more the priority since then the memory would be shared since you would be running them at the same time (ie 8gb/8gb). Disk space not quite as much as if you create a virtual drive it can be resized easily and ideally only grows dynamically. But honestly you are probably fine with both as is (16/512).

I am thinking bootcamp. We have a ton of apple products in the house but I admit this will be my first macbook pro in a long time (I had a 15" macbook pro about 6 years ago). I am leaning towards just going with the 1TB configuration as it's only $100 more. The memory upgrade is a little harder to stomach from a cost perspective though.