I'm a writer. I write around about 2000 words a day, and I'll be getting the new MacBook Pro for a few reasons:
- The screen is better than the Air. That matters when you're staring at it for 8 hours a day.
- However over-priced the MacBook Pro is, that goes double for the small MacBook. It's just too expensive for what you get.
- I want to be able to run photoshop and have it deal with the RAW files from my Sony A6000, My current machine — a 2012 MBA — can't manage it without becoming a noisy radiator.
- If I'm paying top dollar for a laptop, I want it to last for at least four years, and I don't see the small MacBook satisfying me for that length of time with its current resource limitations.
- The extra screen real estate might not seem like much, but when I want my work and a browser next to each other, it makes a difference.
Unusually for writers, I use Vim, and the lack of a hardware Escape is a small concern, but I've remapped it anyway, so I don't think it will pose much of a problem.
The keyboard also worries me, but I've played with the smaller MacBook and It's OK, not awesome but I can deal with it.
Edit: Of course, I could just buy a Windows laptop, but I haven't used Windows regularly for about fifteen years. I used Linux for about a decade, and then OS X. I won't move to Windows, and I'm too busy for the sort of fiddling Linux generally requires. Plus, I'm not a of fan of any current Linux UI — none have the polish of MacOS. So, in addition to everything else, MacOS is a big factor in my sticking with Apple.
As a side note, if you really dislike the current Linux UIs, you may like Elementary OS (https://elementary.io/). It's UI took a lot of design cues from Mac OS and Chrome OS.
But do you need the hardware of the MBP for that or was it a personal choice?
If we are free to use anecdotes I will base my evaluation on two friends who are copywriters and another one who's a tech writer. All of them using an Air or a normal MacBook for the work they do.
I'm curious on what your usage is as a writer for paying a premium on the Pro, care to elaborate?
P.S.: English is not my native language and I'm really trying to not sound condescending, I'm genuinely curious.
I happen to be a developer as well, so I want a machine I can travel with that's powerful enough to get everything done when I'm remote, and can drive a big external monitor when I'm home.
But for people who are writers and nothing else, I think the retina display was a big draw when the machine first came out.
The point I was trying to make above is that people who code, or use a pro laptop for editing or whatnot, still have to do a lot of writing as part of their job. So the keyboard on these machines matters a lot. And pro-users tend to be on their laptops all the time, which makes the ergonomic issues more important.
So this was quite misleading, as a developer myself I completely understand why you'd want a MBP but I was explicitly referring to writing-only work...
