2015 MacBook Pro

My work recently adopted a flexible work policy in which employees could work from home at certain times. I get to work from home on Wednesdays. When the policy was announced, I knew I’d want to work from a laptop so I wouldn’t be chained to the Mac Mini on my desk at home. I wanted the ability to work from bed, the couch, or wherever I had a consistent internet connection. The problem was, my white plastic MacBook from 2007 was really slow and old. It only had 2 gigs of RAM and the battery wouldn’t last more than 2 hours. That’s when I decided to start looking for a replacement.

When I started looking for a new laptop I was unsure of what to get. The company I work for is a Microsoft shop, so our software and tools were developed for the Microsoft ecosystem. That made me consider buying a Windows laptop for the first time in over 10 years. So, I started looking at the higher end laptops that ran Windows and couldn’t believe how awful they were. On top of that, when I would build them with custom specs, the price wound up not being far off from Apple’s line of notebooks.

I started thinking about what specs I would need in a MacBook. I figured I’d need a virtual machine to run Windows. Needing a virtual machine also meant I’d need a bigger hard drive in order to house both OSes, as well as the Windows software I’d need to install. I would also need something really fast so I can multitask in both OS X and Windows. This immediately ruled out the new MacBook with Retina Display. It was just too slow and not worth the price for the specs at this point.

The next machines I looked at were the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air was pretty tempting. I really liked the lightness of the Air and I read plenty of posts about running VMWare and Parallels on it. Overall it seemed to perform well. The problem with the Air is that I wanted a Retina Display. If you’ve never looked at a MacBook with a Retina Display, you have no idea what you’re missing. The display is so crisp. I knew that I would be disappointed if I got an Air, especially since they are bound to be updated/replaced with Retina Display models within the next year.

That leaves the MacBook Pro. I immediately ruled out the 15 inch due to weight and size. I no longer need a laptop with such a large screen. If it was my only computer, I’d consider it, but not for a secondary machine. Also, it had been a while since the 15 inch Pros were updated. The 13 inch model, on the other hand, was updated this year and includes faster SSDs and the new Force Trackpad. ¹

I went to the Apple store and played around with a 13 inch MacBook Pro and immediately knew it was the machine for me. The size and weight were great. I loved the display, and the keyboard made typing fast and fluid. I decided to order one online with the specs that I wanted (16 gigs of RAM, 256 GB SSD, and 2.9 GHz dual core i5 processor).

I’ve now been using the Pro for 3 weeks and couldn’t be happier. This machine is unbelievably quick. The Force Trackpad really is amazing. It’s hard to explain how great the trackpad is until you actually use it. The display is bright and crisp, and I love other things that my previous MacBook didn’t have, such as the backlit keyboard. The battery life on it is amazing as well. After 7 hours of use one day without being plugged in, I still had 37% of the battery left.

So how is it with my work? Well, interestingly enough, I never installed Windows. We use Citrix at work and any work I need to do on a Windows machine I can do via logging into a Windows server via Citrix. Our ticket system is managed through the web browser, and if I really need to, I can remote into my work machine. Everything else I can do on my Mac. Tools such as Text Expander, Notes, Evernote, and Outlook make it quite easy. Even though I’m on a Mac working with Windows-only software, I am just as productive, if not more, when working from home on this laptop.

This is, by far, the best Apple computer I have ever purchased.