New 13" Macbook w/ Touchbar or Old 15" Macbook Retina for Designing?

over 6 years ago from Sandeep Sharma, Full-TIme User-Interface Designer

  • Nat BuckleyNat Buckley, over 6 years ago

    I use the new 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar for design and front-end development, and I love it.

    It replaced my 2014 11" MacBook Air. It’s so much faster, and the Retina screen is just amazing. I have to really force myself to plug in the external monitor to see how things look on non-Retina screen.

    It’s really fast. I use Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, Slack, and a bunch of other memory-hogs all at once and so far I’m impressed.

    I know it’s a controversial opinion, but I also love the Touch Bar. A lot of Apple app make really smart contextual use of it, for example Mail lets me easily Archive / Trash etc when I read emails, but when I compose mail the Touch Bar show me different menus depending on where my cursor is. Especially the last used addressee emails is really neat. I do a lot of programming and my text editor of choice is Vim, and so far haven’t missed the esc key feedback.

    Right now not many apps really make the most of this new interaction paradigm, but it’s clear that some really great things are possible, and I’m curious to see what other developers do with it.

    3 points