Recently, I wrote a blog post called The Gear I Use To Get Things Done. In that post, I outlined all of the computers and other gear I use to get my work done. Out of the list of products listed was a 2015 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display. It was a great computer for the time and it served me very well, until two weeks ago.  During this time, I was browsing my Twitter Feed and saw numerous posts about discounts on the 2017 and 2016 MacBook Pro 15″ with Touch Bar at B & H Photo. Since I was in the market anyway for a more powerful laptop, I decided to check it out. However, the specs of the machines that had the discount were not going to be enough for my workload. With this in mind, I would look out for a good deal until Apple decides to update the MacBook Pro for 2018.

The next day, I decided to head back to the B & H Photo website to see if there was a sale on a more powerful MacBook Pro. To my surprise, there was. I ended up purchasing a brand new 2016 MacBook Pro 15″ with Touch Bar, with 16GB of Ram with an upgraded Intel Core i7 Processor, and dedicated AMD GPU. Compared to my last laptop, this is my dream system. At the time of writing this, I’ve owned the computer for about 2 weeks and here are my thoughts about it so far.

The bigger screen is nicer for coding and blogging:

One of my biggest problems I had with my last MacBook Pro is that the screen was way too small for long coding sessions or for working on my blog. I constantly found myself adjusting my open programs in order to find a good size to get work done. Yes, I could avoid this by using my external display but that led to my Macbook acting more as a desktop than a laptop.

The TouchBar is not as useless as I thought:

I’m going to keep this one pretty brief. However, I do enjoy using the TouchBar. I find the sliders for screen brightness and volume to be more intuitive than buttons. I also like how you can customize the Touch Bar with different buttons. For example, I added a button to take a screenshot. I find this incredibly convenient for my needs. Oh, By the way, Touch ID is a nice added bonus.

The keyboard is perfect:

I have to admit, I was nervous about the keyboards on the new MacBook Pro. In fact, I watched a series of online reviews stating they hated the TouchBar and the keyboard. For me, the new Butterfly 2 Keyboard from Apple is probably my favorite keyboard. The keys feel great compared to the keys on the Magic Keyboard. The best part of all is that these keys feel mechanical compared to past keyboards.

Overall, I’m very happy with my purchase.