Bye bye macbook air :( Hello 13" macbook pro!

Recently, I was assigned to work at a supplier's facility about 200 miles away from the office.  The network in that location basically required me to run everything locally on my laptop instead of trying to use remote desktop with my PC in the office.

Sadly, the macbook air was not up to the task of running a complex Navisworks model in a Windows virtual machine.  This was just about the time that Apple released the new model Macbook Pros with the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C connector) connections.  Armed with a credit card, I headed to Best Buy to try out the 15-inch, then the 13-inch macbook pros.  I ended up returning both of them: the 15-inch because it was too expensive and the 13-inch because its 8 GB of RAM was not enough.

On the new macbook pros, I did find the touchbar useful for limited cases, and TouchID was fantastic.  The keyboard was mostly fine, but I found I kept missing the delete key.  I think it is slightly farther away from the J key than the keyboard of my macbook air.  The force touch trackpad is awesome, though.

I did discover that having 16GB of RAM made the biggest difference in the Navisworks performance, so I jumped on craigslist and soon found a good deal on a 2016 13-inch macbook pro with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and 3.1GHz i7.  This one has the Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB.  It has the added bonus of using the same keyboard as my old macbook air, but has the force touch trackpad.

It also nice to be able to drive three external displays.  While, the laptop can drive them all natively, I prefer to use USB graphics cards for two monitors so I only have one data cable and power going to the laptop. Check out the short video of my new laptop showing the Aerial screensaver from the new Apple TV.

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