- 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.
Note that the keyboard on the MacBook is even worse than the one on the new MBP.
And it's a sad state of affairs in HN when I get downvoted for that, felt like I'm on Reddit now.
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.
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.
Which also has the same Butterfly keyboard, or rather the previous version of it; and according to Apple, a less "better" version of it.