1. I’d wait for the new keyboards first. The Airs and 13-inch Pros still have the faulty ones.
2. I’d get a low-spec MBP13 or MBP14, whatever comes out next.
2. I’d get a low-spec MBP13 or MBP14, whatever comes out next.
As for 2, I already have an MBP13 2017 and I want something even more portable. That was why I was interested to hear people’s experiences programming with it’s lower spec CPU.
That said, I recently upgraded to a new MBP because my 2013 MBP had gotten really laggy for certain things, particularly the web (and the inspector, etc.). This was weird, because on pure-compute tasks it still did pretty okay. But basic sites like Twitter were visibly laggy, and the Chrome debugger was like mud.
I did some research and ended up concluding that it came down to the integrated GPU. The processor itself was still significantly faster than a brand-new Air, based on benchmarks, but integrated GPUs have made huge strides in the past 5 years (and web pages have gotten significantly heavier) and I guess that has a more noticeable impact on basic tasks than the CPU does.
Anyway. If you're only doing the occasional, light web dev then I would guess you'll be fine. It'll be noticeably slower than your 2017 MBP, but probably still passable.