I upgraded from a Late 2013 15" Macbook Pro, the cpu on this is roughly about twice as fast (multicore performance). This was strictly a business purchase for me: I develop mobile games for iOS and android. The six cores go a long way when it comes to compiling, essentially cutting my compile times by at least half from the 2013 model. The keyboard and trackpad are very nice, overall the build quality is very good. It does get pretty hot under load, the hottest area seems to be directly above the touch bar. The SSD is also ridiculously fast, getting around 2300MB/s reads and writes. I've selected the 16GB modal to save a few bucks and I don't regret it; I hardly ever go over 10GB of use, even while having both Xcode and Unity open, among countless other applications. I wish the graphics card was faster, but it's a laptop. The CPU has a large watt draw while under load, hitting the cpu hard while on battery will result less than three hours battery life. Look, I develop for iOS, so I have to have an apple based laptop. Would I purchase this laptop if I did not need it? No. But it's a great tool and has increased my productivity.On a side note, I use BetterTouchTool to customize the touch bar, and it actually makes it useful. I also use Boost Switcher Pro to disable turbo boost while on battery power, which has increased my battery life by about a hour. I consider these two tools as a necessity.