Upgrade Air to Pro 15

Is there anyone who has(d) and experience upgrading their Air to Pro 15?

Can you share were you satisifed with such upgrade?

I have super old MacBook Air (Late 2010) with core2duo and 4GB ram.

It has many pros. It's kinda enough for ssh (i am sysadmin), web browsing, emailing, watching movies (720p is okay, 1080p lagging terribly)

It is super lightweight and compact. I am carrying it in my backpack for all the day and working on it in cafes, in travels, in my parent's home, and at home connecting to my 2560x1440 Dell 27'' monitor.

But there are also huge cons:

- no retina, only 128G of storage, old and slow hardware, OSX UI is not so fast when connected to 27 inches monitor, working with disabled transparency in 10.10.4 to avoid horrible lags and it is very laggish when many tabs in safari opened. No chance to watch 1080p movies. And it is super slow in editing or just previewing raw files from my X-E2 Fuji camera in Lightroom. I am an amateur photographer, so it's kinda important to me.

So now I am thinking what to choose for as an upgrade.

I went to appstore and checked some models tactically, macbook pro 15 inches feels very good for me, especially as a photopgrapher. Retina is gorgeous.

But I am also worrying about the ligthweight: 1.32kg (Air) vs 2.04kg (Pro latest version, 2.5ghz, 16gb ram, 1tb ssd)

And of course I am thinking that I wouldnt upgrade it in next 6-8 years, so I need a really fast macbook.

I also have a Windows PC at home: i7, 12gb ram, ssd storage, but it's kinda annoying to me always to switch between macbook and PC for huge tasks like pictures editing, video converting, using virtual machines in VMware and running huge Cisco emulators. So I plan to sell PC and accumulate all my work in single notebook.

Macbook Pro 15 is very good, but it's sooo expensive like $3200 for the latest and the fastest configuraition. In Russia it costs even more! Like $3900

It much heavier than the air for carrying it everywhere in backback.

Macbook Pro 13 is good, but display size the same as in the Air, it is gorgeous retina of course but you're always want bigger screen especially when you do a major upgrade of your hardware 🙂

New Macbook 12 inches could be the best solution for e, since it has totally the same lightweight capability, even lighter! But that core M processor and not so much of RAM makes me really sad, especially when I am thinking of running multiple applications like lightroom, photoshop and parallels desktop with several virtual machines.

So I am a bit of confused, what would be the best Apple laptop lol?

Does anyone went through the same experience? Any advise can you share?

Or just anyone who upgraded from Air to Pro 15, tell me your experience after upgrade and what is your job and basic tasks you are running on your PRO15.

Thank you!