MX Master or bust

Hi, my girlfriend is a professional UI/UX designer and I have a degree in design. It may cost a bit extra but you 100% want a Macbook Pro not just a normal Macbook. The ones with the dedicated graphics card (GPU), not the Intel integrated graphics. Reason being is that Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign which she will be using daily, and most likely have open at the exact same time are graphic intensive when working with large file sizes. I wouldn't worry as much about the Ghz numbers, focus more on RAM and making sure there is a dedicated GPU from NVIDIA or AMD inside the laptop. My girlfriend uses 2012 Macbook Pro with an NVIDIA GTX 780 GPU and 16GBs of Ram inside, the laptop still runs as good as day 1 for all of her tasks.

I would recommend also getting a 15" laptop not the 13" because the extra screen size / pixel count will benefit your wife greatly when trying to work on larger files.

I took a quick check at the Apple refurbished website and currently they do not have an 15" macbook pros for sale, but these are the specs I would aim for if you are looking around:

CPU: 2.5 - 2.7GHz i7 Intel CPU

GPU: Whatever the newest one you can afford, nothing lower than a 2012 Macbook Pro with a GTX 780

HDD: 512GB or 1TB SSD(Solid State Drive) make sure its an SSD for speed of loading files, and any rendering when saving files.

RAM: 16GBs, don't go any lower. 8GBs might seem good enough, but 16GBs will really keep that machine running like new, especially when having multiple Adobe apps open at once.

Screen Size: 15"

Please let me know if you have any questions!