16 GB and quad-core necessary?

I can't decide which MPB I should get. Do you think that 16GB of RAM is overkill? I'm just doing office stuff and I'm running parallels on it. Is the dual-core i5 in the 13" enough or would you get the 15" quad-core?
I want to use the macbook as long as possible and don't want to change it any three years
Thank you for your help!

Since you plan to run virtual machines on your Mac, you need to consider that the VM will take its own portion of your available RAM and one or more of the CPU cores, depending on how you configure it. Generally, within limits, the more RAM you can devote to the VM, the better. Moreover, the guest operating system will have its own virtual memory system, meaning if the RAM you give it is not enough, what's not immediately needed gets written to disk.
Also, since it sounds like you're after a Retina MBP (there's no 15" MBP and the 13" only goes up to 8GB), whatever you choose is what you're stuck with for good since neither RAM or HD is user-replaceable. And since the HD is really an SSD, the less it actually gets written to, the longer it'll last, something to consider if limited RAM causes "page outs" by either the VM guest or the host OS.

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