New laptop recommendation

Havent been up to date on whats good these days, I'm actually doing this for a friend who's looking to replace a 2013 macbook pro 15" (non retina)

He's just a bit tired of booting into bootcamp everytime he needs to run windows programs and he feels that it is a bit slow sometimes in windows

Some programs he uses are: Rhino, Vray, Arcgis, Lumion, and Photoshop

Things needed:
screen size: 15/17" preferably 17 but only if it isnt too heavy
Decent battery life
Fast performance in the programs listed above
preferably above 8gbs of ram
also decent build quality (not expecting macbook quality here, but anything close is a plus)

Budget is 2k max

rMBP and install VirtualBox on it, assuming your budget doesn't include the cost of Windows and those softwares.

To my knowledge there are no non-retina 15" 2013 MacBook Pro's so I'm going to assume it's a 2012 model. Have you thought about upgrading? Replacing the stock mechanical drive with an SSD and upgrading the RAM from the stock 4GB will make a huge difference. The non-retina 15" 2012 MacBook Pro is still a very capable machine - I believe they all shipped with Ivy Bridge i7's.

I recommend this unit.

At this point if you are buying such a high priced device and aren't in a huge rush I'd wait for Broadwell and the next product cycle to come in.

If it was my $2k, I'd pickup this MBPr refurb: http://store.apple.com/us/product/F...-25GHz-Quad-core-Intel-i7-with-Retina-Display
It is 'slightly' above the $2k price range. After tax and Apple care it would be around $2400ish +/-.

Still, it meets all the criteria, and meets them well. Will be a beast for all of those programs (except for Lumion which apparently doesn't have an OSX variant, still, Bootcamp if absolutely necessary). Retina display doesn't hurt either.