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Ask HN: Development laptop MacBook 2017 vs. MacBook Pro 13"/15" 2017?

2 points by jasonjei ↗ HN
I'm in the market for a new Mac laptop. I use Xcode, Terminal, Docker (MySQL/Rails/nginx/Redis), Sublime Text, and Chrome. Occasionally I use Creative Suite and virtualize Windows 10 in VMware.

I would like to balance screen real estate, weight, power, battery life, and overall value. As I'm also using Docker on OS X, virtualization concerns me on the MacBook over the MacBook Pro.

Would someone kindly help me narrow the field?

4 comments

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dgdosen
I too, would like a good answer to this. My gut says that (other than VMWare) the Macbook would be fine. You'd probably get a bit better battery life and performance out of the non-y chips, but IMO, nothing significant. I see a KabyLake Macbook in my near future.
bradknowles
I worked at VMWare for a while, and I've been a confirmed MacFanatic since December of 1983.

In my experience, your number one driver for performance will be memory. If you don't have 16GB of RAM, you're likely to be unhappy.

Also, the higher capacity SSDs also tend to have higher performance, so you're going to want as much as you can get.

These days, everything comes hard-wired on the logic board, so if the device isn't maxxed-out when you buy it, then it never will be.

CPU performance would be my third criteria -- get as many cores and as high performance as you can, once you've gotten maximum RAM and as much SSD as you can.

For me and my wife, we would be perfectly happy to upgrade from our 2012 and 2014 MacBook Pros today, but only if we could get 32GB of RAM. Meanwhile, we wait.

bradknowles
Another thing I'd like to point out is that single-threaded and multi-threaded CPU performance hasn't really improved that much over the years. Compare a MacBook Pro Retina (mid-2012) Geekbench 4 performance, versus that of the latest and fastest MacBook Pro Retina (mid-2017):

Single-Core: 4658 (2017) 3597 (2012)

Multi-Core: 15691 (2017) 11091 (2012)

So, depending on whether you look at single-core or multi-core performance, that's only an increase of 30-40% over a five year period of time. That's an average of about 1.06-1.07% improvement per year, compounded over five years.

Sure, GPUs will change over time, and recent GPUs have greatly improved their performance over those from a few years ago. But how much of your development work is likely to benefit from a faster/better GPU?

Likewise with SSD performance.

For development and regarding performance, I don't think that the CPU speed will matter all that much, and there's not likely to be a great deal of increase from one year to the next.

I remain convinced that quantity of RAM will be the most important factor that governs your development cycle time, and it is entirely likely that a machine that is a couple of years old might be much less expensive and better suited for the kind of work you're looking to do, compared to how much you could afford to spend on a more modern machine.

TurboHaskal
Aside from the typical specs, note that for a similar price the MBP brings a higher quality screen (bette color gamut, brightness), a 720p webcam and Thunderbolt 3.

So even if you don't care about these things, you're getting a much better value for your money if you go with the non touchbar MBP. If you buy the MB, you'll be paying a lot for a 2015 chassis with some CPU/GPU updates.