As far as a desktop Mac, a suitably configured iMac is more than powerful enough for development. A $2100 5K iMac - 6 Core I5 3Ghz (turbo boost to 4Ghz), 256GB SSD, 16GB of RAM. The RAM is user upgradable and an external SSD drive would be as fast as any normal internal SSD drive.
As far as a laptop? I'm not spending my own money on a development class laptop. I hate developing with just a laptop. I have a dual external monitor setup at home and at work. My next personal computer will definitely be a desktop. You still get more power and more thermal headroom on desktops than more expensive laptops.
Dunno nowadays with all the Electron apps, the RAM jacked up by open JIRA browser tabs, needing Outlook open plus JVM based IDEs from JetBrains having 16GB of RAM is not enough. I need at least 32GB and even then I would feel better with 64GB cause I fear it will only get worse. I am partially hoping JetBrains makes their IDEs fully Kotlin based and compile them natively to much lower memory footprints.
I am also ashamed of Slack and how they dont even take advantage of Electron to add things that Chromium supports, might as well convert it to a native app and make it worthwhile. I feel like Slack could do so much more and yet it sits there nothing new or special. Theres plenty that could be improved for Slack. I could share a dozen ideas but I rather see them get off their own lazy butts and give everybody their moneys worth.
I wouldn't pay $600 for the 32GB upgrade from Apple. I would buy the 8GB configuration from Apple that would take the price down to $1899 and buy 3rd party RAM.
Except the RAM is soldered on their laptops. It's company provided so I rather not argue against a laptop, plus I am effective in using it anyway.
I wish I could buy 3rd party RAM for a MacBook Pro unless they finally stopped soldering on the RAM recently, then I would love to buy a new MBP with my own cash if I can get a normal keyboard.
I think I get what you're saying, so you rather get the 8GB model and add on a 8GB RAM stick? For a total of 16GB and a few hundred bucks saved, cause afaik they solder all RAM. I'm all for putting new RAM on a laptop, but unsoldering RAM sounds like too much effort to me.
No I’m saying if hypothetically the RAM wasn’t soldered onto to the 13” MacBookPro and you could buy third party RAM, you wouldn’t save “a few hundred bucks”. The maximum ram that It can handle is 16GB and that’s $200. Just taking a cursory look, you could save maybe $150. Which is not nothing but you’re already willing to spend Apple prices on a MacBook Pro, I can’t see how $150 in savings would be the deciding factor.
On the other hand, the price delta between Apple prices for the 16GB -> 32GB upgrade is about $250 more for the 15 inch than you could get from a third party if that were an option but you’re already spending at least $2400 on a 15 inch MacBook Pro.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m arguing hypothetically. I’m not spending my own money for an expensive laptop. I don’t need portability for my personal computer. I need portability for my work computer and a job will give you a work computer - and hopefully one that is beefy enough to do what you need.
My personal development computer will always be a desktop. You get more bang for your buck and I hate developing on just a laptop without external peripherals anyway. I’ve never been interested in Apple laptops enough to spend my own money over just getting a much cheaper mid range Dell when I needed the portability.
Doing all this, right now, with 16gb and works fine! Memory left.
Three pycharm instances (=yay microservices)
9 docker containers (=hyperkit =vm =yay for microservices with dependencies)
Slack, ms teams, no outlook though.
It all runs smooth. The thing which makes my workflow slow is the switching between code of and keeping shared code in sync of those goddamn microservices.
Heh I am running out of RAM cause of Microservices plus Docker plus all I listed above.
I was surprised Firefox tells me Jira uses half a gig of RAM and its not even a proper SPA. I hope they optimize their frontend to be less memory hungry.
It runs smooth till I need 3 of my own services plus 8 plus vendor services running then the 16GB MBP runs out of RAM.
Biggest annoyance with the iMac though is you can’t, say, work from home with your work laptop and plug it into the screen.
This is another case with macs where the situation 8 years ago was much better since they used to have target display mode. From what I understand, they killed it because they needed to use a custom format to drive the 5k screen initially. Now regular DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4 have enough bandwidth for it but there’s been no mention of bringing the feature back.
That’s why I said I'm not spending my own money on a development class laptop. I have the same Bluetooth keyboard and mouse at home and at work - in other words, I don’t care about the keyboards on the MacBook Pros. Decent regular monitors are cheap. If/When I do get a 5K iMac for person use, my current two monitors will be attached to it for personal use and attached to my work laptop when I bring it home.
Well, if your work machine is a laptop (and that is the only reason you can take it home) you need to use it, if you want to work at home, hence the need for an screen to attach, which you cannot do, if your screen at home is in fact an iMac. (Work data of course stays on the work machine, everything else is a huge no-go)
Just buy a ThinkPad T480, add 32GB yourself, install Linux and you have the perfect development machine. Unless you work with iOS apps specifically , in which cause you can use a build server
A "$2100 5K iMac - 6 Core I5 3Ghz" is not a substantial improvement over my late 2013 MacBook Pro (2.6 GHz, 4 core i7), which can both travel to client sites and directly drive 2 x 3840 x 2160 pixels on my desktop displays. No new MBP's have been worth buying. The new Mac Pro is nice but crazy expensive in a configuration I'd expected to be buying in 2019.
I'm neither interested in nor discussing here "normal non pro computer[s]". It was you who suggested a "$2100 5K iMac - 6 Core I5 3Ghz" to me. I merely explained why it doesn't, IMO, demonstrate that Apple is Listening.
Because Intel hasn’t created a consumer processor that is significantly faster than what they did in 2013 that means Apple isn’t listening? What hardware (besides a reliable keyboard) could Apple ship in a laptop in 2019 that would make it a worthy upgrade?
I'm probably not a good target, but my wishlist for a laptop (that I cannot buy anywhere right now) is:
- Great touchpad (Apple are the only ones ticking that box)
- Good keyboard (Old apple and thinkpads are fine. New apples are terrible, just like the Asus UX430 I got at work).
- Great thermals (I want to be able to use my laptop as a laptop. Most of them nowadays burn during summer in hot areas).
- Good battery life (replaceable without power tools / health risks).
- Good-enough screen (so I can use it outdoors)
- Good connectivity (USB-C is good, but a couple regular USBs wouldn't hurt). Ethernet without dongle, please?
- Repairable / expandable (no soldered shit please, easy to open and clean).
- Affordable (as in <1500€)
- Either MacOS or Linux support (sorry but I quit Windows a long long time ago and I'm not coming back with all the telemetry and forced-update stuff).
I couldn't care less for 20% more/less cpu power, it being 5mm thicker than most laptops today, or it weighting even an extra pound more than usual.
I have much the same wishlist as you, and also haven't found anything that ticks all of the boxes. My day job is network/sysadmin/IT, which mostly involves remote connectivity to other hosts, so my local CPU grunt needs are not particularly heavy.
That said, given the dearth of good options out there right now, I just replaced an old MacBook Air with a Surface Book 2, and with a few exceptions, I couldn't be happier right now:
1. This touchpad is just as good as pre-Force Touch ones from Apple. No joke. (If you must have the super-size ones with the Force Touch feedback instead of the "spring-board" style real button click, sorry...nobody else has that. But the non-Force Touch ones were "best in class" before, and that wasn't very long ago...)
2. The keyboard is easily the best laptop keyboard I have ever used. And that's coming from someone who used ThinkPads (I had the 770, the T42p, and the T60p) before switching to MacBooks, and who uses a Model M daily while at my desk. :-P
3. I have the base-model Surface Book. It's only a dual-core i5. But, again, I'm fine with that. The CPU is also housed in the screen, since the screen is made to be detachable from the keyboard. And since I have the base-model, I don't have the dGPU in my keyboard base either. So the base of the laptop stays cool while I use it on my lap. Oh...did I mention that the entire device (both keyboard base and screen) on the non-dGPU model is fanless? So no moving parts in the entire thing, noise-free, and isn't constantly sucking dust from the surrounding environment into itself.
4. There is a battery in both the screen and the keyboard base. Combined, I get amazing battery life, easily 8 hours or more depending. (I use it in laptop-mode 90% of the time.)
5. Screen on this is fantastic. Higher DPI than my 15" Retina MacBook Pro from 2012, way brighter, and the backlighting is more even. (I have the Samsung LCD on my 2012 rMBP...the model that never developed "image retention". I think the SB2 panel is made by Panasonic.)
6. It's got 2 USB-A, 1 USB-C (sadly no Thunderbolt, but it can handle DisplayPort), and a full-size SD.
7. Repairability is one area where it really falls flat, and in even bigger ways than the past MacBooks I own. :-( This thing I think got a repairability index of 1 (out of 10) from iFixIt. It's a sealed box for all intents and purposes. What really pisses me off, though, is that the SSD is not soldered onto the mainboard (it's a standard M.2 module), but there is absolutely no way of accessing it without basically destroying the computer in the process. If there was ONE area where I wish Microsoft had NOT taken any cues from Apple...gah, don't get me started. (And even then, at least with pre-2016 MacBook Pros, you could take the bottom cover off and get at the storage module in an emergency.)
8. The particular model I purchased ranges from $1,100 - 1,500 USD depending (list price is 1,500 but it's usually on sale). Don't know how that translates to your specific market.
9. I have not tried to use "desktop" Linux on it. I have booted SystemRescueCD off of a USB flash drive, though, in order to make a bit-for-bit image of my current Windows installation, and that worked fine (though to be fair I never bothered to start up X11). My understanding is that a lot of the hardware is supported even on current models; you can check out https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/7kazwp/curren... for more details.
Unfortunately, the surface book base model is now on sale for 1499€ here (with a pen for "free"). With only 8Gb RAM, 256Gb HDD and 0 upgradability it'll be a pass from me. It is good to know that PC's are starting to get good trackpads though!
9th gen Intel processors perform significantly better in benchmarks than 4th gen Intels that were available in 2013. Not to mention, benchmarks are half the story - modern Intel mobile processors are significantly more efficient.
As to what Apple could do with the hardware, the 2019 MBP outperforms 2018 MBPs in real world benchmarks due to its better cooling and some under the hood stuff in Mojave that is unclear. There was a good review posted today on Linus Tech Tips.
I’m not saying they aren’t “better”. The point is they aren’t “better enough” to be worth the upgrade for the original poster. If the iMac I described doesn’t give him enough of a speed boost to make it worthwhile to upgrade, neither would the newest MacBook Pro.
What external Thunderbolt SSD isn't literally an NVMe drive? Who is bothering with the expense of a Thunderbolt controller only to put a SATA controller and SSD behind it instead of directly connecting a NVMe SSD? (Unless it's a RAID controller and several SSDs in a TB enclosure.)
As far as a laptop? I'm not spending my own money on a development class laptop. I hate developing with just a laptop. I have a dual external monitor setup at home and at work. My next personal computer will definitely be a desktop. You still get more power and more thermal headroom on desktops than more expensive laptops.