Selecting a Mac for development (original) (raw)

Lussier, Denis denisl at openscg.com
Wed Jul 17 01:30:49 PDT 2013

My everyday laptop is a 15 inch Retina Macbook w/ 512 MB SSD and 16 GB of RAM. It's pricey, but I love it. 8 GB would be fine, but, I like/need the extra memory to run virtual machines in the background.

I have an older (now discontinued) 17" Macbook pro that I upgraded myself to 16 GB of RAM. I presently use it as a desktop that is pretty easily portable. Frankly, it's too big to use on an airplane.

I usually advise folks who presently want a MacBook for development, and price is an important consideration, to go with an 8 GB, non-retina display MacBook Pro w/ at least a 512 GB spinning rust drive. This is a reasonably priced great machine that will last you for years. The design is a little more old school than the newer retina models (which means it's cheaper and easier to upgrade and thicker and includes an internal DVD drive).

--Luss

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Eric Richardson <ekrichardson at gmail.com>wrote:

Hi Doug,

Yes the MacBook Pro Retina and the Air models are fixed at purchase according to person at the Apple store I talked to. Not sure on the others. I went ahead and got 15 inch retina because that one comes with 16GB memory and 512GB SSD - I think this is plenty of power to get a useful life out of the machine. It is definitely pricey. I'm replacing an old iMac which I certainly got my money out of so I'm hopeful this will be similar experience. BTW, thank-you for all the people working to make the Mac a great Java platform. It is very popular for developers for all the JVM targeted platforms at a minimum. Eric

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Doug Zwick <Doug.Zwick at blackboard.com_ _>wrote: > Michael Hall wrote: > > > On Jul 15, 2013, at 4:46 PM, Gregg Wonderly wrote: > > > >> I upgraded mine to 8 GB and it does better! > > > > I think writing to a smaller screen on a machine with less memory is > better. Then think how much better it'll run on the others. > > IIRC, some of the current MacBook Pro models have their memory spec fixed > at manufacture -- it is not possible to add memory later. I presume this is > because the memory is not socketed, but mounted directly on the main logic > board. Check the specs before ordering, otherwise you may limit the usable > life of it (at least as a development machine). > > This email and any attachments may contain confidential and proprietary > information of Blackboard that is for the sole use of the intended > recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, disclosure, copying, > re-distribution or other use of any of this information is strictly > prohibited. Please immediately notify the sender and delete this > transmission if you received this email in error. >

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