I'm thinking about buying a Mac

Go go go
Do it
And forget to buy another machine for next five plus years

It really depends what you want to do with it.

I'm saving up for the latest macbook pro 15" 500GB. Buy 15" mate because it will be a quad core meaning much faster. 13" only have dual core. If you'll buy something expensive, be sure that you will enjoy it and will not regret it. 👊😎👍

i, book or pro?

Seriously downvoted
Some people are here more judgemental than so.
What should I say for such non intellectual people.

Got mine a year ago. Very good machine. Highly recommend for devs.

Everyone likes to take a **** on Macs but the truth is MacOS is essentially Linux for the average consumer with better software support. Plus you get the benefit of being able to write in Xcode for Apple products. At the end of the day I would personally reccomend going with something that has 4 cores as well as a low end GPU. You might be able to find something a year or two old like that for a STEEP discount compared to buying new.

Refurbs bring the price down to where it should be. MacBook Pros are great dev machines. But, unless you crap money, buy refurb.

Are you rich enough to take the risk??

Inb4 People who have never heard of eBay continue to call Macs expensive and overpriced despite them being affordable on the secondhand market and actually retaining their value decently well especially if you bought them used to begin with. Also ITT people who don't see the value in coding for the ecosystem that has the wealthiest users that buy the highest percentage of paid applications out of any other platform.

For those of us who like Linux and enjoy the attention to detail apple had as well as their beautiful trackpads and keyboard layouts, a Mac is a good alternative to Linux with more native software support.

I enjoy using the 2015 MBP my work gave me, but I would never buy one with my own money.

@VXYZ So you're comparing macs, proprietary systems which you can't customize that much and of which the source code is closed, to a system which you can customize to infinity and is open source?

Can't agree with you on that one.

As for the OP, if you want to buy a mac, go for it! I'd personally rather cut my balls off but it's you and your money and your decision :D

Think a bit more

Mac is good for almost everything, but on that price rank you probably can get a better system with a better performance.

If I have a reason to buy Macbook

then I would've code it for my project and submit it to iOS users. I can't even deploy it on my friend's iPhoneX without Xcode, unless I'm using Virtual Machine and Code there

You should try the macChicken.

@rookiemaverick the thing is that what you said is basically false. Macs today are seriously underpowered compared to other manufacturers products.

Their max memory is 16GB, what the fuck is that?!

Like today, 8GB is pretty much a minimum for just heavy web browsing. 16GB is just double of that, and you say it's gonna last for 5 years? I seriously doubt that.

@AndSoWeCode my iMac has 8GB and it’s lasted me for a couple years already. I often have Xcode, Safari, iTunes, and a bunch of other things open at one time and it runs fine. Also, the max memory is (I think) >100GB - look at the iMac pro

@Lahsen2016 I literally don’t know why people hate Mac so much. Sure, they’re not as “customisable” as Linux, but so what? macOS looks better than any Linux desktop, and there are loads of great Mac only apps (TextMate, Xcode). Also, you can’t get iTunes or (afaik) Github Desktop, on Linux

My personal experience is Macbook pro is a shitty laptop. So overpriced but very little when comparing the specs. I bought from Amazon and it lasted only 2 years. The Up-Down arrow keys gave up and when I visited Apple store, they literally asked for 30% of the total price of Macbook to replace just the keyboard. That's what you get going elite. They can't f*cking repair 2 broken keys. And it's so annoying to not have ESC key..

The choice to buy a Mac is hard enough. The choice to choose which Mac and spec is even harder!

Time to hackintosh! /s
I actually use a hackintosh as my daily driver, but I'm slowly trying to switch back to Arch Linux because cudNN doesn't work on macOS for some reason.

I’ve got my eye on the iMac pro though realistically by the time I’m ready to pull the trigger, they’ll have announced the new Mac Pro desktop machine.

I adore OSX for general use (I’m an iPhone user), and I really love the OS for their dev stack, and being able to bootstrap into Windows / VM when I need it is great.

I only had to leave the ecosystem on computers once when I sold my iMac to make rent and then ended up getting a steam machine (Alienware Alpha) which has done very well by me for a while now.

Would definitely want to get back into it, and the iMac pro looks like it’ll be good for my needs for years to come.

Most of MacOS is composed of open source software. Darwin absolutely, most definitely is open source. The vast majority of the command line utilities that come out of the box are open source. The principal proprietary component is Aqua.

But it also uses open system APIs, which Linux does, but Windows absolutely does not. As such, third party apps for Mac are far better than on Windows, and are much more capable of allowing the user to customize UI elements.

The fact that Aqua is proprietary doesn't bother me that much. It's excellent and it plays very well with other software. I just wish MacOS didn't use such a garbage filesystem.

@bahua well said :) I’ve never had any problems with the file system though, what do you mean by that?

@zacg

The filesystem is very inefficient. Its design is such that it can only read or write in a linear fashion. One item at a time. This means that anything you do on a Mac takes longer than with any other OS. It's a needless drawback, and they've needed to resolve it for decades.

@bahua File system read/write is working fine in my 2015 15" MBP retina High Sierra.

@Devnergy

I didn't say it doesn't work. It works fine. But as well as it does work, it's very inefficient, and will always be slower on the same hardware than any other OS.

@linuxxx I'm comparing them based on design, not on philosophy. MacOS and Linux are both *nix based operating systems. Also Mac OS isn't really any more locked down than windows if you know what you're doing. The reason why its comparable is I'd you'd rather run software natively rather than in a VM (because wine barely works lol) and the problem with VM's is they'll drain your battery on the go. I'm not a programmer, however I am a repair guy / service tech. I see WAY too many things wrong with windows on a daily basis to ever want to use it for anything other than lesiure unless I care to make constant backups which is annoying.

@Lahsen2016 I use all three operating systems, I own at least 8 PCs running Windows and Linux, and I only own one Mac. With that being said Linux and Unix have a lot more in common with one another than they do with windows

@AndSoWeCode That's a really n00b thing to say. Needs for RAM and processing capability are not cross platform, they are platform specific.

I have an old HP Elitebook Folio 9470m. It came with Windows installed and ran like a dog. I wiped it and installed Linux and it runs like a dream with only 8gb of RAM and an i5.

@datawraith this precisely. Also with the newer SSDs in Macs they'll automatically swap ram when needed.

Also, since I'm in a Mac thread it's worth reccomending to check out MacsFanControl, it's a free app that allows you to limit your processors temperature so it can turbo boost longer. If you keep it below 90c youll get better performance and since you're keeping the components cooler less of a chance of board or component failure.

Since when have you had these self-destructive thoughts?

@bahua a lot of the core systems particularly their dev stack come from Jobs’ NextStep days.

You might want to look into the Dell XPS Developer Edition line as well before purchasing a Mac.

@datawraith that's a really n00b thing to say.

RAM usage in regular work is caused mostly by browsers and Electron apps which are ubiquitous. And RAM usage is the same across platforms. Doesn't matter if it's LXDE or KDE.

And unless you're getting the laptop purely for looking at the wallpaper, RAM matters.

In my case, work requires me to have at least 4 physical CPU cores and 32GB RAM, and nothing less than an NVMe SSD of 500+ GB.

Moral is: DO NOT assume that everybody does the same thing you do, and DO NOT prematurely judge the person you're talking to, thinking that you know everything (you don't).

@zacg my typical usage on Xubuntu (one of the lighter desktop environments) when I'm not doing anything heavy, is 12GB. And I know where that is going.

I used a 2015 MacBook Pro 15" with 16GB RAM and it was horrible. Some of my colleagues also have them because they love all things Apple, but they've been waiting for more than 1 year for memory upgrade, since 16GB isn't enough, ... and it's not happening. Not on MacBooks.

If you need a pretty screen to look at a wallpaper and maybe check mail from time to time - sure, go for 8GB MacBook, or 16GB. But no way in hell is the 8GB version adequate for a professional developer, and the 16GB is borderline adequate (for some it's not), and surely in 5 years it will be paperweight.

I have stupid ideas too, from time to time.

@Lahsen2016 I know that my usage is not average usage. However, 16GB is easy to reach even on desktop activity. It's not too little now, but in 2 years at most it will be the limit where average people would start saying "I wish I had more".

What I'm doing? Pushing data and feeding it into different algorithms. The bulk of it is done by proper servers, but just to test a tiny bit of it when I'm developing it, often takes more than 20GB. Most of it goes to memoization, hash maps, etc.

But come on, even if I wasn't doing it for money - play a bit with deep learning and POOF! It's gone! Play with some open datasets from BigQuery, and unless you're asking trivial questions or are willing to wait for hours for answers, you need A TON OF RAM. 16GB is probably enough though, for now, which is my point - NO WAY is 16GB enough for the next 5 years.

@Lahsen2016 I know tens of people in different companies that are angry because they are impaired by their 16GB macs, unable to run their data crunching routines.

16GB today is fine, for a computer under 1000$. It will be fine for around 2-3 years, after which it will no longer serve the "can do anything" kind of PC.

Spending 2000$ on such a laptop and expecting it to be relevant in 5 years is just foolish, which was my point.

And I have good reasons to think that RAM usage will grow. CPUs stopped growing as fast. More and more computation is replaced with caching, most of which sits in the memory.

As things get more complex, people like using ridiculously RAM-heavy solutions as long as it provides quick, easy and robust solutions. In just 2 years, the number of Electron apps went from a manageable list, to a freakin' alphabetical dictionary, and they're getting popular.

With just these: Slack, Spotify, Insomnia, Chrome, Boostnote, GitKraken more than half of those 16GB evaporate.

After much consideration and thought, I've decided not to get one at this time. I think I'll just stick with Linux or I will buy one and just install Linux on it 😅.

Thank you everyone for your input and feedback 🙂