12 ms·

It's a staple of 'developers' to have fancy Macbooks while essentially just needing a shitton of RAM these days. Programmers don't need bleeding edge, just a l

It's a staple of 'developers' to have fancy Macbooks while essentially just needing a shitton of RAM these days. Programmers don't need bleeding edge, just a lot of RAM.

bluesroo 8y ago
Don't forget the SSD.
- gautamdivgi 8y ago
  The ssd is actually needed. My employer encrypts the drives. It’s too slow without the ssd
  - ethelward 8y ago
    What encryption are you using? LUKS on HDD is imperceptible for me.
est31 8y ago
The funniest thing about this is probably that RAM prices have went up in the last 2-3 years. I built my current computer in 2016 and if I had to buy the same RAM that it has today, I'd have to pay more. So for the same money, "newer" means in fact worse. Noting that prices have went down from their peak increase since, but it's still more than the lowest historic price.
- chasil 8y ago
  More important than price is trust. The Core 2 Duo/Quad on LGA775 is the last revision of the Intel Management Engine (ME) that can be completely removed. The me_cleaner script recently added the ability to clean this platform. A Q9650 quad-core CPU is the best performance that can be reached on this board. I have two and I have run me_cleaner on both. I do my finances on the one that runs OpenBSD.
  - retro64 8y ago
    I bow to your paranoia. Although I have often wondered if retro computers will become more valuable in the future as the final bastion of electronic privacy.
    - icedchai 8y ago
      If your tinfoil hat isn't too thick, you can take a modern computer and set it up behind a hardware firewall, or connect over serial...
      - pixl97 8y ago
        And then monitor the tons of weird ass encrypted traffic coming in and out of it, hoping that those requests to AWS are some program getting updates and not the contents of your L2. Firewalls are great, and you should have one, but you have to constantly watch and understand everything coming in and out of it. Works ok as a full time job, terrible when you have other things to do.
        icedchai 8y ago
        If this is too much trouble, you can connect over serial, like 25+ years ago. Transfer files with zmodem from an internet-connected host. A Raspberry Pi with a serial port would be perfect for this.
  - 51lver 8y ago
    I have a rack full of machines like this. Dual sockets with 8GB ram each. Any affordable upgrade would be a downgrade. I'm looking at at least $200 per U to upgrade from hardware that is essentially worthless. I literally got the CPUs for $2 each. There's something really funny going on with prices after core 2.
    - PascLeRasc 8y ago
      How much is your power bill?
antoineMoPa 8y ago
RAM? maybe for Visual Studio/Xcode/Android dev. But for any nodejs/ruby/php development, a 10 year old machine with 1GB RAM is perfect.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  But for any nodejs/ruby/php development, a 10 year old machine with 1GB RAM is perfect. I don't think I'd enjoy the experience of developing on that machine!
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  A lot of shops have large and swollen Linux VM's to run your database, web server and interpreter in for consistency with the production environment. If I wasn't running on a Mac at work I could comfortably use containers without the overhead of another VM.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
    The new docker that uses the Mac’s builtin hypervisor works pretty well
    - amiga-workbench 8y ago
      I didn't know about that, I'll give it a look over.
  - beatgammit 8y ago
    You could always install Linux. I personally would hate running a VM regularly for my job. It just adds complexity without much benefit.
    - amiga-workbench 8y ago
      It gets worse than that, I'm still on spinning rust, although I do have 21gig of RAM so I can keep my VM's running. Looking forward to putting an inexpensive linux workstation together when this Mac eventually bites the dust.
matthewmacleod 8y ago
Some of them don't – but some of them do, and that improved performance can offer a noticeable productivity improvement. I recently upgraded from a 2015 Macbook pro to a new i9 one, and right now I'm working on a computer vision pipeline for some data – an embarrassingly parallel task. It takes about 15 minutes to run a process which would have previously taken about an hour. This is a direct improvement to my development experience (trust me!) But there are a bunch of different reasons. Modern stacks can be annoyingly under-optimised; a large Webpack app with live reloading can be irritatingly slow even on recent machines. Fast SSDs are useful for people working with large datasets. Better GPUs can mean better UI performance and more screen space. In short, remember that just because you don't need the hardware, doesn't mean that others don't! :)
- acura 8y ago
  And on a none portable computer you could probably do it even faster. Maybe you need a laptop but there are tons of peoples using laptops that doesn't needs to.
  - throwaway-hn123 8y ago
    He literally said that some people need faster computers and some don't > Some of them don't – but some of them do What is wrong with you?
  - matthewmacleod 8y ago
    I think that's pretty much what I said, right? Not everybody needs a laptop, or a super powerful development machine. But if you want to process some stuff nice and quickly, while not being tied to any physical location, it's a totally reasonable solution.
  - jschwartzi 8y ago
    The wonderful thing about a laptop is that if I want to go sit by a window for an hour while I'm working, I can just stand up and move. A desktop chains me to my desk, deep within the heart of a dimly lit cubicle farm.
- 8y ago
maceurt 8y ago
Furthermore, the mac os is seriously impaired compared to linux.
- gcb0 8y ago
  even windows have better UI. on a Mac you can't even alt-tab between two terminal windows. ridiculous.
  - frou_dh 8y ago
    What's ridiculous is condemning something based on your own ignorance. The keyboard shortcut is Cmd-Backtick ("Cycle Through Windows") and it works in all macOS applications. There's simply a more sharply defined distinction between applications and windows. Cmd-Tab is for application switching.
    - gcb0 8y ago
      you happen to be talking to someone graduated in UX design. and from my high horse I often don't fall for personal taste when writing UI critic :) if the user wants to move to a terminal window they have open in the background, which key combination do they press? alt+tab or alt+backtick? they have to stop and actively think about which current window is highlighted. is it the browser? or another terminal? this completely kills the action fluency of a keyboard shortcut.
      - tkxxx7 8y ago
        > is it the browser? or another terminal? This is generally a non-issue, but even if you are getting tripped up consistently, the OS literally tells you at all times what application currently has focus
  - bytebuster 8y ago
    of course you can, it's just another hotkey.
  - Ultimatt 8y ago
sergiotapia 8y ago
Sounds like you never worked on a monstrosity that requires 9 different docker processes running. Java, Scala, Postgres, damn. Even on a top of the line macbook pro that shit chugged. And the laptop would get HOT.
- rhinoceraptor 8y ago
  I think that's just the Docker for Mac client (and Hypervisor.framework). I think the disk I/O performance was bad, the last time I used it was for Node.js/Postgres about two years ago. I was able to really speed up the integration test suite by disabling fsync for Postgres. If you were running native Linux it should be a lot faster.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  That's what servers are for.
  - sergiotapia 8y ago
    100
dkersten 8y ago
SSD's really help a lot too. SSD's and a reasonable chunk of RAM (whether reasonable is 8 or 16 gigs depends on what you're doing, I've never needed more than 16). Anything else is not so important for normal development. A fast SSD definitely helps as without one, IMHO waiting on the disk I/O is typically the bottleneck. Hell, I did a lot of (hobby, not work) development on an eee PC netbook a few years ago. Besides the discomfort that a small screen and sub-normal keyboard brings, it was a reasonable experience. I didn't have to run slack then though. Obviously it depends on what you're doing though. Processing data? Running a ton of tools all at once? Differing workflows and requirements have different hardware needs.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I think the existence of SSDs are why modern OSs are borderline unusable on HDDs. It is kind of ridiculous how much passive IO there is, and how ridiculously long it takes to launch or open things.
  - dkersten 8y ago
    You're probably right. Applications definitely are a lot more lax on resource consumption. I've sat down and enumerated the things I do daily on my computer versus what I did back in ~2000. Besides streaming (youtube, netflix and spotify basically), its pretty uncommon that I do anything that I couldn't or didn't do back then. The performance of these things, now, seems about the same anecdotally. Maybe it was a little slower then, but not so much slower compared to the hardware performance difference. It makes me sad. Also, as I said in other comments, I once developed hobby projects on a netbook. I of course ran a minimal system and didn't run resource hogs like slack. I'm currently using a cheap laptop running a minimal system (but unfortunately I do need to use slack, chrome, docker for work). They run fine. I think developers or companies have decided that developer time is more important than performance and resource use of their products, punting the cost of that onto their customers. If my work didn't require it, I would definitely switch to more resource conscious tools and I'd be a bit happier. Oh well.
    - 8y ago
bunderbunder 8y ago
Even that depends on the dev environment. If you're using a lot of virtual machines, sure. If you're working on something that's inherently RAM-hungry like video processing, sure. If you're working against a local database server, maybe. If you're using something like IntelliJ or ReSharper (but not necessarily Visual Studio), then, <sigh>, yeah, I guess. If you're doing Web development, OTOH, it's probably better if you not have much RAM. If front-end, because a significant percentage of your users will be using low-RAM devices like smartphones and Chromebooks, and you shouldn't need any more RAM than they do. If back-end, because the production servers will (hopefully) be handling a lot more load than what you're doing in testing, so if you get too comfortable with treating RAM as a plentiful resource in development, that's going to be a recipe for scalability problems.
andyidsinga 8y ago
While I generally agree with that - more ram is better. I was doing android os builds a few years ago for a wearable project and using the -j make arg reduced build time significantly.
sascha_sl 8y ago
Our Scala teams disagree. I do mostly Go, and yeah, there it doesn't matter as much, but you should see some of the build times on these services. There isn't even a big scary monolith left in our architecture (besides a frontend in node). Oh, and let me not forget minikube.

It's a staple of 'developers' to have fancy Macbooks while essentially just needing a shitton of RAM these days. Programmers don't need bleeding edge, just a lot of RAM.

bluesroo 8y ago

Don't forget the SSD.

gautamdivgi 8y ago
The ssd is actually needed. My employer encrypts the drives. It’s too slow without the ssd
- ethelward 8y ago
  What encryption are you using? LUKS on HDD is imperceptible for me.

est31 8y ago

The funniest thing about this is probably that RAM prices have went up in the last 2-3 years. I built my current computer in 2016 and if I had to buy the same RAM that it has today, I'd have to pay more. So for the same money, "newer" means in fact worse. Noting that prices have went down from their peak increase since, but it's still more than the lowest historic price.

chasil 8y ago
More important than price is trust. The Core 2 Duo/Quad on LGA775 is the last revision of the Intel Management Engine (ME) that can be completely removed. The me_cleaner script recently added the ability to clean this platform. A Q9650 quad-core CPU is the best performance that can be reached on this board. I have two and I have run me_cleaner on both. I do my finances on the one that runs OpenBSD.
- retro64 8y ago
  I bow to your paranoia. Although I have often wondered if retro computers will become more valuable in the future as the final bastion of electronic privacy.
  - icedchai 8y ago
    If your tinfoil hat isn't too thick, you can take a modern computer and set it up behind a hardware firewall, or connect over serial...
    - pixl97 8y ago
      And then monitor the tons of weird ass encrypted traffic coming in and out of it, hoping that those requests to AWS are some program getting updates and not the contents of your L2. Firewalls are great, and you should have one, but you have to constantly watch and understand everything coming in and out of it. Works ok as a full time job, terrible when you have other things to do.
      - icedchai 8y ago
        If this is too much trouble, you can connect over serial, like 25+ years ago. Transfer files with zmodem from an internet-connected host. A Raspberry Pi with a serial port would be perfect for this.
- 51lver 8y ago
  I have a rack full of machines like this. Dual sockets with 8GB ram each. Any affordable upgrade would be a downgrade. I'm looking at at least $200 per U to upgrade from hardware that is essentially worthless. I literally got the CPUs for $2 each. There's something really funny going on with prices after core 2.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    How much is your power bill?

antoineMoPa 8y ago

RAM? maybe for Visual Studio/Xcode/Android dev. But for any nodejs/ruby/php development, a 10 year old machine with 1GB RAM is perfect.

matthewmacleod 8y ago
But for any nodejs/ruby/php development, a 10 year old machine with 1GB RAM is perfect. I don't think I'd enjoy the experience of developing on that machine!
amiga-workbench 8y ago
A lot of shops have large and swollen Linux VM's to run your database, web server and interpreter in for consistency with the production environment. If I wasn't running on a Mac at work I could comfortably use containers without the overhead of another VM.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  The new docker that uses the Mac’s builtin hypervisor works pretty well
  - amiga-workbench 8y ago
    I didn't know about that, I'll give it a look over.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  You could always install Linux. I personally would hate running a VM regularly for my job. It just adds complexity without much benefit.
  - amiga-workbench 8y ago
    It gets worse than that, I'm still on spinning rust, although I do have 21gig of RAM so I can keep my VM's running. Looking forward to putting an inexpensive linux workstation together when this Mac eventually bites the dust.

matthewmacleod 8y ago

Some of them don't – but some of them do, and that improved performance can offer a noticeable productivity improvement. I recently upgraded from a 2015 Macbook pro to a new i9 one, and right now I'm working on a computer vision pipeline for some data – an embarrassingly parallel task. It takes about 15 minutes to run a process which would have previously taken about an hour. This is a direct improvement to my development experience (trust me!) But there are a bunch of different reasons. Modern stacks can be annoyingly under-optimised; a large Webpack app with live reloading can be irritatingly slow even on recent machines. Fast SSDs are useful for people working with large datasets. Better GPUs can mean better UI performance and more screen space. In short, remember that just because you don't need the hardware, doesn't mean that others don't! :)

acura 8y ago
And on a none portable computer you could probably do it even faster. Maybe you need a laptop but there are tons of peoples using laptops that doesn't needs to.
- throwaway-hn123 8y ago
  He literally said that some people need faster computers and some don't > Some of them don't – but some of them do What is wrong with you?
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  I think that's pretty much what I said, right? Not everybody needs a laptop, or a super powerful development machine. But if you want to process some stuff nice and quickly, while not being tied to any physical location, it's a totally reasonable solution.
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  The wonderful thing about a laptop is that if I want to go sit by a window for an hour while I'm working, I can just stand up and move. A desktop chains me to my desk, deep within the heart of a dimly lit cubicle farm.
8y ago

maceurt 8y ago

Furthermore, the mac os is seriously impaired compared to linux.

gcb0 8y ago
even windows have better UI. on a Mac you can't even alt-tab between two terminal windows. ridiculous.
- frou_dh 8y ago
  What's ridiculous is condemning something based on your own ignorance. The keyboard shortcut is Cmd-Backtick ("Cycle Through Windows") and it works in all macOS applications. There's simply a more sharply defined distinction between applications and windows. Cmd-Tab is for application switching.
  - gcb0 8y ago
    you happen to be talking to someone graduated in UX design. and from my high horse I often don't fall for personal taste when writing UI critic :) if the user wants to move to a terminal window they have open in the background, which key combination do they press? alt+tab or alt+backtick? they have to stop and actively think about which current window is highlighted. is it the browser? or another terminal? this completely kills the action fluency of a keyboard shortcut.
    - tkxxx7 8y ago
      > is it the browser? or another terminal? This is generally a non-issue, but even if you are getting tripped up consistently, the OS literally tells you at all times what application currently has focus
- bytebuster 8y ago
  of course you can, it's just another hotkey.
- Ultimatt 8y ago

sergiotapia 8y ago

Sounds like you never worked on a monstrosity that requires 9 different docker processes running. Java, Scala, Postgres, damn. Even on a top of the line macbook pro that shit chugged. And the laptop would get HOT.

rhinoceraptor 8y ago
I think that's just the Docker for Mac client (and Hypervisor.framework). I think the disk I/O performance was bad, the last time I used it was for Node.js/Postgres about two years ago. I was able to really speed up the integration test suite by disabling fsync for Postgres. If you were running native Linux it should be a lot faster.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
That's what servers are for.
- sergiotapia 8y ago
  100

dkersten 8y ago

SSD's really help a lot too. SSD's and a reasonable chunk of RAM (whether reasonable is 8 or 16 gigs depends on what you're doing, I've never needed more than 16). Anything else is not so important for normal development. A fast SSD definitely helps as without one, IMHO waiting on the disk I/O is typically the bottleneck. Hell, I did a lot of (hobby, not work) development on an eee PC netbook a few years ago. Besides the discomfort that a small screen and sub-normal keyboard brings, it was a reasonable experience. I didn't have to run slack then though. Obviously it depends on what you're doing though. Processing data? Running a ton of tools all at once? Differing workflows and requirements have different hardware needs.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I think the existence of SSDs are why modern OSs are borderline unusable on HDDs. It is kind of ridiculous how much passive IO there is, and how ridiculously long it takes to launch or open things.
- dkersten 8y ago
  You're probably right. Applications definitely are a lot more lax on resource consumption. I've sat down and enumerated the things I do daily on my computer versus what I did back in ~2000. Besides streaming (youtube, netflix and spotify basically), its pretty uncommon that I do anything that I couldn't or didn't do back then. The performance of these things, now, seems about the same anecdotally. Maybe it was a little slower then, but not so much slower compared to the hardware performance difference. It makes me sad. Also, as I said in other comments, I once developed hobby projects on a netbook. I of course ran a minimal system and didn't run resource hogs like slack. I'm currently using a cheap laptop running a minimal system (but unfortunately I do need to use slack, chrome, docker for work). They run fine. I think developers or companies have decided that developer time is more important than performance and resource use of their products, punting the cost of that onto their customers. If my work didn't require it, I would definitely switch to more resource conscious tools and I'd be a bit happier. Oh well.
  - 8y ago

bunderbunder 8y ago

Even that depends on the dev environment. If you're using a lot of virtual machines, sure. If you're working on something that's inherently RAM-hungry like video processing, sure. If you're working against a local database server, maybe. If you're using something like IntelliJ or ReSharper (but not necessarily Visual Studio), then, <sigh>, yeah, I guess. If you're doing Web development, OTOH, it's probably better if you not have much RAM. If front-end, because a significant percentage of your users will be using low-RAM devices like smartphones and Chromebooks, and you shouldn't need any more RAM than they do. If back-end, because the production servers will (hopefully) be handling a lot more load than what you're doing in testing, so if you get too comfortable with treating RAM as a plentiful resource in development, that's going to be a recipe for scalability problems.

andyidsinga 8y ago

While I generally agree with that - more ram is better. I was doing android os builds a few years ago for a wearable project and using the -j make arg reduced build time significantly.

sascha_sl 8y ago

Our Scala teams disagree. I do mostly Go, and yeah, there it doesn't matter as much, but you should see some of the build times on these services. There isn't even a big scary monolith left in our architecture (besides a frontend in node). Oh, and let me not forget minikube.