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>You can get away with this machine if your workflow primary involves a text editor and remote servers, but otherwise I would still opt for the pro. I bought a

>You can get away with this machine if your workflow primary involves a text editor and remote servers, but otherwise I would still opt for the pro. I bought a 2018 15 inch MBP with 6 core i9, 32 GB of ram and vega GPU with the idea that it would be my one stop development machine. The system is terrible, especially considering the outrageous price - it does have sufficient compute power but the thermals are insanely bad - it's constantly turning the fans to 100% and I can't even tune the power usage - when I run a VM/emulator along the IDE people in the office start turning their head in my direction because of the fan noise. And the performance still isn't even close to a mid range desktop machine which would have cost 1/4 the price. I'm seriously considering selling my MBP buying this Mac Book Air top config (I need an OSX machine to develop iOS/OSX apps, otherwise I would go for Lenovo X1 Carbon) and building a desktop which will be always on VPN for heavy lifting + it can replace my gaming console.

kristofferR 7y ago
The 2019 Pro completely fixed the thermal issues, it is actually considered to have pretty impressive thermals now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxocVricANg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxocVricANg
danieldk 7y ago
And the performance still isn't even close to a mid range desktop machine which would have cost 1/4 the price. I'm seriously considering selling my MBP buying this Mac Book Air top config (I need an OSX machine to develop iOS/OSX apps, otherwise I would go for Lenovo X1 Carbon) and building a desktop which will be always on VPN for heavy lifting + it can replace my gaming console. I have a MacBook Pro 2018 and Intel NUC running Linux with exactly the same CPU. In typical C/C++/Rust builds, the Linux NUC is perceptibly much faster than the MacBook. Didn't dive much deeper, but I'd guess the difference is thermals (despite the NUC having a small enclosure) and much higher system call overhead in macOS. That said, I still like having a Mac as well, since there are so many great applications that I use frequently. But a sweet spot (as you suggest) is a reasonably powerful MacBook for the things that macOS is good at and a powerful Linux workstation or server for compute.

kristofferR 7y ago

The 2019 Pro completely fixed the thermal issues, it is actually considered to have pretty impressive thermals now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxocVricANg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxocVricANg

danieldk 7y ago

And the performance still isn't even close to a mid range desktop machine which would have cost 1/4 the price. I'm seriously considering selling my MBP buying this Mac Book Air top config (I need an OSX machine to develop iOS/OSX apps, otherwise I would go for Lenovo X1 Carbon) and building a desktop which will be always on VPN for heavy lifting + it can replace my gaming console. I have a MacBook Pro 2018 and Intel NUC running Linux with exactly the same CPU. In typical C/C++/Rust builds, the Linux NUC is perceptibly much faster than the MacBook. Didn't dive much deeper, but I'd guess the difference is thermals (despite the NUC having a small enclosure) and much higher system call overhead in macOS. That said, I still like having a Mac as well, since there are so many great applications that I use frequently. But a sweet spot (as you suggest) is a reasonably powerful MacBook for the things that macOS is good at and a powerful Linux workstation or server for compute.