4 ms·

I regard the Retina display as a significant improvement. I now find it unpleasant to look at conventional screens. You have to ask yourself what you're going

I regard the Retina display as a significant improvement. I now find it unpleasant to look at conventional screens. You have to ask yourself what you're going to do with it. If you're going to browse the web and do email, the new MacBook is far more than enough. If you're going to be doing really hardcore hacking, you probably want a MacBook Pro. That's wha I've got.

jason_slack 12y ago
I don't have any retina display machine now. My job is a lot of git, c++, markdown, Xcode, etc. Sadly I have 3 machines and they all feel very similar to me. Even my wife's 4-5 year old 13-inch MacBook Pro feels fine. My son's newer Mac Mini is the only machine I can say feels slow to me. 2014 MacBook Air, Core i5, 8gb, 256gb SSD (work provided) 2014 iMac (October 2014), Core i7, 16gb, 1tb (family shared machine) 2012 MacBook Pro 15 inch, Quad Core i7, 16gb, 1th SSD (mine)
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  The Xcode compiler - clang/lldb - would be plenty fast on the MacBook, but the Xcode GUI would feel sluggish. I fault Apple for that, as I was using responsive IDEs on an 8 MHz Mac 512k in 1988, but Apple's developer tools people simply assume you're going to use a high-end machine. It pisses me off, but there it is. If you do go with the MacBook, I expect it would work a lot better to use BBEdit for your source code. I presently use TextWrangler for HTML/CSS, but havent really tried to use it for editing the source that I build with Xcode. Anything that's purely on the command-line would work really well on the MacBook. A real nice thing about today's SSDs is that the computers boot really really fast.
  - jason_slack 12y ago
    Good point about BBEdit. I usually use it on a regular basis. I could always use a Bash script and `xcodebuild`. Only go into Xcode to debug (or learn gdb finally)

4 ms·

I regard the Retina display as a significant improvement. I now find it unpleasant to look at conventional screens. You have to ask yourself what you're going

by MichaelCrawford 12y ago

jason_slack 12y ago
I don't have any retina display machine now. My job is a lot of git, c++, markdown, Xcode, etc. Sadly I have 3 machines and they all feel very similar to me. Even my wife's 4-5 year old 13-inch MacBook Pro feels fine. My son's newer Mac Mini is the only machine I can say feels slow to me. 2014 MacBook Air, Core i5, 8gb, 256gb SSD (work provided) 2014 iMac (October 2014), Core i7, 16gb, 1tb (family shared machine) 2012 MacBook Pro 15 inch, Quad Core i7, 16gb, 1th SSD (mine)
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  The Xcode compiler - clang/lldb - would be plenty fast on the MacBook, but the Xcode GUI would feel sluggish. I fault Apple for that, as I was using responsive IDEs on an 8 MHz Mac 512k in 1988, but Apple's developer tools people simply assume you're going to use a high-end machine. It pisses me off, but there it is. If you do go with the MacBook, I expect it would work a lot better to use BBEdit for your source code. I presently use TextWrangler for HTML/CSS, but havent really tried to use it for editing the source that I build with Xcode. Anything that's purely on the command-line would work really well on the MacBook. A real nice thing about today's SSDs is that the computers boot really really fast.
  - jason_slack 12y ago
    Good point about BBEdit. I usually use it on a regular basis. I could always use a Bash script and `xcodebuild`. Only go into Xcode to debug (or learn gdb finally)