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13 vs 15 for regular guy (rMBP)

leftywamumonkey said:
Yeah, I get that, but it's a usage problem when I start getting beach balls and apps start not responding.
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Just curious.. what are you doing that is giving you beach balls?
Specifically, a beach ball means that an application can't handle all the events it receives... in other words, the CPU is being overtaxed. An excessive amount of paging activity might contribute to your CPU cycles, but it won't beachball simply because you're low on RAM. I think it's more likely that there's some funky business going on in software.
 
SuperMiguel said:
any of you guys that have used the 15" and the 13" does the extra size really matters?
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Ya, I originally had the 15'' early 2013 model. But for the haswell refresh I thought I'd try out the 13''.

Sad to say, the 13'' went back 2 days later because it was just too small. I found myself constantly having to hunch over to see the screen. 13'' is fine for casual use, IMO, but if you are trying to get work done (not that it can't be done on the 13''), it is just much nicer to have the 15'' screen. IMO
 
aiyaaabatt said:
Ya, I originally had the 15'' early 2013 model. But for the haswell refresh I thought I'd try out the 13''.

Sad to say, the 13'' went back 2 days later because it was just too small. I found myself constantly having to hunch over to see the screen. 13'' is fine for casual use, IMO, but if you are trying to get work done (not that it can't be done on the 13''), it is just much nicer to have the 15'' screen. IMO
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I bet it would be tough to go from a 15" to a 13". I've always had a 13", so staying at that size shouldn't be an issue for me. While I'd like to upgrade to the 15", the ~$500 price difference between top 13" and base 15" (including apple care price difference and having to upgrade the HD of the base 15") is probably going to keep me at a 13".
 
mangotears said:
Just curious.. what are you doing that is giving you beach balls?
Specifically, a beach ball means that an application can't handle all the events it receives... in other words, the CPU is being overtaxed. An excessive amount of paging activity might contribute to your CPU cycles, but it won't beachball simply because you're low on RAM. I think it's more likely that there's some funky business going on in software.
Click to expand...

Well on my rMBP, the only things I have open are: Safari, Chrome, Xcode, Spotify, Pages, Preview with a bunch of PDFs and a few miscellaneous applications open. The CPU usage is never high, but I monitor my memory and always see that it goes in the <500 MB range when things start to bog down. Quitting applications and "cleaning" the memory temporarily relieves the problem though.
 
SuperMiguel said:
any of you guys that have used the 15" and the 13" does the extra size really matters?
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As I stated earlier in the thread... yes the size matters to me. For programming I want the screen real estate without the small ass font size. The 13 is a little lighter but a couple pounds makes no difference to me in carrying it around. Not like Im some huge guy either. Im 6'2 and 180 pounds.
 
now i just have to figure out if its worth it selling my gaming desktop and buying a 15" or keeping it and getting a 13
 
SuperMiguel said:
now i just have to figure out if its worth it selling my gaming desktop and buying a 15" or keeping it and getting a 13
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For your uses, keep your gaming desktop and get the 13". That's what I'd do in your situation. Gaming is always better in Windows since all the games are coded to take advantage of Direct X vs OpenGL. I've also never really found gaming on a laptop to be a great experience personally. It makes the laptop heavy, loud and hot to the touch. For your other uses, the 13" is nice since it's lighter and more portable. With the money you save for your day to day uses, you can get an external monitor to plug in to do your coding and other things you need to do for long stretches of time.
 
SuperMiguel said:
the thing is that i dont know if im better off just buying a ps4/xbox one and not have to upgrade every 6 months my hardware to keep up with games
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Every 6 months? My PC is nearly a year old and was not a high end system. I still can play bf4 with ultra settings. The only thing I might need to upgrade is my GPU in one year..rest is doing fine.

So I kept my PC and bought the 13 for developing. Saves you money and you still have the best of both worlds!

About ps4...only you know if you want to play ego shooters on a console. 😉
 
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