Advice from fellow programmers on Macbook Pro 13 inches

[GustavoRamos]

Hello folks, i need a little advice from you again...

Initially I was thinking about buying me a 15" MBP. Currently I own a Dell Inspiron 15R with and 2.4GHz i5 CPU, 6GB Ram and 500GB 5k4rpm HDD. Its a great machine. I run windows in it with a linux VM with 4GB RAM running all the time for my programming tasks. I mostly program PHP and RoR.

Now... i was thinking I need something more portable. I always carry my laptop with me and my backpack is always full, so a less heavy laptop would be awesome.

Now i'm thinking about buying the top of line 13" lappy, with dual-core i7 and 8GB RAM. I could upgrade the RAM to 16GB and swap the drive for a SSD and buy a optidrive caddy for the 500GB drive... what do you think? With this config will I be able to do the same tasks I currently do on my current laptop?

I almost do not play anything at the PC. I have a desktop for that and play 2 games almost exclusively (Starcraft II and CoD). Gaming is a no-go on my workstation, so the intel 4000 GPU is nice for me.

The reduced screen size / resolution would bother me a lot ? I know this is very subjective, I just wanted to know a guy who really programs on a 13" MBP.... are there any of you here ?

Thanks

 

[Slivortal]

Hello folks, i need a little advice from you again...

Initially I was thinking about buying me a 15" MBP. Currently I own a Dell Inspiron 15R with and 2.4GHz i5 CPU, 6GB Ram and 500GB 5k4rpm HDD. Its a great machine. I run windows in it with a linux VM with 4GB RAM running all the time for my programming tasks. I mostly program PHP and RoR.

Now... i was thinking I need something more portable. I always carry my laptop with me and my backpack is always full, so a less heavy laptop would be awesome.

Now i'm thinking about buying the top of line 13" lappy, with dual-core i7 and 8GB RAM. I could upgrade the RAM to 16GB and swap the drive for a SSD and buy a optidrive caddy for the 500GB drive... what do you think? With this config will I be able to do the same tasks I currently do on my current laptop?

I almost do not play anything at the PC. I have a desktop for that and play 2 games almost exclusively (Starcraft II and CoD). Gaming is a no-go on my workstation, so the intel 4000 GPU is nice for me.

The reduced screen size / resolution would bother me a lot ? I know this is very subjective, I just wanted to know a guy who really programs on a 13" MBP.... are there any of you here ?

Thanks

I currently program on a 13" '09 MBP. The screen size isn't terrible (it's pretty decent), but the C2D just has a rough time handling my VMs - I'm in the market for a new comp this summer as well.

I think a lot of it depends on cost. I know when I was considering getting an upper-end 13", a lot of it revolved around the fact that SSDs are expensive, and the 13" MBP is only $600 less (assuming student discount) than the MBPR to begin with. Add in the fact that they're the same weight (MBPR is slightly lighter), and the MBPR runs on a QC CPU (especially good for running multiple VMs) and you're about at the same value for each (Apple forces you to pay $180 to upgrade to 16GB RAM, but they don't rip you off TOO much). And you get larger screen size + pixels...

Other than that, the only comp I really see as cost-effective would be the base 13" MBA w/RAM upgrade, but then you still have to deal with 8GB max of RAM and a ULV CPU (not quite the best for virtualization), so it is quite the issue.

 

[harrisonw1998]

It is ok, but mainly the bad part is that iPad apps are hard to display when developing.