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Buy 16-inch base or 15-inch loaded
- Thread starter Abbas
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Hmm, let me see 🤔
16" MBP:
- Better keyboard
- Bigger display
- Bigger battery
- Better cooling
- Newer GPU
- Newer CPU
Hmm, let me see 🤔
16" MBP:
Yep, I think so
- Better keyboard
- Bigger display
- Bigger battery
- Better cooling
- Newer GPU
- Newer CPU
Sure- all valid points and I did go ahead and order the 16-inch but the offer sure was tempting as I was getting double the RAM and storage, same processor and equivalent GPU.
Do you need 32GB of ram? If not, it goes unused, in essence you paid for a component that you're not taking advantage of.
Hmm, let me see 🤔
16" MBP:
Yep, I think so
- Better keyboard
- Bigger display
- Bigger battery
- Better cooling
- Newer GPU
- Newer CPU
Lets add:
- Much better speakers
- Much better microphone
- Faster RAM
Also the keyboard improvement can't be understated. You get a physical escape/TouchID, you get more space between the touchbar and the keyboard to minimise accidental touches, the keys have shrunken a bit to increase space between keys and we now have an inverted T arrow keys.
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Someone did some testing around RAM and found that not only is it pretty hard to use up 8GB let alone 16GB of RAM, if for some reason you did, the SSD speeds are so fast that any slowdowns will likely not be noticeable (even if your memory pressure goes red). There is also a saying that if you don't know whether you need 32GB RAM, you definitely don't need it.
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I would argue that the 15 inch might be a better buy considering the extra RAM and SSD you will get. Surely the new keyboard looks more reliable, but the latest butterfly is not that bad either. In fact I think I might even miss the unique typing experience of that keyboard in the future. Top of the line of the last 15'' macbook pro itself is worthy of owning. You might even have higher resale values in the future to ppl who prefer this last generation (you never know).
Yes the newer model is all shiny and loud, but if I were you, I would definitely pick the 15'' fully loaded model.
Yes the newer model is all shiny and loud, but if I were you, I would definitely pick the 15'' fully loaded model.
Important question - is either machine 6 core or 8 core ?
Someone eh??? Someone was talking through their ass.....
and in this case i'm purposely trying to the model size small so I could run 10 threads simultaneously. If I allow it to be a bigger (more realistic size) each thread takes up 4GB and I can run only 4 threads at once out of the 12 threads I could run on my machine.
I'm considering a 64Gb 16" as I may be doing alot more of this work 😅
Of course it is possible to use up 16GB RAM (and your case might be unique to be fair), but did you notice a slow down out of curiosity? But honestly I'd say even in the pro population, less than 10% will likely ever need more than 16GB. Saying that you have 15GB of memory swap so you have a workflow that is probably not the norm.
Well I don’t like to make too many assumptions about what others are doingon their machines - I would not consider myself to be uniquely demanding in my work load - I’m doing statistical modeling that honestly is not that complex compared to what others might be doing. Also I don’t use vm’s for example but apparently loads want more ram for that reason 🤷♂️ Plenty of tasks out there that might seem unique when taken in isolation but many different things add up.
Did it slow down? Ha when it goes into the red like that it ground to a halt - you press Fingerprint Id and maybe 2-5mins later the screen responds.... slowly... 😝 basically machine becomes unusable. Mouse on screen lags way behind what you do on the trackpad. Etc. I had to change up my approach to have smaller data in memory for this (which was a lot of extra work).
We have 8GB RAM machines running VM's and end to end development in a large financial corp so I would think 16GB would probably work for most use cases.
Statistical modelling can be quite a niche thing depending on how it is done, we have had data/BI guys do a lot on even 8GB machines using R/SASS/Tableau/PowerBI in a professional environment. It is like machine learning, it depends how you apply it, 8GB can be enough but also 128GB may not be enough.
Aye I know little to nothing about vm’s myself.
The thing with statistical software is you are almost always using a mixture of your own code and someone else’s. So in the situation above I optimized my own code but I can’t do anything about the other packages I’m using (something in the middle has ****** memory management I think but it’s beyond my time and talent to fix that). It’s also a topic where there is always a bigger problem - gimme more resources and I can expand the model a bit more.
But I wouldn’t call statistical modeling niche. Perhaps it is in your financial corp, but I’m in academia literally everyone is doing some sort of statistical modeling- as are all the analytics companies, even the AI folks are doing statistical modeling half the time and simply calling it machine learning (ssshhh don’t tell them I said that). And I’ve not even mentioned biotech yet where the stats they do is many orders of magnitude greater than anything I would go near (but mostly you need high performance computing for that still). But there are intermediate level problems like what I’m doing where a few years ago it wasn’t feasible for a laptop but with recent boosts of cpu core count etc suddenly you can do more and you need the RAM to go with the higher cpu count. STAN software is making leaps and bounds in terms is parallel cpu and gpu processing too. So very quickly the kinds of problems you can throw at a laptop are much more than a couple of years back 😊
So a beefier mbp with better cooking more ram and better gpu??😍😍 where do I sign up? 🤪
Sounds fun hehe.
When I say niche, I meant for every 100 professionals, there isn't going to be a whole lot who fit in that category. I mean i could probably find 250 web developers for every statistical modeller and that is being conservative!
When it comes to Vms, 16GB is a better option. I have a dedicated computer in my office for Vms, it has 12GB and even then memory can be a bit constrained.
Oh I agree I recommend 16GB, it is more that it can be done on 8GB.
If the 32GB upgrade was around £100-£150 I don't think it would matter if you went overkill on the RAM, but at over £300 for the privilege, I'd probably only invest if your workflow needs it.
And I would say the exact opposite - 1 web developer for 250 modellers in my world. We are both subject to our own selection biases. But I do know that software like R, Python, SPSS, Stata have very large user bases
Go for the 16" base for sure.
This 100%
Hmm, let me see 🤔
16" MBP:
Yep, I think so
- Better keyboard
- Bigger display
- Bigger battery
- Better cooling
- Newer GPU
- Newer CPU
This 100%
We still don't know the core count of each machine - a vital part of the calculation!
Oh yeah you are right. I dunno I would take 8 core 15” over 6 core 16” personallly
Worth or not really depends on what will you be using it for .
Although a new "Magic Keyboard" but it is first generation for Apple . From the previous offerings first generations offering do have hiccups here and there (touch wood) .
Bezelness is nice to look at and it tells you that you are already approaching year 2020 . Macbook was like way behind on the bezel looks since this is the only time they change the look and feel of the screen.
And lastly it is not the same price point altogether .
Although a new "Magic Keyboard" but it is first generation for Apple . From the previous offerings first generations offering do have hiccups here and there (touch wood) .
Bezelness is nice to look at and it tells you that you are already approaching year 2020 . Macbook was like way behind on the bezel looks since this is the only time they change the look and feel of the screen.
And lastly it is not the same price point altogether .