Has anyone found the 13" dual-core to be too slow for iOS and/or Android development purposes? I'm looking to purchase 13" but a colleague said that he found the dual-core too slow. Any recommendations?
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Development on 13" or 15" MBP 2017
- Thread starter Tronicnotes
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I personally prefer the 15" model, due to the larger screen, though you will get a nice speed bump with a quad core processor vs. a dual core. I don't code so I cannot say if the 13" is too slow or not, though if I was a betting man, I'd say it was ok for coding.
An iOS developer at work who went travelling swapped his 2016 15" for a 2017 13" (top-spec). He said the builds and simulator were definitely slower, but it didn't affect him enough to regret the swap. Besides that, he said they performed largely the same. It was a maxed out 13" TB i7/16/512.
It's all relative.
It's all relative.
Screen-estate all the way for me but that may be because my eyes are getting old. I don't think there'd be a massive difference for coding purposes, after all you spend most of your time typing, but I think the quad core in the 15" would shine if you needed to run a VM or something.
Any modern dual-core should be good enough for Xcode, it's just longer build times. Since both 13" and 15" are limited to 16Gb RAM, it won't help with running larger/multiple VMs either. Heck, I've done a lot of work on the fly with Surface Pro 4 in VS.NET, and it was fine.
Screen real estate is the big one for me, and the price difference between 13" and 15" is really not that great when looking at higher specs though...
Screen real estate is the big one for me, and the price difference between 13" and 15" is really not that great when looking at higher specs though...
Being honest, you shouldn't realistically be used a laptop itself all the time to code anyway. Laptops are there for portability. You should realistically have a setup at home or at work that you can plug into when you intend to sit for more than 2-3 hours doing work.
The 13" model should be adequate enough, although I would advise getting at least one external monitor to use in the place you normally sit for hours on end.
I wouldn't like the idea of spending multiple hours even on a 15" trying to code etc.
The 13" model should be adequate enough, although I would advise getting at least one external monitor to use in the place you normally sit for hours on end.
I wouldn't like the idea of spending multiple hours even on a 15" trying to code etc.