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TechGod

macrumors 68040
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Feb 25, 2014
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I have the 13" model and I love this little powerhouse. I reckon I can make it work for around six to seven years!
 
Hmmm I think about this a good deal. As of today I plan on at least 5 years, but between 3 and 5, depending on what's available at the time get the itch. Hard to say this time around, but I do love the 2018 MBP, even the keyboard. I find the short travel efficient and pleasing.
 
Hmmm I think about this a good deal. As of today I plan on at least 5 years, but between 3 and 5, depending on what's available at the time get the itch. Hard to say this time around, but I do love the 2018 MBP, even the keyboard. I find the short travel efficient and pleasing.
Truthfully? same. I was not a fan of the keyboard initially but I practiced a ton on it and now I am just as fast if not faster than the 2013 I had beforehand and prefer this one .
 
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Owner of a 2018 15“ here. If I need to, I can easily see myself hold onto it for 4-5 years, I do have some minor gripes with it but overall I love it. But for me, when I‘ll upgrade depends a lot on what Apple brings to the table in the next few generations.

Performance-wise I‘m very satisfied and don‘t expect that the next few years win me over in this regard. But there are other areas where I could see Apple improve in the next redesign; performance isn‘t the only area in which a new MBP update/redesign can be innovative.

The screen would be a big one: if we finally get a screen with a full 4K (or higher) resolution, a significant bezel reduction and maybe a few of the bells and whistles of the recently announced 31“ Pro Display XDR in one of the next MBP redesigns, that would be a big plus for me. I‘m also curious on where Apple will go with the keyboard in the next redesign after all the critique they got for it. I‘m personally fine with it, but I am a bit worried that I‘ll run into keyboard issues at some point. There are also a lot of patents from Apple floating around concerning the MBP that would be interesting to see in action one day, plus Apple‘s „Pro Workflows“ team that is responsible for the Mac Pro is said to advise/influence other design teams at Apple aswell, so I‘m curious if and how their suggestions might influence future MBP designs.

To come back to the question of the thread: realistically, the earliest I can see myself upgrading personally is with the microLED-screen MacBook Pro in 2021 that Ming-Chi Kuo predicted, if that really comes to fruition in that year. That seems like a worthwhile addition, and I‘m sure we the MacBook Pro new design and a bunch of other new features by that point aswell; plus, my 2018 MBP would have had a good run at that point (it‘s also the year my AppleCare runs out for it). But as I said in the beginning, if Apple‘s new MBPs aren‘t appealing by then, I could totally see myself sticking to my current MBP a few years longer, I‘m not in a hurry. For me, it would mostly be a question of if the new models would provide worthwhile benefits.
 
My 2008 gave out in 2018 (the display died - it still works fine with an external monitor). My 2014 and 2015 MBP 15s are still going very strong. I expect ten years out of these computers. The 2014 and 2015 were among the most reliable MacBook Pros from 2007 to 2018 (jury is out on 2019). If one of these died, I'd replace it with another 2015. I expect that Apple either got its act together in 2019 or will in 2020 or 2021. But I have until 2024 or 2025 for them to get their act together and history has shown that they do that eventually. If I had to buy a computer right now and it had to be really powerful or new, I'd go with the Lenovo P72 but I'd still use my MacBook Pros.
 
2-3 years. That is our replacement cycle for computers. Been this way for years, see no reason to change. Within that time period enough upgrades have occurred to make it worth it to upgrade, and units are fully depreciated.
 
As long as I can. Maybe I’ll change when they either get into the 2nd year after a chassis redesign or the 2nd year after a move to ARM CPUs.
 
I use it for work, every new processor generation yields tangible performance benefits. The cost of a MBP is nothing compared to the cost of a developer salary.
What kind of dev work do you do and at what point do you need a powerful machine? I’m in uni and aim to be a developer too.
 
What kind of dev work do you do and at what point do you need a powerful machine? I’m in uni and aim to be a developer too.

Many workplaces have moved work off the desktop or laptop onto the cloud so your laptop or desktop is just a portal into the cloud where the real computational work gets done.
 
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Many workplaces have moved work off the desktop or laptop onto the cloud so your laptop or desktop is just a portal into the cloud where the real computational work gets done.

I am a developer and I don't know anyone who develops in this way. Everyone has a laptop and works from that. You're probably right that this is the future, but I'd say distant future at best.
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What kind of dev work do you do and at what point do you need a powerful machine? I’m in uni and aim to be a developer too.

I'm not the person you quoted, but a more powerful machine is nice for faster compiles and builds and stuff. Also, often devs run multiple VMs or test cloud infrastructure locally, etc... More speed and especially more RAM is good for this.

That being said, my home computers aren't as powerful as work and they're still fine to develop on for the most part. Things are just a little slower all around. My personal Macbook is a 2013 13" MBP which is pretty good. My work machine is a 15" 2018 MBP and a lot of things are much faster. But both machines are hooked up to external keyboards and monitors and other than certain tasks I can't tell them apart.
 
I have the 13" model and I love this little powerhouse. I reckon I can make it work for around six to seven years!

My 2013 Late Macbook Pro still works fine. It does everything fast enough including running xcode.
 
I am a developer and I don't know anyone who develops in this way. Everyone has a laptop and works from that. You're probably right that this is the future, but I'd say distant future at best.

Not at all. A laptop works for some development. But cloud development is becoming more and more common.

As more Machine Learning gets added to applications, laptops or desktops just don't have the power to train models in reasonable amounts of time.

Plus, other development is easier on pre-configured environments that start up new pre-configured sessions ever time so there is no need to worry that something has changed on the local machine (ex. path or other environment variables, versions of libraries installed, etc.) and now you have issues compiling, debugging, etc.
 
I am a developer and I don't know anyone who develops in this way. Everyone has a laptop and works from that. You're probably right that this is the future, but I'd say distant future at best.
[doublepost=1560446519][/doublepost]

I'm not the person you quoted, but a more powerful machine is nice for faster compiles and builds and stuff. Also, often devs run multiple VMs or test cloud infrastructure locally, etc... More speed and especially more RAM is good for this.

That being said, my home computers aren't as powerful as work and they're still fine to develop on for the most part. Things are just a little slower all around. My personal Macbook is a 2013 13" MBP which is pretty good. My work machine is a 15" 2018 MBP and a lot of things are much faster. But both machines are hooked up to external keyboards and monitors and other than certain tasks I can't tell them apart.

We have 10K software engineers where I work and this is how development is done here. Our code base is probably in excess of 70 million lines of code and we support probably 30-40 different hardware/operating system platforms. You're not doing that on a laptop.
 
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I'll be keeping mine for a while, maybe 4-5 years. It's a 2nd computer for me so the need to keep up with certain things just isn't there.
 
Not at all. A laptop works for some development. But cloud development is becoming more and more common.

As more Machine Learning gets added to applications, laptops or desktops just don't have the power to train models in reasonable amounts of time.

Plus, other development is easier on pre-configured environments that start up new pre-configured sessions ever time so there is no need to worry that something has changed on the local machine (ex. path or other environment variables, versions of libraries installed, etc.) and now you have issues compiling, debugging, etc.

Very interesting! Maybe this is closer than I realize.

For our teams, we do a lot of AWS stuff but its still all developed locally. The lambda code for example is written locally and executed locally on MacBooks and then pushed up to the cloud where its tested and executed again against test data and pre-prod infrastructure.

The idea you mentioned of having pre-configured environments that keep some consistency to help prevent machine to machine configuration issues sounds pretty rad. I don't like the idea of developing through a dumb terminal where all my code is on some remote machine but then again, configuration issues are soooo annoying :) I dunno, its interesting.
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We have 10K software engineers where I work and this is how development is done here. Our code base is probably in excess of 70 million lines of code and we support probably 30-40 different hardware/operating system platforms. You're not doing that on a laptop.

Thats definitely very different from what we're doing, or any friends of mine. Do all the developers work on all 70+ million lines of code? They're not working on modules and only responsible for portions of that codebase?

How does coding in the cloud help with supporting all those hardware configurations? You still have to deploy and test on each one right? Or is it where the code written in the cloud is somehow live deployed to test systems of every configuration? We target multiple environments as well (although not as many as you!!) but we still develop locally on our MacBooks and then test on each configuration as needed. This is an interesting concept!

These questions are genuine, I'm not challenging what you said, just very curious what that kind of scene looks like, and how coding in the cloud actually addresses those concerns you mentioned. Maybe I don't even understand what is meant by "coding in the cloud."

Maybe my questions are derailing the thread. I'll pick your brain on PM maybe.
 
Very interesting! Maybe this is closer than I realize.

For our teams, we do a lot of AWS stuff but its still all developed locally. The lambda code for example is written locally and executed locally on MacBooks and then pushed up to the cloud where its tested and executed again against test data and pre-prod infrastructure.

The idea you mentioned of having pre-configured environments that keep some consistency to help prevent machine to machine configuration issues sounds pretty rad. I don't like the idea of developing through a dumb terminal where all my code is on some remote machine but then again, configuration issues are soooo annoying :) I dunno, its interesting.

Today on a phone, iPad, or Mac we have assets(video, images, etc) in the cloud and use them pretty seamlessly. Same thing happens to the code. You can store it locally, play around, and push it to a project repository in a cloud. Or you can just log onto one of the available sites and code there, play around, and push from you private cloud environment to the repo for integration and testing.

I don't know what languages you code in, but these days I do ML so that means Python. So a lot of my coding these days is at my account (i.e. my gmail account) at colab.research.google.com, which is free. It is jupyter notebook (if you are familiar with that) in the cloud. I play around with my ideas there, get GPU and TPU access, and then push to the project libraries on Azure, AWS, or GCS (Google Cloud Services).

I sometimes do things on my 2018 macbook pro or desktop system with multiple GPUs, 2-3 monitors, etc. But being able to have a clean environment, not install products, etc. make cloud more and more my go to option.

If you do angular/react web front ends I hear stackblitz has similar functionality.

Containers in the cloud are another way to achieve this consistent environment and have even more flexibility, but I am not an expert on these.
 
My wife and I have a 2017 MBP 13' TB with the mid-range processor and max ram. We're planning on keeping these till they drop but we want 5-6 years of heavy duty service. One down so far! The keyboard took some adapting to but we both use it (my wife does every day for hours and hours for her PhD studies).

But we expect 5-6, hoping to get more.
 
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Today on a phone, iPad, or Mac we have assets(video, images, etc) in the cloud and use them pretty seamlessly. Same thing happens to the code. You can store it locally, play around, and push it to a project repository in a cloud. Or you can just log onto one of the available sites and code there, play around, and push from you private cloud environment to the repo for integration and testing.

I don't know what languages you code in, but these days I do ML so that means Python. So a lot of my coding these days is at my account (i.e. my gmail account) at colab.research.google.com, which is free. It is jupyter notebook (if you are familiar with that) in the cloud. I play around with my ideas there, get GPU and TPU access, and then push to the project libraries on Azure, AWS, or GCS (Google Cloud Services).

I sometimes do things on my 2018 macbook pro or desktop system with multiple GPUs, 2-3 monitors, etc. But being able to have a clean environment, not install products, etc. make cloud more and more my go to option.

If you do angular/react web front ends I hear stackblitz has similar functionality.

Containers in the cloud are another way to achieve this consistent environment and have even more flexibility, but I am not an expert on these.
Thanks for explaining that. It is very interesting! Yeah, I'm doing Vuejs currently but been Angular for the last year before that, Silverlight before that, etc... I'll check out Stackblitz! Thanks again for elaborating!
 
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