I've gone back and forth on this for the past week after seeing the Macbook.
Right now I'm running a nearly loaded Macbook Pro Retina 13 (Late 2013) (Core i5, 16GB, 512GB).
My Macbook Pro has been an absolute work horse. There is absolutely no denying it at all. But I dread carrying it around in my bag because it is so much heavier then my iPads.
Over the course of the last year or so I've been running the Macbook Pro, I realized that I am normally at about 25% CPU utilization. As a Project Manager at a software consulting company most of my world CAN be doing things like running Windows in a VM, or working in Photoshop and etc but these are the exceptions not the rule. The vast majority of my time is hammering out SOW's, putting project plans together, reviewing other peoples code (continuous integration is a beautiful thing) and the like.
Last week I bought my wife a 2014 Macbook Pro Retina that was on clearance at a steal of a price. After messing with the Macbook though, and seeing how portable it is, I decided to get a Macbook. My current plan is to return the 2014 Macbook Pro that I picked up for my wife, and give her my 2013 Macbook Pro Retina. In return I'm getting the Macbook for every day use. When those few times a month when I can actually peak out a Macbook I'll use my old profile on the Macbook Pro.
Use cases are a very transitional thing. I went for about 6 months using an iPad Air, an iPad Mini, and an iPhone 5S for mobile computing. When I had to use something more intensive I would login using Parallels Access into our Mac Mini (Quad Core, 16GB, 1TB Fusion) home server to load up other workloads and it worked fantastically. The main reason I got a Macbook Pro last year was because most of the keyboards for the iPad Air just suck, and I kept running into situations where using ethernet to get something fixed on the spot kept coming up.
Yes the Macbook is under powered. It's also about 2X the performance of an iPad Air, and probably many X faster then cloud VM's that most developers are allocated for development use. The size, weight, and battery life of this kind of device (including the iPad) just makes far more sense then carrying a mobile workstation.
Obviously I may be an edge case. But I can't tell you how many developers I know that develop in Visual Studio using Parallels because they now hate Windows. Wheres the performance benefit of just running it natively then? Or Rails and Perl developers that want a base level Linode so they can login with a Netbook?
I'm glad I'm testing this out like this. We are slowly getting to the point though where if your workload can overpower a Macbook it could very well be time to ask if a local machine sucking up battery is the best thing that can be ran on something like on Azure or AWS at a low price.
Right now I'm running a nearly loaded Macbook Pro Retina 13 (Late 2013) (Core i5, 16GB, 512GB).
My Macbook Pro has been an absolute work horse. There is absolutely no denying it at all. But I dread carrying it around in my bag because it is so much heavier then my iPads.
Over the course of the last year or so I've been running the Macbook Pro, I realized that I am normally at about 25% CPU utilization. As a Project Manager at a software consulting company most of my world CAN be doing things like running Windows in a VM, or working in Photoshop and etc but these are the exceptions not the rule. The vast majority of my time is hammering out SOW's, putting project plans together, reviewing other peoples code (continuous integration is a beautiful thing) and the like.
Last week I bought my wife a 2014 Macbook Pro Retina that was on clearance at a steal of a price. After messing with the Macbook though, and seeing how portable it is, I decided to get a Macbook. My current plan is to return the 2014 Macbook Pro that I picked up for my wife, and give her my 2013 Macbook Pro Retina. In return I'm getting the Macbook for every day use. When those few times a month when I can actually peak out a Macbook I'll use my old profile on the Macbook Pro.
Use cases are a very transitional thing. I went for about 6 months using an iPad Air, an iPad Mini, and an iPhone 5S for mobile computing. When I had to use something more intensive I would login using Parallels Access into our Mac Mini (Quad Core, 16GB, 1TB Fusion) home server to load up other workloads and it worked fantastically. The main reason I got a Macbook Pro last year was because most of the keyboards for the iPad Air just suck, and I kept running into situations where using ethernet to get something fixed on the spot kept coming up.
Yes the Macbook is under powered. It's also about 2X the performance of an iPad Air, and probably many X faster then cloud VM's that most developers are allocated for development use. The size, weight, and battery life of this kind of device (including the iPad) just makes far more sense then carrying a mobile workstation.
Obviously I may be an edge case. But I can't tell you how many developers I know that develop in Visual Studio using Parallels because they now hate Windows. Wheres the performance benefit of just running it natively then? Or Rails and Perl developers that want a base level Linode so they can login with a Netbook?
I'm glad I'm testing this out like this. We are slowly getting to the point though where if your workload can overpower a Macbook it could very well be time to ask if a local machine sucking up battery is the best thing that can be ran on something like on Azure or AWS at a low price.