The 12" MacBook: A Web Developer’s Perspective

[charlieegan3]

Without proper cooling, it can get hot really fast.

Do you have a means of measuring how hot? I'm interested where the 2016 model limits kick in and and how that affects the performance.

 

[darkmaxdevil]

Do you have a means of measuring how hot? I'm interested where the 2016 model limits kick in and and how that affects the performance.

I use iStat Menus for tracking my Macbook condition. The Macbook start throttle at around 85-90C. But normally, it will run around 42-58C depend of the load. The throttle hit pretty hard, but as soon as you get it below 80C; it will be in it usual state.

 

[charlieegan3]

I use iStat Menus for tracking my Macbook condition. The Macbook start throttle at around 85-90C. But normally, it will run around 42-58C depend of the load. The throttle hit pretty hard, but as soon as you get it below 80C; it will be in it usual state.

Ok yes, so this is interesting - these temperatures are much closer to what I was expecting. The cut off for the throttling seems to be quite low in this video:

In this article it also seems to be lower - even under very high load. (http://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/feature-taking-apple-macbooks-core-m-its-limits)

We used DOTA 2 to tax the MacBook as it stresses up the CPU and GPU. After about half an hour, it reached its warmest temperature of around 47 degrees Celsius, which is really toasty

I'd be interested to see a more detailed test of the 2015/2016 macbook from a heating perspective. The numbers seem to differ from test to test.

 

[Scripted Pixels]

I wrote a bit on Medium about my month of using the 12" MacBook as a web developer.

Here's the conclusion:

My opinion is that, to be the most productive, I need a lot of screen real estate. This is a problem whether I use a MacBook Pro or the new MacBook. With that in mind, I didn’t find any cons to the MacBook when comparing it to the 13" MacBook Pro. I did find a lot of pros, though: the light weight, the better battery life, the more comfortable keyboard, the silence from having no fan — these are just a few of the benefits that the MacBook has over the MacBook Pro.​

If this is going to be your only dev machine, don’t get the MacBook — the Pro is a better choice if you can only get one machine. But if this is your second computer — one to carry with you everywhere you go — then I absolutely recommend the MacBook!

Anyone else using it for web development and having a different adivce?

Have you looked into or read about the latest MacBook's?

I do similar work to you but I'll be using docker & working Wordpress & magento websites with potentially some swift & NodeJs soon