What upgrade should I choose?

[Anon1848]

I´m going to start on my master this fall, and therefore need a new mac. I have decided to buy the new 2019, 13 inches MacBook pro with 1,4 GHz quad-core processor.
I´m planning to make one upgrade, but I´m stuck between upgrading the memory from 8GB to 16GB, or the storage from 256GB to 512 GB.

I'll be using the laptop mostly for excel and programs like Python and Matlab.

 

[jandrso]

You can't go wrong with upgrading memory in these things since that's truly non-upgradable after you get it. You could always get an external SSD or flash drive for archiving your code or more drive space.

 

[lance link]

You can't go wrong with upgrading memory in these things since that's truly non-upgradable after you get it. You could always get an external SSD or flash drive for archiving your code or more drive space.

+1 on all of this.

BTW: I ran desktop MATLAB on my 2013 MBA with with 4 GB ram for years. It was fine but things suffered when I had chrome open with multiple tabs and other apps. And you’ll probably want to run/debug python in an IDE. Go for the ram. I just ordered the 13” 2.4GHz and went with 16 GB. Nothing more frustrating then when your laptop is sucking wind due to memory starvation and you have to close out work and context that you have loaded into both your machine and your brain.

 

[chabig]

If money isn't tight, get both upgrades. But if you must choose, I'd suggest getting the storage over the memory. The operating system manages memory very efficiently. I have been running with 8GB and 512GB for four three years now. I run lots of apps and even a Parallels VM and my memory pressure is never a problem.

 

[Clix Pix]

Memory first -- go for the 16 GB RAM. As others have mentioned you can easily add an external SSD for additional storage if and when needed.

 

[leman]

For your use case, I’d say RAM. Especially if you want to do machine learning etc. on larger data sets.