Which Macbook for development?

[TheJessTech]

Ok, so I can either get the base 13 inch retina Macbook Pro for £999. It has a 2.7GHz Intel core i5, 8gb ram and 128gb flash drive.

Or I can get the 2012 model Macbook Pro, which has a 2.5GHz Intel core i5, 8gb ram (upgrade) and a 500gb HDD.

Should I go for the nicer design, higher battery life and better display? Or the higher storage space?

I'll be dual booting with windows, and doing some game development in C#.

 

[talmy]

By the time you carve up the 128GB drive for dual boot you will be hurting for space, but a flash drive is much nicer than a HDD. I'd either go with the mid model with 256GB, or if choosing the 2012 MBP replace the HDD with a 256GB flash drive and skip the RAM upgrade. (My data point -- I've got a 2009 Mac mini at work and I run Linux in a VM, no Windows, with a 128GB flash and 4GB RAM. The flash memory size has been a problem, the RAM never a problem. It outperforms an HP Z400 workstation running Windows with a Xeon processor but conventional hard drives.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Ok, so I can either get the base 13 inch retina Macbook Pro for £999. It has a 2.7GHz Intel core i5, 8gb ram and 128gb flash drive.

Or I can get the 2012 model Macbook Pro, which has a 2.5GHz Intel core i5, 8gb ram (upgrade) and a 500gb HDD.

Should I go for the nicer design, higher battery life and better display? Or the higher storage space?

I'll be dual booting with windows, and doing some game development in C#.

Get a refurb 2014 with a bigger SSD size 256GB at least.