OT - Selecting a Mac for development

[Lussier, Denis]

My everyday laptop is a 15 inch Retina Macbook w/ 512 MB SSD and 16 GB of
RAM.  It's pricey, but I love it.    8 GB would be fine, but, I like/need
the extra memory to run virtual machines in the background.

I have an older (now discontinued) 17" Macbook pro that I upgraded myself
to 16 GB of RAM.   I presently use it as a desktop that is pretty easily
portable.   Frankly, it's too big to use on an airplane.

I usually advise folks who presently want a MacBook for development, and
price is an important consideration, to go with an 8 GB, non-retina display
MacBook Pro w/ at least a 512 GB spinning rust drive.  This is a reasonably
priced great machine that will last you for years.  The design is a little
more old school than the newer retina models (which means it's cheaper and
easier to upgrade and thicker and includes an internal DVD drive).

--Luss

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Eric Richardson <ekrichardson at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Doug,
>
> Yes the MacBook Pro Retina and the Air models are fixed at purchase
> according to person at the Apple store I talked to. Not sure on the others.
>
> I went ahead and got 15 inch retina because that one comes with 16GB memory
> and 512GB SSD - I think this is plenty of power to get a useful life out of
> the machine. It is definitely pricey.
>
> I'm replacing an old iMac which I certainly got my money out of so I'm
> hopeful this will be similar experience.
>
> BTW, thank-you for all the people working to make the Mac a great Java
> platform. It is very popular for developers for all the JVM targeted
> platforms at a minimum.
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Doug Zwick <Doug.Zwick at blackboard.com
> >wrote:
>
> > Michael Hall wrote:
> >
> > > On Jul 15, 2013, at 4:46 PM, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
> > >
> > >> I upgraded mine to 8 GB and it does better!
> > >
> > > I think writing to a smaller screen on a machine with less memory is
> > better. Then think how much better it'll run on the others.
> >
> > IIRC, some of the current MacBook Pro models have their memory spec fixed
> > at manufacture -- it is not possible to add memory later. I presume this
> is
> > because the memory is not socketed, but mounted directly on the main
> logic
> > board. Check the specs before ordering, otherwise you may limit the
> usable
> > life of it (at least as a development machine).
> >
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