Ask HN: Using a mac as the main development system or not

Parallels works very well on the Mac, and while you won't be able to do much that requires graphics acceleration in Windows, it otherwise works extremely great (in particular on Macs with SSDs, but ok on HDDs too).

That being said, Bootcamp (dual booting) does not work well. It "works" in the sense that Windows will load and you can do tasks, but the drivers are poorly optimised, often broken, and Apple doesn't prioritise fixing them (and provides near zero support either in-store or over the phone for Bootcamp).

So if you wish to do this, then just come to terms with the fact that OS X will be your MAIN operating system and Windows will be a virtual machine you work in. The whole experience will just be more pleasant that way, as the Parallels team do support their product and DO fix the drivers that interact with their virtual hardware.

If you plan on buying this and MUST duel boot into Windows, then the entire plan is just a bad idea. Buy a Thinkpad instead (or Surface Pro, etc).

I use Bootcamp on all my Macs and regularly boot natively into Windows. Most of my PyParallel development is done in Windows 8.1 running on my iMac 5K retina.

The only complaint I have about natively booting into Bootcamp/Windows is that the touchpad driver isn't anywhere near as nice on Windows as on OS X.

The fact that VMware will happily boot a virtualized instance of the Bootcamp Windows partition (when I'm on OS X) is pretty damn fantastic too.

In the past I've also been able to do the reverse: use VMware to boot OS X from within Windows.

I've got a mid-2010 (holy crap it's getting old!) MBP 13" that I've used for iOS development for a long time. It's had a bit of an upgrade (1TB drive, 8GB ram) but nothing major. You can definitely do iOS development on something like this, and it's way underpowered compared to what you're looking at.

Having a second monitor (I've got a 24" Asus) at home/work is really handy, but I have no problem using just the main screen when I'm working mobile.

Thank you for commenting. Do you think I should go for the 16gb of ram, or would the 8gb be enough for ios dev? Assuming I don't plan on running any VM in it

I'd definitely bump it up as far as I could. I'm pretty sure ol' trusty here maxes out at 8, so that's all it gets.

If possible you should definitely get an SSD; mac or otherwise, the speed bump is more than worth the price. However, if developing for osx/ios is a priority, you don't (easily) have a whole lot of choice.

I was in the same boat as you roughly two months ago (needing to develop on ios/osx) and vmware/vbox ios wasn't cutting it. I was able to snag a 2014 mbp on ebay for a measly $1,000 (ha).

Best of luck either way!

Thanks! Will keep an eye in ebay

I'd lean towards a, if you want to keep both, but if it was me I'd be going for B and specced up high as I can do all of my work as a Systems Administrator from my MBP. They're awesome machines and mine is coming up to 3 years old.

MBP's definitely need an SSD (not sure if they still come with HDDs). Mine had a 500GB HDD, I dropped the laptop when using it and damaged the HDD. I replaced it with a 128GB HDD (as I don't have much large software that's double what I need) and the speed difference is insane. App launches are 5-6x faster, bootup is probably 10x faster and more. If I let the battery run out and it slept, when waking it'd take about 2-3 minutes to resume, now it's 2-3 seconds. I'll never own a machine with a HDD again.

Get whatever you want, that's the truth. I'm currently on a 3 years chromebook that I bought for $150. It works great for me, but you will probably hate it. I added 8gb of ram to it for a total of 10gb. It has 16gb drive. I installed crouton on it, still have 2gb free and I do plenty of dev on it. Pretty much everything you do plus more. :-) I don't do OSX or iOS but if I did, I do probably get an old apple Box, and use it as a headless workstation.

My current laptop is four years old and I have been considering getting a mbp for awhile now. It would be primarily used as a mobile dev station (primary), but are there any downsides to this?

If your current machine is sufficient for the non-iOS/OSX dev work you do, I don't see the value in putting money into it instead of a MBP. I would go for option B, however i'd get a 15" with as large an SSD as you can afford with 16GB of memory. Unfortunately what you get with these newer models is what you're stuck with, and I can tell you that anything less than 8GB on those machines can be a PITA, especially if you start running VMs.

Thank you very much for you comment. I guess you're right, there's probably no point in upgrading my current machine. But I'm curious you suggest the 15'' mbp with a large ssd. Wouldn't a 13'' mbp be enough as a secondary dev machine? Assuming I run VM's on my main dev machine (windows).

I just bought the new 13" MBP a few months ago. How often are you in some place where you won't have access to a larger screen? Save your money, and buy the 13" MBP.

Indeed. If I may ask, which sort of development do you do? Web or app? How much ram do you have? And shich ssd size did you choose?

Thanks

The road to hell is paved with good intentions - I'd personally get a 15" because of the flexibility it provides. Also because of the "envy" factor, which is nearly impossible to discount.

I'm still using my 2007? 2008? second hand mbp (700 eur, I bought it on 2009 or 2010), 6GB, I forgot the Mhz, with bootcamp+windows for photoshop, illustrator, After Effects, 3dsMax, and ocassionally php, js, openfl, as3. Yeah, it's not that I'm all the time rendering full HD movies, my point is: for php and node and toying around... have you considered a 2nd hand mbp?

Have you considered a Mac Mini? I was in the same boat (main dev machine a linux/win dual boot) and a mini fit my needs perfectly.

The Mini is a nice inexpensive way to get into the Mac world.

I would like to add a small word of caution: The current generation Minis are not upgradable. Previously you could pop them open and turn a 4 GB RAM Mini into a 16 GB Mini for under $70, now the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard so the configuration you buy is the configuration you're stuck with.

PS - This was done without physically shrinking the size of the Mini, so one can only assume Apple did this for profit reasons (either manufacturing savings OR forcing people to buy their overpriced upgrades during purchase).

If it saves a step during assembly and makes the final product more reliable, it'd make business sense to do it.

Very few people upgrade their machines after buying them, it's a small percentage of their user base that ever bothers to. The inconvenience there is worth the trade-off: Any Mini coming in for service is using factory memory, no questions, past this point.

It's was always a nice to have, but it's not exactly a deal-breaker now, their prices aren't anywhere as crazy as server vendors can be. It just means you need to build-to-order a machine as they rarely stock the upgraded models.

That's a really Apple-apologist answer. You're essentially justifying it because it makes "business sense [to them]." Of course making more money makes business sense to them, that was never in question.

Given Apple's target market is not hobbyists, that there is already an embarrassment of components you can buy and build your own system from, being able to add after-market memory was never a priority for them for this spot in the product line.

Historically it wasn't advantageous to lock it down like that, people would typically upgrade their memory several times over the course of a system's lifecycle. If you look at what the original G3 case was like, where there was a latch on the side that lays the case open with easy access to memory and hard-drives, a design improved upon throughout the early Mac Pro models, you can see they were never intentionally user-hostile.

In the interests of shrinking components and improving reliability, though, in an appliance-like product such as the Mac Mini, it makes sense.

Notice that the new Mac Pro has extremely easy access to the memory slots.

For most people, the memory that comes with their computer is the memory that computer dies with. This holds true for all kinds of systems, especially laptops where in most cases people don't even know or care how much memory they have.

It was nice to be able to save a little by buying third party memory, but it's not the end of the world that you can't. The Mini can only go to 16GB, so the savings are minor. The Mac Pro can go to 128GB, so it's almost expected you can do that.

I have considered it, but for a "little" more I would have a lot more portability.

If this is a hobby decision, then buying a Mac is spending money on your hobby. If it's a business decision then YAGNI applies until you have paying work developing iOS/OSX applications. Even then on the iOS front there are things like Xamrin that cover the functional requirements for iOS and the price of new hardware covers many months of subscription.

Good luck.

Thanks for the advice. But, if I won't learn how to develop iOS\OSX applications then I will never have paying work related to it, right? I believe this will be half hobby half investing in my future skills.

If the equipment is generating revenue then it's a business. If it isn't then its a hobby. Calling it a "half hobby half investment" is just BS for the sake of a rationalization for buying something shiny. There's nothing wrong with buying something shiny, but it's better if it is acknowledged as buying something shiny rather than pretending its an investment. All that's needed for iOS/OSX development is a used Mac Mini.

The equipment will be meant to generate revenue. But it can only generate revenue once I learn how to develop for ios\osx. And I can only learn it by having a mac.

I don't want shinny. I want something portable (hence the mbp or mba) and powerful enough to do what I want.

>until you have paying work developing iOS/OSX applications.

Isn't it a little disingenuous to advertise that you are able to develop iOS/OSX when you can't at the moment?

YAGNI doesn't really apply to building new skills or gaining new capabilities... especially when said skills and capabilities open up new markets.

In my opinion, the way to move into iOS would be with a small project that is adjunct to some larger project. If a person has never done commercial development for iOS, owning a Mac or taking Code Academy's Swift course doesn't really count for much in terms of professional experience anyway. YMMV.

If you're just toying with Mac/iOS development and you're mostly a .NET dev, you should get a really beefy Windows box and run Mac OS in a VM. Spend your money where you spend most of your time.

IMO, the Macbook Air is useless. I personally wouldn't bother with it.

Isn't running OSX in a VM against its TOS ? I could get my apple ID banned, right? Why do you think the mba is useless? I wouldn't use any CPU intensive programs (eg.: photoshop, video editing)

I have 3 year old mb air, i made the mistake of getting the lowest spec version, but even then I'm still able to do lightweight RoR development (sublime, rails s, guard, chrome all running at once).

I've never heard of anyone ever getting "Banned" for running OS X in any sort of VM, or on non-Apple hardware for that matter.

The Air isn't "useless", but it isn't really intended as a development machine. It prioritizes size and battery life over horsepower.

Useless insofar as it has no use for me. Pretty much everything I do requires more horsepower than the MBA can deliver.

Apple's refurb store (U.S.) has a July '14 MBP Retina with 16GB RAM and 256 GB SSD for $1,609. I bought a '13 model last year for about that price, and it's been a fantastic machine. The refurb units are indistinguishable from new.

Too bad my country's Apple store doesn't have refurbished products :(

That seems overpriced to begin with.

You can get a 15" MBP new, with the dedicated graphics card, 16gb ram, and the new SSDs for like... 2500 USD

OP may have rounded up a bit but in Europe it costs around €2850 ($3200).

- http://store.apple.com/fi/buy-mac/macbook-pro

- http://store.apple.com/es/buy-mac/macbook-pro

- http://store.apple.com/pt/buy-mac/macbook-pro

- http://store.apple.com/it/buy-mac/macbook-pro

- http://store.apple.com/ie/buy-mac/macbook-pro

....

Which makes sense when you consider the 20% "sales tax" (VAT) and the fact that it is included in the price, and not just at the checkout like in the US.

A $2500 machine even in the US might cost $2,700 after tax in the US (depending on your state's sales tax % and if Apple has to pay it).

You don't buy an Apple product for the hardware performance, you buy it for the OS.

Actually a lot of us buy Apple for the hardware performance, just not the kind of performance you measure in GigaWhatevers :) A touchpad that's not horrific, great battery life, a quality screen, and managing to fit it all into a smaller/lighter package than anyone else are all high on my performance list. A few years ago I was looking for basically an ubuntu macbook air. Hardly anything even came close to an air & what did was generally still inferior and just as expensive.

That's a great point I hadn't thought about. The UX for Apple products is generally fantastic.

On a site where everyone's concerned with the Hz and the MBs, the UX regularly gets left behind.