Hi everyone, I'm very confused, I have the opportunity to buy a MacBook pro 13'' 2016 with 8gb of RAM or a MacBook pro 2015 15'' with 16gb of RAM, I really need some advice cause I can't decide by Processor (2016) or RAM (2015), I work as a Ios/Web developer

It all depends on what you need it to do. Basic web dev? The first one is more than enough

@ScribeOfGoD I actually do some mobile development (flutter development) Android and iOS

I don't use Macs. What is the difference between 15 and 16 versions? 16 GB is always welcome

@asgs the difference is between the processor 2015 have a core i7 of 4th generation and 2016 have a core i5 of 6th generation.

@CRzech Not a big difference unless you are doing CPU intensive coding/rendering/gaming

Neither. 16gigs of ram is a bare mimimum, buy something you can upgrade to 32.

@M1sf3t arent the 13" ones soldered?

Don't

@yellow-dog

That's complete bullshit. 8GB is fine for most dev machines. CPU is nearly irrelevant for most dev machines.

My home PC has 64GB and a (by now little bit dated but still beefy) 16-core Ryzen 1950x — but I regularly do video editing, machine learning experiments and stuff like that WHILE I'm simultaneously gaming.

For development, ergonomics are most important for me. Is it balanced in terms of "feel" vs "mobility"?

When you are running an IDE and maybe a few docker containers for web development, or VScode with a react app, or a few MySQL databases with datagrip... CPU & RAM aren't your main worries.

My main concerns when I recently got a new laptop (replaced MBP '15 with a Dell XPS 2020 13") were:

1. Disk size. I use a lot of big databases, and sometimes work in places without internet (nature).
2. Weight. The MacBook pro is a fucking concrete brick.

@bittersweet *8 gig is fine for you. I had 8 in my laptop until like a month ago, reboots because of running out (i dont use swap) were everyday. I use shit like npm, metals, a bunch of electron apps, around 20 ffox tabs, roll en/decryption on semi-huge datasets in-memory. Yes, maybe you can get by using 8 with constant disk loading an sql db, but anything other than crud backend development needs all the ram in the world.

@yellow-dog Not to say that CPU/RAM are irrelevant in all dev fields of course — but it depends on how much you need to actually compute locally.

If you compute & run big test suites locally on your laptop instead of on CI/CD, I understand getting something a bit more powerful.

Although at a certain point the question becomes: Why even buy an expensive overpowered laptop — just go use some cloud computing power, it's probably cheaper.

@yellow-dog Ah, NPM. Yeah, say no more.