Before buying a Macbook

J

JonathanTad

Bit poster
Hi,

I am considering buying a macbook pro 15.

I am a programmer so I will need Visual Studio on my laptop and that's why I would like to use your product in order to have windows on my mac so I can run Visual Studio.

Now my question is if there is a difference between the three i7 processors Apple provides with the macbook pro 15:
- 2.2GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz
- 2.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz
- 2.8GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.0GHz

I mean if there is a difference in the performance of your product the Parallels Desktop between the three, or will I feel the same performance regardless which one I choose?

What about the Hard disk size does that effect the performance of the Parallels Desktop? there is the option of 256 and 512 GB.

Any one here having experience with programming with visual studio via Parallels Desktop I would like to hear your thoughts, Can you really program with no problem at all? using all Windows API etc?, IS there any limits on it? like can I install regular windows offfice?



Thank you very much,
Jon
 
The performance question is subjective. Unless you buy all three models and sit them side-by-side, you won't have any frame of reference to really say that one is faster than the other. Easier way to frame it using Visual Studio: would you notice a difference between a 2.2GHz and 2.8GHz in Windows? Absolutely. How about 2.5 versus a 2.8? That's harder to notice. You're virtualizing though, so as a rule you will always be sacrificing some portion of raw power...therefore get the most you can possibly get! Personally I went the route of asking myself how long I would use this laptop for, which is 2-3 years. Worth it to me to pay the extra couple hundred bucks or whatever it was to upgrade. You're already overpaying by getting an Apple, might as well go all out was my thinking.

Check out the benchmarks for the 256 and 512. I don't think there was a big difference back when I looked. I went with the 1TB drive knowing that I was going to have a metric crapton of VMs. Cool note on performance: the 1TB drive is insanely fast, as in nothing-else-can-touch-it-fast. Not sure if the same is true for the smaller ones. There's probably a newer article than this one out there, but: http://9to5mac.com/2013/11/04/lates...ing-ssd-performance-thanks-to-4-channel-pcie/

As for developing with VS in Parallels, lots of anecdotal things I can talk about:

1. If you're impatient, VS will feel a little clunky. When you hit '.' after a class, do you expect to instantly see the members like you do in Windows? There will be a 50-100ms delay there. You may notice, you may not.

2. Coherence is terrible from both a usability and performance standpoint. When it isn't getting busy crashing, it's noticeably slower than normal full-screen mode. I also just found it harder to use than full-screen. You need to mentally switch contexts when you use Windows apps, and coherence fudges with that.

3. I've had zero issues regarding APIs, libraries, etc. I focus primarily on ASP.NET and some light Windows 8 dev, so I can't speak to anything lower level. Yes you can install Office; it's a Windows environment. Doesn't matter if it's running in Parallels, Virtualbox, whatever.

4. Being able to context switch between OSX and Windows is the hardest part of the whole thing. Once you get used to OSX, you think in terms of their shortcuts. Focus on the URL bar in Chrome? Apple-L. Switch over to Windows. Focus on the URL bar? Ctrl-L...d'oh, you instinctively hit Apple-L again which translates to Windows-L and locks the machine. That sort of thing is really hard to get used to.

5. The shared folder integration is nice. I do my development in Windows, but all of my commits (using Git) I actually do via iTerm2. It's fantastic having a non-terrible terminal.

6. If you have Resharper enabled, look into Resharper optimizations in general. Agonizingly slow if you don't turn certain things off (they're the same as Windows though; symbol completion off, show member signatures off, etc. Lots of tutorials on optimizing Resharper.

Overall, it's workable. It's noticeably slower but you get used to it. I have zero regrets about the purchase, because this is the only route that lets me target every platform I need to work with from a single machine. I should point out I am not doing daily Windows development in it anymore though (as we are trying to get the hell out of ASP.NET) and Parallels 10 did just come out, so there could be performance improvements there.
 
jaguilar said:
The performance question is subjective. Unless you buy all three models and sit them side-by-side, you won't have any frame of reference to really say that one is faster than the other. Easier way to frame it using Visual Studio: would you notice a difference between a 2.2GHz and 2.8GHz in Windows? Absolutely. How about 2.5 versus a 2.8? That's harder to notice. You're virtualizing though, so as a rule you will always be sacrificing some portion of raw power...therefore get the most you can possibly get! Personally I went the route of asking myself how long I would use this laptop for, which is 2-3 years. Worth it to me to pay the extra couple hundred bucks or whatever it was to upgrade. You're already overpaying by getting an Apple, might as well go all out was my thinking.

Check out the benchmarks for the 256 and 512. I don't think there was a big difference back when I looked. I went with the 1TB drive knowing that I was going to have a metric crapton of VMs. Cool note on performance: the 1TB drive is insanely fast, as in nothing-else-can-touch-it-fast. Not sure if the same is true for the smaller ones. There's probably a newer article than this one out there, but: http://9to5mac.com/2013/11/04/lates...ing-ssd-performance-thanks-to-4-channel-pcie/

As for developing with VS in Parallels, lots of anecdotal things I can talk about:

1. If you're impatient, VS will feel a little clunky. When you hit '.' after a class, do you expect to instantly see the members like you do in Windows? There will be a 50-100ms delay there. You may notice, you may not.

2. Coherence is terrible from both a usability and performance standpoint. When it isn't getting busy crashing, it's noticeably slower than normal full-screen mode. I also just found it harder to use than full-screen. You need to mentally switch contexts when you use Windows apps, and coherence fudges with that.

3. I've had zero issues regarding APIs, libraries, etc. I focus primarily on ASP.NET and some light Windows 8 dev, so I can't speak to anything lower level. Yes you can install Office; it's a Windows environment. Doesn't matter if it's running in Parallels, Virtualbox, whatever.

4. Being able to context switch between OSX and Windows is the hardest part of the whole thing. Once you get used to OSX, you think in terms of their shortcuts. Focus on the URL bar in Chrome? Apple-L. Switch over to Windows. Focus on the URL bar? Ctrl-L...d'oh, you instinctively hit Apple-L again which translates to Windows-L and locks the machine. That sort of thing is really hard to get used to.

5. The shared folder integration is nice. I do my development in Windows, but all of my commits (using Git) I actually do via iTerm2. It's fantastic having a non-terrible terminal.

6. If you have Resharper enabled, look into Resharper optimizations in general. Agonizingly slow if you don't turn certain things off (they're the same as Windows though; symbol completion off, show member signatures off, etc. Lots of tutorials on optimizing Resharper.

Overall, it's workable. It's noticeably slower but you get used to it. I have zero regrets about the purchase, because this is the only route that lets me target every platform I need to work with from a single machine. I should point out I am not doing daily Windows development in it anymore though (as we are trying to get the hell out of ASP.NET) and Parallels 10 did just come out, so there could be performance improvements there.
Click to expand...

I actually have had a much better experience. I have a 2011 MacBook Pro 2.3Ghz i7 that I upgraded to 16GB RAM and have SSD drive running in it and I would actually say that working on this is better than running on my "real" windows machine at work. I would agree that its really subjective because it really depends on what you are comparing it to. I would highly recommend getting the basics and then upgrading the memory and possibly drive through a 3rd party. I purchase all my stuff through macsales.com. I think there are also a lot of different variables to look at too:

1. What kind of programming? (Web based/Game/Heavy Processing/Windows Phone).
2. 3rd Party Add-ons to VS.
3. Non-Standard compiler settings.

As you can see its a difficult question to answer but I think that CPU is not as important as memory and drive speed.

Hope this helps.

David
 
Hi,

Thanks a lot for your help.

So I understand from you guys that the processor doesn't matter that much and it's more about the memory,
So I think I will go with the 2.5 i7, 16 GB ram which is the only size they offer, and about the hard disk I am towards the 512 GB because 1 TB is just too much for me, I think I can even settle on the 256 GB but as you said I am paying so much for an Apple so I guess its better that Ill get the 512 and not regretting I didn't in a couple of months. The only thing that is concerning me as what you said that the 1 TB hard drive is faster then the smaller, is it still right for the new mid 2014 macbooks? Is it that noticed that if I don't need a 1 TB I should still consider going on it because it's extremely fast?

What about the Nvidia graphic card how would I feel the difference with and without it? Does it affect watching movies on the computer or via HDMI to the TV?

Thank you so much again you guys really helped me,
Jon
 
I have a challenge on my hands. I want to use MS Visual 13 to do Windows Phone Programming on MS Visual. I can't run the emulator, it shows an error.
I've been told that I need HyperV but the Hypervisor is greyed out. Now i've been told that I cannot run Windows Phone emulator using Parallels. is this true?WindowsPhone MSV 13 error3.pngWindowsPhone MSV 13 error3.png
 
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