I can only have one upgrade… 16GB of RAM or 512GB storage.
I am planning to use this for programming for at least 5 years, so I am tempted to choose the former and use an external hard drive / SSD to store older projects and pictures.
Thoughts?
Go for Ram. Softwares in worst case will get up to 80gb. You still have lot of space+cloud storage+external ssd 1tb for less that $100.
Just to repeat what everyone else is saying, WAIT FOR THE 30TH IF POSSIBLE! We can EXPECT pro and maybe even iMacs, but other stuff including new Airs could smack the price of that one down, or even compel you to go with a possible new option. Id wait it out unless you find an AMAZING deal. If nothing changes afterwards, go with the 512gb storage, no question. Here’s why.
Coding and general multitasking is going to be FINE for quite a while with 8gb ram, Macbooks are highly ram efficient. The fact that the m2 Macbooks with 256gb SSDs are half the speed of their 512gb+ counterparts is not highly efficient (lol). Essentially, 256gb m2 Macbooks use a different SSD than their 512gb, 1tb, and 2tb counterparts. The low spec 256gb version happens to be quite literally twice as slow.
Not only is 8gb likely going to be fine, but even if it’s not (which I don’t expect to be the case), Macbooks use memory swap, meaning they borrow ssd space to use when they run low on unified memory. With the 512, your SSD available for mem swap is twice as fast, leading to faster memory performance as well as just better read/write speeds. Unless you read this and disagree, go 512.Thank you so much. I’ll also make sure to watch the event and return the laptop if something better comes up 👍
Do you plan to code with SwiftUI? If so, do not go for a 8gb ram model
Would it still be doable, albeit with longer compilation times, to use xCode on an 8gb model?
I had a m2 mba with 8gb ram and i started an empty SwiftUI project and it immediately got extremely hot and was using more swap than memory (10gb swap) and that’s without even writing a line of code so I swapped it for a m2 mbp, you don’t need a mbp for Xcode but it was on offer at the time so i got it anyway
Edit: typo
Thank you so much for your feedback. I sold my PC a year ago and I still have a really good quality monitor, so now (after checking the price-performance) I’m tempted to go for a Mac Mini - 24GB RAM & 512GB storage.
Do you think the M2 Pro chip upgrade cost is justified for xcode, or is the normal M2 fine? Due to my budget, I would have to bump it down to 16GB of RAM. For programming this seems counterintuitive imo, as everyone praised the M1 for its speed.
Thoughts?
I too would’ve gone for a Mac mini but I can’t go without the portability of a laptop. My previous laptop was an i5 11320h with 8gb ram which was fine, I was mainly programming desktop apps, the ram would start to struggle when I was using SQL management server. CPU was never an issue. Unless you’re programming huge complex applications that would use large amounts of cpu on the end users machine, any apple silicon chip will be fine