Buying advice on MacBook Pro 16" and Bootcamp

[nilss2]

Hi all,

First post!

My MacBook Air 11" (2013) is dying. The battery is EOL and the Thunderbolt doesn't work anymore. My eye used to be on the 12 inch MacBook, as I am often on the road and I really take my laptop everywhere , even barely use my smartphone. Now that Apple no longer makes the 12", I will probably buy a nice MacBook Pro and search for a portable solution later (Surface neo? iPad mini + brydge? Samsung Dex? I don't know yet).

Now, I don't need all the processing power or a graphics card, but I do like the big screen of the 16" MacBook Pro, especially as I no longer have a home office with external screen. Cost is no issue, it's for professional use as a data analyst.

What I do need, though, is Windows once in a while. Most things I can do on a Mac, even Office got a lot better recently, but I miss business intelligence applications like PowerBI. I do have a Windows laptop now, too, but it has plenty of hardware issues unbecoming for a laptop of its price class (HP Spectre x360). It will be retired. Moreover, sometimes I do some print work and Mac has better options.

But my question: How well does Windows run in Bootcamp these days? I've heard performance is not so great and power management neither, and the laptops run quite hot. Is it better in a virtual machine (e.g. Parallels)? Looking for opinions of real users, not benchmarks on biased websites.

Thanks!

 

[TeCH-Guruz]

Got my 16" inch a few hours ago and so far so good! No more stuttering like in my previous 13" 2017 TB

I have attached my normal workflow usage details in here.

Hi all,

First post!

My MacBook Air 11" (2013) is dying. The battery is EOL and the Thunderbolt doesn't work anymore. My eye used to be on the 12 inch MacBook, as I am often on the road and I really take my laptop everywhere , even barely use my smartphone. Now that Apple no longer makes the 12", I will probably buy a nice MacBook Pro and search for a portable solution later (Surface neo? iPad mini + brydge? Samsung Dex? I don't know yet).

Now, I don't need all the processing power or a graphics card, but I do like the big screen of the 16" MacBook Pro, especially as I no longer have a home office with external screen. Cost is no issue, it's for professional use as a data analyst.

What I do need, though, is Windows once in a while. Most things I can do on a Mac, even Office got a lot better recently, but I miss business intelligence applications like PowerBI. I do have a Windows laptop now, too, but it has plenty of hardware issues unbecoming for a laptop of its price class (HP Spectre x360). It will be retired. Moreover, sometimes I do some print work and Mac has better options.

But my question: How well does Windows run in Bootcamp these days? I've heard performance is not so great and power management neither, and the laptops run quite hot. Is it better in a virtual machine (e.g. Parallels)? Looking for opinions of real users, not benchmarks on biased websites.

Thanks!

I occasionally boot up in windoze and can confirm it runs quite hot but other than that no real issues. I would imagine it will still run a fair bit better than your old laptop either way.

 

[D.T.]

But my question: How well does Windows run in Bootcamp these days? I've heard performance is not so great and power management neither, and the laptops run quite hot. Is it better in a virtual machine (e.g. Parallels)?

Here's my perspective on BC vs. a VM after years of using both.

Bootcamp will give you nearly "hardware level" performance, you're basically booting into native windows. The downside being when you're in Windows, you're only in Windows, i.e., no access to any Mac apps, services or resources. If your workflow is when you're in Windows, you plan on being focused on only those apps, you won't need to reboot into Mac OS with any regularity (meaning, once you reboot into MacOS, you're there for a long period), it's good. You can use services like DropBox or Google Drive to share files, and you can even use things like the Web UI for various email clients to avoid having to install an extra mail client.

If you're not as performance concerned, and you want to use MacOs as your primary computing platform, and you find yourself needing to access Mac based resources on and off through the course of a day - you'd be better off with a VM solution. I use MacOS like described, including some Docker containers, developer tools, etc., plus it's my primary personal computing solution, so Windows in a VM is really very secondary (even if it's needed for a couple of profession critical applications, like Visual Studio).