Resolved I'm planning to buy Macbook Air/Pro for Rust programming, would Air be enough?

[Miicat_47]

I'm programming with Rust as my hobby (mainly websites) and would like to know, if MacBook Air 15" (512GB, 16GB RAM) would be enough

or if I should get MacBook Pro 14" (512GB, 16GB RAM)

Stuff I will be running at the same time:

* Around 20 safari tabs
* Prob also Firefox with couple of tabs
* Discord/Element/Signal (messaging apps)
* Apple Music
* Visual Studio Code
* Docker for database (MongoDB/PostgreSQL)
* Terminal (SSH connection)

Currently those use around 9GB of RAM on my Linux laptop

 

[Toutou]

Yeah, the Air should have no problem with that. They're great dev machines.

 

[Isamilis]

Probably you need 16gb ram if you use docker (or vm-like apps).

 

[Miicat_47]

Probably you need 16gb ram if you use docker (or vm-like apps).

Yup. I'm mainly concerned about the performance, I haven't had any macs so I don't know at all about their performance

 

[chrono1081]

Yep you'll be fine. I run way more than that on my M2 Air (16 gigs ram, 10 core GPU) just fine without it even getting warm. Some of the stuff I do:

-Lots of Xcode/Godot/sometimes Unity development
-Running simulations in Houdini
-3D art/animation in Blender
-Music in Logic (I've ran 24 tracks at once just fine, it can likely do more I just stopped adding tracks because I got bored)
-Editing 4k video in Final Cut (although I know it can handle 8k)
-Gaming (mainly Final Fantasy 14)
-Creating motion graphics in Motion.

These machines are little beasts and I love them. When I ordered mine I fully expected to be returning it for a MacBook Pro but nope, it handled everything I need to do just fine.

 

[Miicat_47]

Yep you'll be fine. I run way more than that on my M2 Air (16 gigs ram, 10 core GPU) just fine without it even getting warm. Some of the stuff I do:

-Lots of Xcode/Godot/sometimes Unity development
-Running simulations in Houdini
-3D art/animation in Blender
-Music in Logic (I've ran 24 tracks at once just fine, it can likely do more I just stopped adding tracks because I got bored)
-Editing 4k video in Final Cut (although I know it can handle 8k)
-Gaming (mainly Final Fantasy 14)
-Creating motion graphics in Motion.

These machines are little beasts and I love them. When I ordered mine I fully expected to be returning it for a MacBook Pro but nope, it handled everything I need to do just fine.

Wow, that’s awesome! Thank you for the info!

 

[chrono1081]

Wow, that’s awesome! Thank you for the info!

No problem! I got my M2 Air last year when they were released and it put my late 2019 top of the line MacBook Pro (top Intel i9 processor, 64 gigs of ram, a $4k machine) to shame. It literally did everything significantly faster except for rendering in Blender which it was even with....until Blender made an update and then it cut the render times literally in half.

I'm stoked with these machines especially knowing I can now get away with buying a $2k machine vs a $4k machine when I need to upgrade.