Macbook Pro 13inch Which CPU?

[lukeyyyyy]

Hello, so here's a quick overview of my usage.

I'm a software developer who currently has a late 2013 13" Macbook pro. It has an i5 2.4ghz CPU with 8GB ram and a 256GB SSD.

Typical usage at the moment would be running 5-10 java services simultaneously, a node application with one or two projects open in IntelliJ and Atom, maybe 5-10 browser tabs, possibly a virtual machine, mail and a few other lighter apps.

My current machine gets to around 70% of that workload and understandably starts slowing down. I'm wondering between the i5 or i7, this is based on the 13" mbp. Would the i5 be good enough, or from a future proofing aspect would the i7 be a better buy?

I feel like my bottleneck at the moment is the Ram and not the CPU. Thanks

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hello, so here's a quick overview of my usage.

I'm a software developer who currently has a late 2013 13" Macbook pro. It has an i5 2.4ghz CPU with 8GB ram and a 256GB SSD.

Typical usage at the moment would be running 5-10 java services simultaneously, a node application with one or two projects open in IntelliJ and Atom, maybe 5-10 browser tabs, possibly a virtual machine, mail and a few other lighter apps.

My current machine gets to around 70% of that workload and understandably starts slowing down. I'm wondering between the i5 or i7, this is based on the 13" mbp. Would the i5 be good enough, or from a future proofing aspect would the i7 be a better buy?

I feel like my bottleneck at the moment is the Ram and not the CPU. Thanks

Well firstly open up your top workload and then go to activity monitor and check the RAM pressure graph if it remains green you are still good for RAM. You could also check your CPU usage in the same place.

To be honest assuming your RAM is okay then it will probably be the lack of cores that's limiting you in using VM's as you need to assign a core to each OS and all the 13 inch MBP's only come as dual core. An i7 dual core vs an i5 dual core will make little difference if that is the case and you will need to jump to the 15 inch machine for quad core multi tasking performance (and of course 16gb RAM standard).

 

[lukeyyyyy]

Well firstly open up your top workload and then go to activity monitor and check the RAM pressure graph if it remains green you are still good for RAM. You could also check your CPU usage in the same place.

To be honest assuming your RAM is okay then it will probably be the lack of cores that's limiting you in using VM's as you need to assign a core to each OS and all the 13 inch MBP's only come as dual core. An i7 dual core vs an i5 dual core will make little difference if that is the case and you will need to jump to the 15 inch machine for quad core multi tasking performance (and of course 16gb RAM standard).

Well firstly open up your top workload and then go to activity monitor and check the RAM pressure graph if it remains green you are still good for RAM. You could also check your CPU usage in the same place.

To be honest assuming your RAM is okay then it will probably be the lack of cores that's limiting you in using VM's as you need to assign a core to each OS and all the 13 inch MBP's only come as dual core. An i7 dual core vs an i5 dual core will make little difference if that is the case and you will need to jump to the 15 inch machine for quad core multi tasking performance (and of course 16gb RAM standard).

Good Advice, I saw talk in another thread about the upcoming 10nm chips allowing for quad core in the 13inch. Maybe it's worth while waiting until 2018. Along with the addition of 32GB not that i'd use that RAM to begin with but I'd like to keep this next laptop for a while. I didn't realise a vm would hog a core by itself. Form factor is important, but I guess I can't have the best of both worlds.