MBP 16” for Windows Development

[Surekill]

Hi,

I'm looking at purchasing my first MBP. I’ve decided to get an i7 16” as that offers the better processor than a 13”, but I’m not sure just how much memory I need.

On my windows PC I have a 6th gen i7 and 16gb and that’s been perfect for the last 3 years.

I’m a .net developer so most of my time is in Visual Studio on a Windows PC. So I’m guessing for this I’d be using Parallels.

Would 16gb be enough to run VS smoothly via Parallels or is 32gb preferred (or really required)

I don’t want to buy a machine then see it running poorly but at the same time don’t want to spent £400 extra for memory which could be overkill.

I think the i9 is overkill for my usage, but again if people think it’s better to have that then I’d have to seriously consider it.

Thanks for any advice you can give me.

 

[glenthompson]

It's been a few years since I ran Parallels with VS. At first I had 8gb and it would drag. After I upgraded to 16gb, performance was great. That was 7+ tears ago so I'm not sure about the memory needs for Parallels + Windows + VS these days.

I would spend the money for extra memory before upgrading to the i9. The memory needs may be dictated by other processes you might be running. Do you need to run SQL Aerver or a web server? That might push you towards needing 32gb. If not then 16 will probably be fine.

 

[Boyd01]

I don't know anything about Visual Studio, but I use a 16gb Windows 10 Parallels virtual machine on a new Mini. Right now Windows is running with no applications open and I'm only using Safari under MacOS. A total of 26gb is being used. Maybe you don't really need a 16gb virtual machine for your usage? Have seen as much as 42gb in use at times. I have 64gb of RAM.

BTW, the regular version of Parallels is limited to 8gb and 2 cores, you need the pro version if you want more than that.

 

[Surekill]

I don't know anything about Visual Studio, but I use a 16gb Windows 10 Parallels virtual machine on a new Mini. Right now Windows is running with no applications open and I'm only using Safari under MacOS. A total of 26gb is being used. Maybe you don't really need a 16gb virtual machine for your usage? Have seen as much as 42gb in use at times. I have 64gb of RAM.

BTW, the regular version of Parallels is limited to 8gb and 2 cores, you need the pro version if you want more than that.

I guess I’m comparing a dedicated 16gb windows laptop to the performance under parallels. So maybe it will have to be 32gb. Or boot using boot camp and use the 16gb dedicated to Windows.

cheers for the advice.
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It's been a few years since I ran Parallels with VS. At first I had 8gb and it would drag. After I upgraded to 16gb, performance was great. That was 7+ tears ago so I'm not sure about the memory needs for Parallels + Windows + VS these days.

I would spend the money for extra memory before upgrading to the i9. The memory needs may be dictated by other processes you might be running. Do you need to run SQL Aerver or a web server? That might push you towards needing 32gb. If not then 16 will probably be fine.

Cheers for the advice. I guess part of me wanted to walk into a store and walk out with a Mac, but that’s not possible with Apple only making 16gb versions of the MBP available.

 

[Boyd01]

You could certainly get by with less RAM under bootcamp. I considered going this route, but I wanted to continue using my Mac during lengthy compile/rendering operations under Windows (I am running GIS software on Windows). I also didn't want a separate Windows partition on my disk. Parallels stores everything in a file, which also makes backup easy (Time Machine can back it up like any other files). And I only have a small windows disk, since Parallels can access all the files on your Mac disk(s) natively - they are mounted as network drives on Windows.

 

[glenthompson]

One other thing that’s handy to do under Parallels is making multiple copies of your VM file. Once you install Windows and authenticate it, save a copy of that file. If you ever want a fresh install of Windows, just copy that file over and you now have a new install of Windows. Can also be used for making different Windows configurations.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Last year I ran a 2017 MBP 13' TB (16GB of ram) with the non-pro version of Parallels doing VS 2019. I did this for a full year (starting in 2018) running a pretty big project (hundreds of thousands of lines of code). Our app can use gigs of memory when running too - so testing two versions of these side by side - Parallels handled it really well. The fan ran a lot, but it worked.

This year I built an AMD desktop with a 3600x CPU, 64GB of Ram, and 2TB of NVME storage (2 additional TB of Sata 3 Samsung SSDs). Yeah, it is noticeably faster and can handle loads a lot better, and it cost 1/2 of what my MBP did. I needed a desktop for Windows Server testing this year.

8GB Parallels was very doable for me - I did this for a year+. I wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

 

[D.T.]

I'm a developer, and I do some things native on MacOS (and it's my preferred computing platform), but I also run VM(s) for some Windows work. I run quite a few things concurrently (in MacOS and the VMs), so I like having the extra headroom, I didn't want MacOS to suffer at all, so I wanted it to have a full 16GB (or more) while running a VM (or two). You might also think about what other services you might be running in the VM, like if you're going to run a local MS-SQL instance, IIS as a standalone (vs. the integrated VS service).

I think 8GB for MacOS, 8GB for Windows is _OK_, especially the latter, but I love knowing I've got 24GB reserved for the Mac side, so when I do something like run XCode, Chrome, Mail, Postman, iTunes, ST2, Notes, Cal, and a Docker container running an Oracle instance there's no performance issues while I'm also running a Windows 10 VM for VS

 

[Kaelbron]

Hello!

i borrow this thread because I as in a same situation as thread starter.

I going to student backend/net developer and some other coding. I want both OS X and Windows and think it’s great to have both boot camp and Paraells.

Are they gonna be problems for developer to code in an ARM-Mac? It’s better to buy a MacBook Pro with a intel processor?

 

[BigMcGuire]

Considering we’re still wondering about how Mac’s own processors will work with Parallels and Windows, unless you’re willing to wait till later this year, your best bet is to choose an Intel based Mac.