To mac or not to mac

[alinescoo]

Hello community,

Very useful information around this forum.

I am thinking of changing my development machine. I use it mostly for .net/web/mobile development. Right now I have a PC with an i7 7700 cpu and 16GB RAM running Windows 10.

There are a few things that concern me, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter. I've never owned a mac but used iphone for a while.
- now I use a benq monitor 27" (2k) 2560x1440 @144HZ on DP and works great. Font size is just right, text clarity is fine, it has auto brightness and blue light filter. From what I've read, macs go well with 27" @5k because it achieves the 220ppi. My monitor would be 109ppi so that means it would work without scaling at it's native resolution. However, most the opinions are that text will look blurry and will generate eye strain. The main draw is that while on windows works great on mac it will look bad. How do you think the monitor would perform? Will it be able to run at 144hz?
- there are many users who complain of eye strain from macOS because of temporal dithering usage. There are uses who complain the same thing on windows. Have you experience more eye strain from macOS compared to windows?

Thank you very much for your time!

 

[Boyd01]

You might have a look at this long thread... I don't think you will find a consensus on this question here. I have a 32" BenQ 1440p monitor (around 96ppi IIRC) and am really happy with it at native resolution. I'm sure I could also use a 27" screen like yours, but am 73 years old and appreciate the larger text. I also run Windows 10 in a VM and don't see much difference in text quality (but that might be because it's a VM).

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/a-warning-do-not-buy-a-mac-mini-unless-you-have-a-high-resolution-4k-display.2338026/

 

[Yebubbleman]

Hello community,

Very useful information around this forum.

I am thinking of changing my development machine. I use it mostly for .net/web/mobile development. Right now I have a PC with an i7 7700 cpu and 16GB RAM running Windows 10.

There are a few things that concern me, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter. I've never owned a mac but used iphone for a while.
- now I use a benq monitor 27" (2k) 2560x1440 @144HZ on DP and works great. Font size is just right, text clarity is fine, it has auto brightness and blue light filter. From what I've read, macs go well with 27" @5k because it achieves the 220ppi. My monitor would be 109ppi so that means it would work without scaling at it's native resolution. However, most the opinions are that text will look blurry and will generate eye strain. The main draw is that while on windows works great on mac it will look bad. How do you think the monitor would perform? Will it be able to run at 144hz?
- there are many users who complain of eye strain from macOS because of temporal dithering usage. There are uses who complain the same thing on windows. Have you experience more eye strain from macOS compared to windows?

Thank you very much for your time!

The display stuff admittedly isn't my bag. I will say that Apple, especially in the age of Apple Silicon Macs, can be finnicky with third party monitors and it has never really had decent multi-monitor support when compared to Windows.

.Net development is probably best done on Windows. From what little I know of it, it probably HAS to be done on Windows. iOS and iPadOS development, at some point in the process, will require a Mac. Apple doesn't let you publish iOS and/or iPadOS apps without Xcode and Xcode is Mac-only. The ideal is probably having a Mac for iOS/iPadOS development and web development and a PC for .Net.

If you are averse to having two machines, I might recommend an Intel Mac (a 2020 27-inch iMac or a 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro; most other Intel Macs are not really worth it). However, you're not going to get the best performance available for current macOS releases and, until Apple does the needful, you're only getting official support for Windows 10 (however, with a Core i7-7700 based PC, you're similarly stuck on Windows 10 as far as official support from Microsoft for Windows 11 is concerned).

 

[alinescoo]

Thank you very much to both of you for your input.

I agree that .net is better on Windows. The only main issue would be running sql server but that can be mitigated with tools. The latest versions of .net run good on apple silicon. Also Visual Studio for Mac has native m1 support and seems to catch up on features of its older Windows brother. Mac mini sounds interesting to me because it should have good compile times, it's size is small, it's quiet and I can try to make the jump intro apple ecosystem (an iphone, apple TV, watch...)

Now that m2 is out, used m1s should have better prices and probably one with 16GB/512GB would be good enough. However, if I need to buy a new monitor then it probably isn't worth it. Brand new, a m2 with 16GB is probably around the same price as a custom build PC (i7 13700, 32GB DDR5, 512 NVME SSD).