I had all of those models, I would only choose between MacBook and MacBook Pro. The Air is a legacy product.
The MacBook 12" is neat, especially if you have an external display, keyboard and mouse for heavy work. I would stick to it, but the keyboard is too shallow for heavy typing.
The MacBook Pro is great all around. I have the 15.4" with Touch Bar - that thing sucks - so I am tempted to get the 13.3" without Touch Bar in the future. I think that machine is the best.
The MacBook alone was powerful enough to run Meteor, SublimeText, a few browsers, and clunky Adobe software, all on a Retina display. Thus, I wouldn’t spend much time thinking about specs.
At the current prices, they’re honestly hard to recommend.
Even the newer models are quite underpowered compared to other laptops on the market. I enjoy developing on my own 13 inch Macbook Pro (that I’m using right now!) but this will be the last one I own unless the pricing becomes more reasonable. Or they upgrade the hardware further.
For development purposes, don’t forget Linux! Nothing wrong with a high quality linux-based laptop
Not sure this is particularly helpful to the thread but thought it’d be worth putting my point across!
Why none looks towards Windows transformer + docker?
I can’t get more happy than using sufrace book, pen, touch and tablet mode do their thing.
If we talk of Mac though, i’d also stand for Pro one.
Perfomance and usability are so far - the main advantages mac could offer. Don’t trade them away.
If you can afford a MBP its a great dev machine. I couldn’t, I bought a used Thinkpad from ebay, and I think in most ways its a superior choice. Thinkpads are workhorses and business class hardware, they run Linux perfectly. You can easily put in an ssd and expand memory and they are really cheap. The downsides are - screen and battery life won’t be as good, not as light/slim (don’t care). Pros - full Linux of your choice, much much cheaper, probably more reliable.
I don’t know about Thinkpads being “business class hardware”, it’s just Lenovos slightly-premium label by this point I think. But you can often get about twice the raw performance for the same price when you buy a non-Apple computer. With Apple you’ll always get a nice screen though, probably the best touchpad, and a nice aluminum casing. The choice of OS for Meteor is Mac or Linux IMO.
For me, the user experience on mac is good and I’ve never really had my day to day work stopped because of the mac specs. $1,500 is steep, but if it lasts two years and you can sell it at the end for $3-400, and you use it for work on the daily… it’s not that bad of a deal.
