MBP 13 For Programming?

I've been looking for a personal computer to watch videos on, play a few games, and do some programming. I've been looking at the hp dv6t and, while its power is amazing for its price, the design falls short ergonomically and teh gpu has a lot of problems. I then looked at the sony vaio sa and its perfect (great power and size), except the screen is of poor quality. I'm now looking at the MBP 13 because its design and screen are great, although the power is so-so. I was wondering if anyone uses theirs for college level programming with things like java or c++ and how well that works out in windows or os x (i would defininetly dual boot).

 

I own an MBP13 and do programming on it. I develop (or am attempting to learn) Objective-C in the Xcode IDE. I primarily do C# development for my day job, so I run Visual Studio in a Windows 7 virtual machine with VMWare Fusion. So far I'm happy with the setup.

To get the best experience, I replaced the hard-drive with an SSD drive and installed 8 GB of memory to give a boost in running the Windows 7 virtual machine. It was expensive, but I like both OS X and Windows a lot.

 

I do ObjC/Cocoa, C, C++, and Java all on Mac OS X with no problems... but remember that there are some platform specific things you can do really easy with C and C++ especially on Windows because people use things like Visual C++ which has some of its own libraries and such... so code isn't always easily portable.

Running Windows in a Virtual Machine works fine for coding as well, at least for university courses I've had where instructors force you to turn in Visual C++ projects and such, even though I always did all my coding and compiling in OSX, then just copy and pasted it over to make a Visual C++ project to turn in. Dual booting is really only required if you need direct GPU access, like for games, or heavy graphics rendering related software development.

 

A MBP 13" is powerful enough for the majority of programming work and with an SSD its very snappy. The downside is the low resolution screen.

 

My friend has an MBP13" and she runs the Eclipse IDE on it fine. The MBP13" won't be great for gaming though since it lacks a dedicated graphics card.

 

If you don't need CPU power or an optical drive, consider the 13" Air, as it has a higher resolution screen.

 

Yes, i use a mbp and am in a post-secondary program.

its fine for everyday use. my only complaint is how sharp the MBP is.

i would also recommend getting the air 13. the better resolution and SSD will make it a better development machine. the loss in CPU power won't really hurt you.

 

theres a misconception that programming requires high performance systems, it is not.
most IDE and SDK can be run with just 2.0Ghz machine.

but i like the mbp because the OS supports many languages natively especially python and java , with its plugins

i can do it just from the terminal

 

Thanks for the responses.

I'm looking to do mostly game or AI programming. I was toying with the idea for the game programming by doing most of the coding in bootcamped windows 7 and doing the graphics and such in os x.

I've also seen people from maker magazine using macs and I was wondering why they use them over windows for engineering work?

Oh, something that I was also wondering. Has anyone played Stalker: Call of Pripyat on their computer? My friend with a mbp play CS:S and TF2 perfectly on his but I haven't really seen anything of Stalker (its my favorite game).

 

I'm playing STALKER: SOC on my MBA 11, at native res with dynamic lighting. I don't have Call of Pripyat, but AnandTech benchmarked the MBA with it and got 40.5 fps with low settings and dynamic lighting. So it should be playable on either of the current MacBook Air models.

For coding, I think the higher resolution screen of the MBA 13 will be an advantage over the MBP 13, and the SSD will probably have as much influence on compilation times as the CPU. But the keyboard seems a bit better on the MBP 13. I would head to an Apple store and spend some time with both machines. I'm a software engineer myself and ergonomics makes more difference to me than anything else when coding.

 

How is the MBA in terms of power/games compared to the MBP?

 

I use the 2.66 with the 320m. I love having a backlit keyboard in windows and it runs cool and silent. got it for a steal brand new. while i enjoy it i wonder if an 13 inch mac air would be better. the higher resolution screen is so very sweet. it doesnt take much just for compiling so its very tempting.

 

There is a rumor of an upcoming MacBook Air refresh very soon, possible by the end of this month. If you are on the fence in getting a Mac laptop for development purposes, I'd hold off for at least a couple weeks to see what transpires. The MBA in its current form is a very capable development machine, especially with an SSD drive.

 

a mac air refresh would be sweet.

 

Same situation here. Looking at a Mac for development work. Anyways, considering the rumours of a MBA refresh, it's possible that it will be announced/released at around the same time that OS X Lion is available. So, I'm sitting on the fence waiting for this rumor to be true.

 

Waht are the new refreshed MBA's supposed to have?

 

Likely the ULV versions of Sandy Bridge.

I'll guess the base MBA 11 will have the i5-2537M (1.4 GHz) with an option for the i7-2617M (1.5 GHz) or i7-2657M (1.6 GHz). Similarly, I'll guess the base MBA 13 will have the i5-2557M (1.7 GHz) with an option for the i7-2677M (1.8 GHz).

These should be roughly 50% faster than the current MBA models on CPU intensive tasks, but worse for games. Battery life is a big unknown. Going strictly by TDP ratings, I'd expect slightly worse battery life for the MBA 11 and slightly better battery life for the MBA 13 (vs. current models). But TDP isn't a good measure and we don't know whether Apple will make other changes. It's all speculation.

 

I saw "Call of pripyat" mentioned in the same sentence as "Mac book air"

let me go ahead and throw this out there.

NO!

Running on a dual gpu desktop, CoP has random slow downs, frame rate issues and while an amazing game in terms of story/even graphically.

The programming is from the bowels of hell and is optimized about as .. who the hell am I kidding, that game isn't optimized in anyway. It might "run" on the MBA but, then technically cryris will "run" on my 10 year old desktop with a 2 ghz processor and a 7xxx (low end of the 7xxx series for that matter) gpu.

Anyway, I was reading online, and I was surprised (being a programming major myself) that apparently one thing you should look for in laptops particularly lower end netbooks and such is a higher hdd speed.

Never thought about it but, an article I read said that more often than not.. hdd speed is more likely to slow you down than CPU speed due to the fact that there is a lot of read/writing going on.

Anyway, I accidentally stumbled in here... I can't speak on behalf of the air or pro but, I highly advice against the regular old macbooks.

I've heard the pro are top quality but, the regular mac itself leaves much to be desired..

As a person who will one day work in the actual CMPS field, I try to not be bias against apple... I will say there are advantages as macs are the only platform which can legally run any system.

I would just really try to keep in mind that you pay a premium for apple products.. and as much as I do believe you get what you pay for.. I really caution you to think long and hard about purchasing a mac because, (sorry for sounding cliche) all that glitters isn't gold.. If you honestly suspect you will end up spending a majority of your time in windows.. you may as well save the money and get a windows machine.

My girlfriend before she met me didn't use her comp for anything besides facebook.

Now she uses it to play l4d2, spiral knights, and is seriously considering switching over to be a comp sci major.

I don't know much about virtual machines but, I can say that when it comes to the majority of her use.. its in windows and she has started to really dislike the mac platform.

So let me throw out there...
If your going to end up playing games... your going to be in windows.
If you find it easier to compile code without a VM... your going to be in windows.

If you find yourself doing the above two frequently... your going to be in windows frequently.

Why bother with a mac?

If your planning on programming for the iphone/ipad/ect then be my guest and grab a mac.

Just a little confused as to why it seems appealing..

 

Believe it. I just downloaded the demo/benchmark to be sure. Depending on the settings & renderer, it varies from just playable to really smooth. This is on the 1.6 GHz 11" version. And if you don't believe me, see here:

AnandTech - Apple's 2010 MacBook Air (11 & 13 inch) Thoroughly Reviewed

I'm part way through Shadow of Chernobyl right now and it seems to run a little faster than the Call of Pripyat benchmark. SOC is playable on max settings if you don't mind occasional stutter when transitioning between areas, or perfectly smooth with medium settings. Crysis is playable too.

The Air is no Alienware m11x, but you'd be amazed what's playable on this thing. See more here:

MacBook Air 13" (Late 2010) - Gaming Benchmark Thread! - MacRumors Forums

Functionally, there's not a whole lot of difference between the MB and MBP 13 aside from the fact that the MBP 13 tends to get updated first. The differences are mainly aesthetic: aluminum vs. polycarbonate body, glass screen, backlit keyboard.

The OP mentioned C++ and Java. You only need Windows if your projects need to be in Visual C++. And for software development, running Windows in a VM should be the way to go. I would only use Boot Camp for games.

Ultimately, what it really comes down to is whether the OP wants a Mac or not. If it were as simple as buying the cheapest thing that allows us to accomplish our necessary tasks, we'd all have Acers.

 

Hi Dekabal,

This is an odd question. Almost any computer you can buy (outside some netbooks) would be fine for what you are wanting to do. The new 13" MBP has a 2nd generation Core i5 (or i7) processor (aka "SandyBridge") and is very robust. There are only 3 (as I see it) problems you may encounter using one for programming (and this would be true for any laptop of similar design). First, screen size and resolution. The 13" has a 13" screen with a max resoution of 1280 x 800: This may not be adequate for your use, but can be remedied by attaching an external display. Second, ergonomics: you may not like coding on a notebook as small as this. Larger notebooks have bigger keyboards, and the MBP lacks a numberpad. Third, limited GPU performance: Apple has been pushing OpenCL since Leopard was released, and currently the Intel HD 3000 does not support it. Supposedly Intel will be adding this support in the future, but as of right now it doesn't. What is interesting in the new Final Cut Studio that ws just released, it requires OpenCL or the Intel HD 3000, Apple is implemeting some kind of work around? Well good luck!

Rich S.

 

are you SURE the mbp 13" keyboard is smaller than most other keyboards? cause it looks freaking identical to the 4 other lappies in my house right now

 

Synthetic benches are useless.

I benchmarked at 120 average and get a huge range of 50-120.

The average is 50ish. anytime stuff is going on.

Congradulations.
SoC is dx9

CoP is dx11

Trust me when I built my own desktop, CoP playability had a lot to do with it. Saying SOC is playable is like saying "runescape is playable, therefore COP will be playable!"

I think you should be careful when you say "playable".

CoP can get choppy performance on my system with xfire 6870's :/

I somehow doubt the user mentioned it being a game he really wants to play and is going to settle for 20 fps average.. and I'm not trying to knock the benchmarks but, being blunt.

You may as well expect a 15-20 FPS decrease from whatever the benchmarks online tell you.

And depending on his college or maybe even on his individual classes.... I would be willing to bet that at some point or another he will need Visual Studio's.

VM's are great tools but, if you need Visual Studio odds are it is going to be offered by the university for free.

I do understand it isn't always about the out right cost of the device.

The only point I want to make is if he needs Visual studio's for a project course (or 3) and he wants to play video games.

He is going to end up spending a lot of time in windows.

The question becomes "is it really worth it to worry with OSX, if your going to be using mostly windows anyway?"

And while I can't comment on MBP.. the MB itself is definitely not worth the money in terms of build quality.

 

But CoP is DX9, DX10, or DX11 and the performance varies by a huge amount depending on the renderer. What I see varies from borderline playable with some stuttering using the DX10 enhanced full dynamic lighting renderer to pointlessly high frame rates and zero stutter with dynamic lighting turned off. Running the DX9 full dynamic renderer seems to be a decent compromise that gives normally smooth frame rates (30+ fps) with just some occasional stutter. And aside from a change in gamma, it's hard to see any difference between DX9 and DX10 on this 1366x768 screen. Clear Sky seemed to make better use of DX10 than CoP.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. There are two ways of running Windows on a Mac. You can run it within a VM in OS X or dual boot using Boot Camp. Dual booting is the way to go for games, but otherwise it would be better for most people to use a VM for running things like Visual Studio. That way you don't leave OS X and you can switch back and forth between Windows apps and OS X apps and you enjoy all of the OS X touchpad goodness.

 

I did not mean to imply that it is smaller than other notebooks of comparable size, just smaller than larger notebooks. Plus number pads come in handy. Personally I like the MBP keyboard, others do not. It was only mentioned as a possible issue the OP may want to consider.

Rich. S.

 

30 fps is not considered "Ok" by most gamers for first person shooters..

He will probably end up using boot camp since that is what every single mac user in my school does when it comes to Visual Studios.

If he is playing video games and using visual studio in windows.

It raises the question why boot into osx if you can browse, program and do everything you need to do in windows?

If your not using osx why get a mac?

And being completely honest here.. using a VM is great if you love osx and don't want to leave it..

However, if your like most people and ok with win7 and are indifferent..

your going to end up using whats easiest.

I am not just speaking favoring windows here.. its hard to use something you don't need to use when there is a solution which has your needs in one.

 

The performance of the machine is fine and if you can get the required IDEs in OSX then that's fine too. I think the biggest issue with the 13" MBP is the small screen. Unless you do very basic stuff in a text editor, you will probably need a lot of screen space to be efficient. I think even my 15" is insufficient most of the time.

 

Thanks for all the info. I was also wondering how the MBP 13 is for power users? I play a lot of retro or indie games like Minecraft and Doom 2 Mods and was wondering if they would run well (for some of them I realized i'll need to bootcamp windows). In terms of being a power user, I will general have a video up in my browser, a webpage that I will tab a bunch of other pages off of, and some work or a game minized while I wait for it to load. Would the MBP be able to handle something like that?

 

Minecraft has a native client. Doom II would probably run in Boxer, which is a front-end for DOSbox.

As for the rest, it should be fine. My wife's 2009 macbook handles her leaving Mail, Pages, Firefox, Safari, iCal, iTunes and a myriad array of other stuff that she forgot she's running, for days at a time, without a hitch. A new MBP is drastically more powerful. For instance, I can have Windows 7 running in Fusion, minimized, and still run anything I want with hardly any performance hit, on my 2010 MBP 15". I have 8 gigs of ram though, so YMMV.

If you really plan on doing heavy multitasking though, you might want to consider the 15". I've had both a 13" and a 15" MBP, and it's a lot easier to do multiple things on the 15".

 

just fyi. thats not a power user . i'm pretty sure an dual-core atom could handle that.

EDIT: a power user to something closer to having 150 firefox tabs open with about 10 videos, several MS docs, Visual Studio, sublimetext, itunes, and various hardware monitors running