[LRUG] MacBook for Ruby dev work

[Jim Myhrberg]

I know a couple of people who use plain MacBooks for work, I'll try and get
a hold of them to see if they want to chime in.

Personally, while it's not a plain MacBook, I've been using a 2012 MacBook
Air (dual-core 2.0GHz i7, 8GB RAM) for the past 4 years as my main machine
for all development work. It's fine, and still does a good job. CPU isn't
always as fast as I'd like it to be, but 95% of the time it's enough.

As far as I recall the first version of the plain MacBook was about
equivalent to the maxed out 2011 Air. And I believe the recently updated
MacBook brings performance up close to the 2012 Air I have.

As for what I do, Emacs is my editor, I run mysql, redis and elasticsearch
in Docker Beta, and most of my work is Ruby. Basic Rails apps takes a few
seconds to boot, while more typical large ones are around 10-15 seconds.

And more recently I've been on a Microservice project, where booting
everything locally kicks up around 30 separate Ruby processes. That boot up
is really the only time the CPU is painful as things kind of freeze for
10-30 seconds. But once it's all up and running everything is fine.

And on top of that I run Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Skype, and more than a
handful other apps too at all times.

Only reason I haven't gotten a MacBook myself is that it's a lot of money
for something that's roughly the same as the Air I already have. If I'm
gonna upgrade, the idea is it'd be an actual upgrade.

However if I was in your position and offered a choice between a MacBook
Pro and a MacBook at work, it might be difficult to say no to the MacBook I
think. Unless the MBP was a 13-inch retina with fully max specs of course.

Best of luck :)



On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, 23:02 Andi Studer, <andi.studer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does anyone have first hand experience in using a MacBook for Ruby dev
> work?
>
> I am being offered new hardware at work, and can't make up my mind between
> trusty steed MacBook Pro and feather weight MacBook.
>
> My setup is fairly standard. I use Atom as editor, my projects need local
> PostgresSQL and ElasticSearch servers and I'd like to run DockerBeta.
>
> Feedback welcome
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