I can only have one upgrade… 16GB of RAM or 512GB storage.

I am planning to use this for programming for at least 5 years, so I am tempted to choose the former and use an external hard drive / SSD to store older projects and pictures.

Thoughts?

  • StefanMorris71BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Do you plan to code with SwiftUI? If so, do not go for a 8gb ram model

    • X2077OPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Would it still be doable, albeit with longer compilation times, to use xCode on an 8gb model?

      • StefanMorris71BEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I had a m2 mba with 8gb ram and i started an empty SwiftUI project and it immediately got extremely hot and was using more swap than memory (10gb swap) and that’s without even writing a line of code so I swapped it for a m2 mbp, you don’t need a mbp for Xcode but it was on offer at the time so i got it anyway

        • X2077OPBEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Edit: typo

          Thank you so much for your feedback. I sold my PC a year ago and I still have a really good quality monitor, so now (after checking the price-performance) I’m tempted to go for a Mac Mini - 24GB RAM & 512GB storage.

          Do you think the M2 Pro chip upgrade cost is justified for xcode, or is the normal M2 fine? Due to my budget, I would have to bump it down to 16GB of RAM. For programming this seems counterintuitive imo, as everyone praised the M1 for its speed.

          Thoughts?

          • StefanMorris71BEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I too would’ve gone for a Mac mini but I can’t go without the portability of a laptop. My previous laptop was an i5 11320h with 8gb ram which was fine, I was mainly programming desktop apps, the ram would start to struggle when I was using SQL management server. CPU was never an issue. Unless you’re programming huge complex applications that would use large amounts of cpu on the end users machine, any apple silicon chip will be fine