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General Discussion

Konrad Pilch
Konrad Pilch
2,435 Points
Posted by Konrad Pilch
Konrad Pilch
2,435 Points

13inch or 15inch mac for a programmer?

I'm 6ft if that has any use. Is 13 or 15inch better? I woukd probably buy extra monitor as well.

And is it better to buy the best 13inch with max stuff for 1.6k pounds? I'm new to this. Or 15inch?

1 Answer

Margaux Flores
Margaux Flores
11,453 Points
Margaux Flores
Margaux Flores
11,453 Points

Well, I personally think that since you're buying an external monitor, it's just up to preference now on how portable you want it to be or whether lugging around a 15" laptop would bother you or not.

To be honest, it will all come down to the internal specs you're going to add to it.

I personally went with a 13" and just packed it with the specs I wanted cause I wanted portability since sometimes my work requires that I lug around a laptop for meetings and I have a 27" monitor on my work desk and room anyways.

However, a plus of the 15" besides the bigger screen is you can get it with the AMD Radeon graphics card and you can also get an upgrade to a quad-core i7 (versus the dual-core that comes with 13"s) with a bigger memory shared L3 cache. (I'm not certain if you can get the same upgrades on the 13" or not, can anyone clarify?)

I can't really advise you on which specs would be "enough" or required since you didn't really specify what kind of things you're going to be doing with it other than "programming", but I find that my 13" Retina is serving me very well for someone doing lightweight front-end programming, graphic designing and etc.

PS: If I had the money, I would have probably not minded the 15" either since MBPs are so light nowadays that there's just a slight difference. (To me, at least.)