https://www.reddit.com/r/AITechReport/comments/1dyfz1o/exploring_the_powerful_new_macbook_pro_laptop_m3/

Low budget Good performance- M2/M3 Air with 16 Gb

High Budget High performance- M3/m4 pro

There is a m4 pro with a 14cpu, 20core gpu, 24gb ram and 1tb ssd, it’s 14’ so more portable and it’s 2400 dollars. It should last you years. Then again, do you need such a machine or would the new m4 air work better, since it’s super light and portable. Or maybe you don’t plan on moving it a lot then the 16’ mbp is better. All up to you 🤣

Could check first is apps you want to use already optimmized for M chip.

https://isapplesiliconready.com

Brand new I'd go M2 Air or M3 based Macbook Pro, 16GB RAM minimum, screen size / storage to taste. Storage its best to balance what you need on the go on the laptop vs what could be kept on an external SSD when you dock up as Apple's storage is very very expensive.

Used anything with an M chip is going to be a fantastic machine so may be able to save some money there. Even the base M1 is going to perform great still.

Parallels is fantastic for running Windows and Linux if needed for testing.

Mac Pro, 24 CPU/76 GPU/32 neutral engine, 192 GB ram, 8 TB SSD with a Pro Display XDR

Without any knowledge of the course(s) content its a pure speculation.

Ask the school for an advice

Most CS courses are PC Based

Get a big mac.

16” MacBook Pro with 16/40 core M3 Max CPU/GPU, 128GB Ram, and an 8TB SSD

Switched from a MBP 14” to a MBA 15”. The extra screen real estate and lightness of the 15” was a deal breaker. I don’t use it for watching content so an upgraded screen and speakers are no use to me. I prefer typing on the keyboard on the Air, I’m not sure why.

I’m stuck as I do some light graphic design work and gaming which is why I would prefer a larger screen but the MBP 16in is not in the budget. Not sure what to go for

Only get the Pro if you need more than 24GB of memory. If you are doing CAD or multiple virtual machines go Pro. Of course ifnyoure heavy into video editing, also go Pro.

Otherwise the M3 Air is a very capable machine. I don't find the screen difference worth the extra pound of weight. I'm still weighing whether to upgrade to Pro to get 32GB for virtualization. Again, that extra pound makes me want to screen share into my M4 mini and run the workloads there.

I think the Air is the better deal here! I would only recommend the Pro for power users like music and video editing, really intense code development and other power hungry tasks. I do a lot of photo editing on my Air and it doesn't flinch

The good news is I don’t think you can go wrong. The 15 inch Air should be a strong consideration especially if you plan on watching video. A lot of people say the screen quality is improved on the Pro, but side by side, I don’t see much practical difference.

Now if you plan to use the built in speakers extensively, go listen to the MBP. Apple did some real magic in those things. I’m impressed each time I fire up a YouTube video or Teams call.

I’ve done some work in VS Code on the M3 Air and even loaded some smaller local LLMs. No issues at all.

Source: I own an M4 MBP and wife has an M3 Air 15.

At the very minimum please get the 14” M3 pro. The one with 18gb of ram. It will last you for so many years, great machine.

A M2 Air would probably be sufficient, just get at least 16GB of RAM. Gaming is not great on Macs, even high end ones, use the money saved from buying a Pro Max and use it for Geforce Now, or an Xbox + Gamepass.

Long time software engineer here - the 15” Air is perfect for you. 16GB RAM will get you through your degree, but you’d benefit from 24GB if you started tinkering on your own.

For the laptop to throttle it would have to be under constant load, which as a computer science major, you will not be doing to it.

What you are looking for is probably not a Macbook.

You may have to use stuff during uni that's hard or impossible to set up on an ARM device. Also if you want to play games Mac is just a terrible option.

Buy something in the same price range with an x86 CPU and a dedicated GPU.

15 Air. The screen estate. GeForce now.

I had a m1 for my ML job until I got an upgrade last week. The m1 8GB suited me fine for those years

https://branzomed.blogspot.com/2023/11/understanding%20deprresion.html

I think you are full of shit

find a budget - get the machine with the most ram.

"better" is subjective. all of the machines you are looking at are beasts. the ram can be a bottleneck vs one with one or two less cores, so get the most ram you can and moveOn.org.

it depends on your wishes - if it’s convenient to work with an external monitor, then you can take the MBP 13“. If you need to connect a lot of peripherals or work without an external monitor, it’s better to take the MBP 16“. But you should wait for the next Apple presentation

Any MacBookPro M1/2 with 16+ Gb and 512+ SSD

Wait for m3 with 128GB of ram, should last for 6months at least.

BTW 2Tb is just so 2015, 4TB is a must now and 8TB lets you have peace of mind for another 6month. investing more makes n sense bc anyways you want to switch to m4 in a year time.

It is good to have both 14 and 16. 14 to travel, 16 stays at home. If you work for important huge figures add extra spare 14&16 as a backup. You don't want to be cheap here. oh and they come in two colorsso I would double on that, you neverr know what color you would like more that crucial day with important codeing to be done

Depends on your programing skills: one Apple studio pro xdr display for beginners and 3 xdrs for advanced. They are only 60hz but you can buy extra 3 and put them aside so at least in theory number of hz will sum up to 120.

BTW It makes no sense without a set of Pininfarina Xten Office Chairs, at least two if someone wants to seat with you, but maybe if you would buy 4 you can get a nice 1% discount, meaning your apple stuff would be for free anyways so who cares you can even buy some ipads like 10 of them jsut to have some nice boxes in your room.

PS. For those 8 macbooks you could get a studdents disocunt probablly.

If you are coding and programming, I’d say it depends on what you are designing. Are we talking HTML/web design stuff that needs to be light and quick, or heavy AI, maybe video games?

We need more info before we can recommend. Otherwise I’d say base Air and code in the cloud

i prefer pro because of 2 external display which i couldn't live without while coding

I just bought a 16”, 32GB, 512GB, M1 Pro. I was about to buy a 15”, 24GB, 256GB, M2 Air but then I saw this MBP was only $100 more. The exact configuration I wanted. I don’t use much storage so lowest is fine. I upgraded ram for longevity. I wanted the biggest screen bc I watch a lot of videos. Some things I’ll be doing with it are coding microcontrollers, mobile development, and doing CAD work. Probably overkill but I just got the best bargain I could find that was in my price range.

would an 8gb M2 Air be fine for a software eng student? don’t plan to use this for work at all - the most i’d do is personal coding projects +. coursework (on a budget too)

If you are asking this type of question, probably you are not a programmer yet. Anything from the M series probably gonna work for learning how to code. If you have something specific in mind, like Machine Learning, go for the M2 Pro Max, but keep in mind that nvidia GPUs are going to be faster and cheaper.

I went with the 14 inch M2 Pro MacBook Pro and I have no regrets, it's truly a phenomenal machine for coding.

MacBook Air M1 is probably fine for you.

I’d worry less about the hardware since you can learn to code on basically anything. And worry more about actually learning to code.

M1

It’s perfect.

I use a MacBook Air M1 (256GB SSD, 16GB RAM) for development (iOS apps, Python, occasional web development amongst other things) and it works pretty much flawlessly.

I would highly recommend going for the extra RAM, it will help if you’re running lots of programs at once and will increase longevity.

If you can, I’d even go for the extra SSD on-board storage. It’s faster than any external SSD you can get out there, and it’s obviously much more convenient than carrying around another drive.

As a bonus (especially for development purposes), the extra SSD space can let you comfortably dual boot Asahi Linux (meaning you can have both macOS and Linux and switch between them).

More memory 36G 512G SSD … just to ensure you take into account the intended workload to reserve about 20% of free ssd space for optimal performance and ssd bad cell remappings