daliaan

Long time Mac hater here. I was forced to start working on a 15'' MacBook Pro last August and I was surprise by how nice the experience is. I still hate that you cannot snap windows to divide your screens perfectly, but that's no fault of their own since Windows patented this feature. (If you watched LTT's latest videos they even suggest a paid app that provides this exact feature if it is such a deal breaker for you). Besides this and gaming performance OS X is better in any way after you get used to it. I think a quad core Air will serve you for many years if you can get it at US prices.

At the moment I have a 15'' 2019 six core MacBook Pro at work. My machine had some issues and I had to work on a spare one that is a 15'' 2017 MacBook Pro - quad core. The only difference between them performance wise are the 2 missing cores and DDR3 vs DDR4. For me the difference was huge. I hated the 2017 the whole time and for most part I think that RAM speed made the difference, that's why I'm hesitant to go with the two thunderbolt 13'' MacBook Pro and that's why I'm comparing it with the four thunderbolt 13'' Pro since it has the same fast RAM. I'm aware that the statement that I made above sounds stupid - at least to me it surely does - but for some reason that's the feel I get from this recent comparison that I had. One of the reasons this could be the issue is that I usually have around 10 tabs opened in chrome besides fleep, slack, skype and Android Studio and all those apps really consume RAM. In Romania we usually get the option to choose between ISO and ROU keyboards, so I'm not concerned about this. This seems less than ideal to me too, that's why I was asking if anyone tried it. This also sounds a bit stupid to me since I'm asking if Apple's least expensive laptop can drive 2 4k displays and what's even crazier for me is that I would spend less than half of the price for the Air for those 2 4k monitors. Again, thank you for your input @Darkseth @Kilrah @Commodus

Does anyone know if the Air runs hotter with 2 4k monitors attached? I'm used to having at least 2 external monitors and I was wondering if the Air gets hotter since the Iris G7 GPU is supposed to support only 2 4k monitors at the same time.

I'll buy the international keyboard. Or even if I won't have that option, I'll select the international layout by software.

I did that. The prices I provided are all from the Apple official dealer in Romania thank you for the idea and the time @Lord Vile

unfortunately no. I have to buy it from Romania. Good thing is that I'll have to contact more than 1 store to ask for offers and choose the best one (not necessarily the cheapest since some shop could offer extended warranty) but I'm stuck with Romania prices.

thank you for your input @Electronics Wizardy @Kilrah @SupaKomputa . I hope you have a nice day and wish you an awesome weekend. Cheers!

from the reviews I have the same picture in my mind that the Air should work. I need them to be laptops since I'm still a student working for my Engineering degree and probably my first employees will be students too and portability is key. that's the idea I have too, but all reviewers are saying that the i7 is not worth it and I was confused by that

I don't know if I can do that. Atm I'm a code developer at a company and I have the posibility to apply for some non refundable funds to setup my company. There are multiple criteria that one must get right in order for those funds to be approved and one of them is that you must say exactly what you'll do with the money. For instance let's say that I say that I'll buy 2 16'' MacBooks. Then I need to buy them since if I change the initial statements they can say that I made the initial statements to be 100% sure that the funds get approved and then I changed my mind and do whatever I want with the funds and some other person might have been entitled to the funds. As almost everything in Romania it implies bureaucracy and that's what I'm trying to avoid. Regarding buying an Air and returning it myself, not trough my company, I guess I could do that but in less than 1 month I need to meet with someone to start working on the application for the funds and I need to have everything figured out by then. Basically I'm trying to get the most versatile and least expensive machine to code Android and iOS to leave as much of the funds for other expenses.

for the moment I do only Android. but the sole point of my company is to provide both Android and iOS applications and for that I'll need MacBook.

Hi. I'm an Android software developer from Romania and I wish to start my own company that will mostly focus on mobile applications. Obviously, that means that I must do a pact with the devil (Apple) since I cannot afford to spend huge amounts of time with hackintoshes or develop iOS applications with Windows which is impossible. I need to buy a laptop for me to develop code on. From all the reviews I watched I managed to get the following picture: - 2020 four thunderbolt port 13'' MacBook Pro will 100% manage to serve me perfectly, especially if I go with the 32 gb of ram version to future proof it - the i5 / i7 MacBook Air with 16 gb of ram could serve me well but I'm not sure about the thermal limitations. All reviewers are doing the performance review from their point of view - as creative professionals. However the tasks that a video creator and a programmer are doing are extremely different: one uses its machine at full power for an extended period of time - video encoding and so on - while the other uses a text editor and compiles code from time to time. Did anyone managed to do by any chance any testing between the two machines that can shed light on this predicament for me? I'm asking this because in Romania the price difference is massive. I can get the i5 MacBook Air for ~1800$ (on US for 1800$ you get the 4 thunderbolt MacBook Pro) or the i7 MacBook Air for ~1870$ yet I cannot get the Pro without spending ~2500 $ for "the same" configuration - quad core with 16gb of ram. I know that the pro gets 2 fans connected with a heatpipe, better speakers, microphones and additional 256 gb of storage but those things really don't matter for me. What matters is the performance for short bursts (compiling the code and running it on devices), that's why I'm even considering the i7 MacBook Air since it has a base clock of 1.7 GHz and I'm hoping that it doesn't throttle back. Best regards, Dalian