Chosing Laptop for developer

codecat · June 20, 2018

Greetings!

A couple days ago I've desided to renew my existing laptop.

I've got two options to chose from and I need to keep only one of them

Options

1. Macbook Pro 15 (2017) 512SSD

2. SurfaceBook 2 13 8Gb RAM, 256 SSD

The main profile of usage as it said in the title is developing but there is few other areas of my concern, so I've made a small list, sorted in order of my priorites

Priorites list

1. Development (Visual Studio 2017, SQL Server, JS Development in VisualStudio Code, Cross Platform dotnet in Rider, Docker Containerization, Virutal Machines - VM Ware, VirtualBox)

2. 3D Modeling (Blender, 3DS Max)

3. CAD (Autodesk etc)

5. Office stuff (Word,Excel,Powerpoint)

6. Browsing through tons of tabs (Stackoverflow etc)

7. Video Editing / Rendering (Small tutorial videos etc)

8. Gaming (old games like Alpa Centauri, Master of Orion 2, Batllefield 1 (min settings is ok ), for modern heavy titles I've got a standalone PC)

As from battery life perspective it would be nice to have up to 3 hours of heavy load, and 5-7 of moderate usage like browsing web, movies, word, excel

This is not a "what to buy" question because I've already have these devices at home. Just need to choose one of them, the other one I have to return.

Which device is best for my usecases?

P.S.

I've also made some benchmarks of both devices and get some strange SSD speed results for Surface Book 2.

I've investigated further and it looks like that all 256GB models have the same write speed, so in case of my priorities will it be enouth for heavy workloads?