For web development purposes, you really don't need anything powerful for the most part. You can even make sites just as well on a netbook. Keep in mind that you'll want a good computer for emulating iPhone apps, and you'll want a good amount of hard disk space for the SDKs you'll be using.
I have been trying coding for about a month and do everything on an acer 11 chromebook. I’m not a hardware expert but I know I’m lacking in cpu power. I’ve been looking at the mac book pro from afar. But honestly for where I’m at it doesn’t matter. Eventually, I will want to learn how install and run things locally in my own IDE. Between codepen and cloud 9 I have been able to at least dabble in things like php node and git.
From what I’ve seen as far as higher end people, it has been a lot of macs. I m gonna keep my eye on this threadI had asked something similar a while ago and got answers all over the spectrum, because at a certain point its personal preference. Also, macOS is a certified UNIX system so you can use all sorts of handy command line utilities and such. I’m a Linux man but there are some very cool things a macbook pro has to offer a web developer. Just don’t let them Apple you on their ecosystem and wall you in. Linux on the other hand, has all that and much more to offer.
Knowing your way around GNU/Linux is also helpful as a majority of webservers run Linux, Git has a lot of Linux flavor to it, as Linus Torvalds was involved with it early on. Node.JS is also a project of the Linux Foundation. I’d recommend at least considering it. There’s a small learning curve with a YUGE payoff. There are only 3 real things that Mac has over PC:. You can run all 3 operating systems: Mac, Windows, and Linux as it was mentioned. Technically, you can do this on a PC too but Apple’s bullshit makes it much harder to accomplish.
Trackpad/Build Quality - I’m grouping these into one. If you’re the kind of guy who cares about how smooth the trackpad works and don’t like other build-quality issues, Mac may be your best bet.
Never found a PC with a touch/trackpad anywhere near as good as a Mac. That said, build-quality wise, you can still find nice PC laptops, you just have to know where to look. MSi, Alienware, and Lenovo ThinkPad PROFESSIONAL all have outstanding build quality comparable to a Mac. HP, Chromebook, Surface, and pretty much anything you can find at a Best Buy are all trash unless it’s one of the above I mentioned. For me and many others, what we do to solve this issue is simply use an external mouse (and sometimes keyboard) as needed. I prefer this anyway, so the value of a nice trackpad is not very high for me Certainly not $1,500 high. Battery life out of the box seems to often be higher than PC.
Everything else, PC wins. PC wins in terms of actual computer part/hardware quality any day all day.
PC wins with ease of upgrading/customization, PC wins for best gaming experience and support. I got my MSi for $1,000 NEW.
The Apple computer with the equivalent hardware would have costed me $2,500. If $1,500 is worth a trackpad, some battery life, and you absolutely need Mac software Knock yourself out buddy.
![Best Mac For Web Development Best Mac For Web Development](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125617251/603168225.png)
All that said, a developer friend of mine recently picked up a nice used Macbook Pro for around $600 with an i7, 16GB RAM, AND 1TB SSD. This was a killer deal! Even I would purchase one if I could find it that cheap and use it as another box.
Even still, in a few years, he’s gonna be stuck at 16GB RAM. My PC has that But it’s upgradable to 32GB whenever I want This is my professional opinion after using both Mac and PCs as a technical guy and now as a low-level software engineer for over 20 years. Honestly, I do everything pretty much on my 2012 11' MacBook Air. It still works great, it’s pretty fast, and I also installed Windows on it, so there’s not much to hate.
(Just to clarify, you don’t need Parallels desktop or VMWare Fusion to run Windows. The drawback is that without those, you must restart to switch operating systems (which isn’t much of a problem for me.) EDIT: Make sure that, if you plan on installing windows, get a large amount of disk space on your laptop.
I’ve had to deal with this storage problem for quite a while now, and I resorted to getting one of those small flash drives that I leave in one of my USB ports for 64GB of extra storage. Hope this helps! Powered by, best viewed with JavaScript enabled.