Hi y’all!
I am about to start a bootcamp and my school requires a mac computer. I’ve never had one before, so I’m kinda lost. Since I don’t want to spend a lot of money, I was thinking about getting a refurbished one.
Please let me know your thoughts on this one:
MacBook Pro Retina 15.4-inch (May 2015)
Core i7
16GB
SSD 256 GB
$1,079.99
Do you think it’s a good one? Too old? Not worth the money?
Thanks in advance.
If you’re required to have a Mac computer, I assume that what you’re learning is iOS development?
I am no expert, but you usually don’t need a super duper computer for web dev. What you are suggesting is probably adequate. That is basically what I have to do mobile work which involves emulators and it handles it fine. The only difference is that my SSD is twice as big, but you could probably get away with that - as long as you aren’t doing a lot of video processing or something that takes up a lot of memory, I would assume.
You might want to get a 24-27" monitor or two to make working easier.
Hii. Nope. It will be web development. They require Mac because they consider it the best computer to learn.
They require Mac because they consider it the best computer to learn.
[rolls eyes]
That’s…dumb. Really dumb.
That place sounds like they don’t know what they are talking about, to be honest.
To answer the original question: The only reason that computer wouldn’t be fine is if it’s too old to run the latest MacOS version. Other than that, any computer that runs well will work for web development. I can’t tell you how big of dicks your bootcamp is going to be about refusing to help you if you don’t own a Mac, but anything that runs pretty well, has an up-to-date OS and connects to the internet is good enough for web development.
What your getting should be more than enough! But if you put just a bit more money, you might be able to pick up a brand new one!
Could you describe use cases??
Yeah, as mentioned, the only real reason to require mac is if you are doing iOS development specifically. It seems an unnecessary expense burden for the students.
Maybe they just want it easier - they don’t have to give separate install instructions for mac, windows, and linux? Still dumb.
Yeah. Not only is “figure out how to install this on your own computer” a perfectly reasonable expectation for a coding course, if they really wanted to avoid it they could just provide a VM image. Pure pretension.
That’s almost exactly the MBP I have, except I have the 13" version. It runs Catalina just fine. That’s actually a better model than the next couple years of MBP’s because the keyboards on the newer models were terrible (they’ve since fixed them).
I honestly don’t have it in me to get into tech fights anymore. Use what works and don’t listen to people who get righteous about platforms.
If you have to have a Mac, then that’s one of the best laptops ever made, and it’s likely to be a solid choice for a few years as long as you’re not expecting to run modern games or other very graphics-intensive stuff on it. If you can find a newer one (definitely 2016 and possibly 2017 are just very slightly upgraded components in the same shell) for a similar price go for it, but that should work fine. It’s a lot of cash for a five year old laptop though.
That is nearly identical to what I have. Got it in 2018 for my bootcamp (not touching that discussion thank you). Worked well and still using it to this day with zero problems. I still haven’t upgraded to Catalina (I keep putting it off lol). The price you listed is a good price too for that model.
And for what it’s worth I do have a Windows desktop- have used both to practice code (when Windows 10 isn’t trying to upgrade and getting stuck at 48% every single time).