My younger son is still using my five year old 15" MacBook Pro. It has no problems. I replaced the hard drive with a Samsung SSD about four years ago only because I wanted the improved performance. The whole system as zero problems.

My older son is now using my four year old 13" MacBook Air. It has had zero problems except that the battery doesn't hold a charge for more than 2 hours any more. Normal battery wear. That notebook spent four years traveling all over with me, almost every week in my bag going and coming from somewhere. The only physical issue is a few of the keyboard key tops are scratched down from my fingernails.

I have run Ubuntu and Mint on both of the systems without issue. Though I confess to spending most of my time in OS X.

I now have a four month old 13" MacBook Air. Has double the RAM of my previous unit. It helps. Buy as much RAM as you can.

Apple hardware, in my experience, is both beautiful and durable.

Alan


On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 12:05 PM, Anon Anon <lokotejones@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a MacBook pro I use at work. It's a Mac. It'll work. It's a bastardized bsd box.

I haven't turned mine off in months. If you need a Mac, buy it.

Why not try running mac os in a virtual box machine to try it out before hand?


On Aug 24, 2016 08:54, "Keith Smith" <techlists@phpcoderusa.com> wrote:


Hi,

I'm strongly considering buying a Macbook pro.

I'm a LAMP (PHP) developer.  Currently I use Mint on a Dell.  Both laptop and desktop. I do have a Dell laptop that runs M$ 10.  Was a bad move upgrading from M$7 to M$10... another story for another day.

The reason for my desired move is I want something that just works.  I do not have the time nor do I have the expertise to maintain Linux Mint when there is an issue.  For instance Dropbox does not launch correctly. I have a work around, but do not want to have to figure this stuff out.  JoinMe.com does no work completely on my Linux desktop and I need it so I use my Windows laptop.  I can watch but I cannot become the presenter.

Moving to Mac is purely a business decision.

Up to this point I have bought cheap on sale Dell.

I also need Virtualbox because I need to develop using PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.

In doing my research I have narrowed my search to the Macbook Pro 13.3 or 15.4 inch models.  I'm leaning towards the 15.4 since it has 16GB of RAM.  I suspect with the SSD drives these Macs have to sing.

My shock is the $2000 price tag.  Yikes.  I'm used to cheap dell hardware that I pay $300 to $400 for on sale.  I can see Best Buy is selling the MacBook at a slightly discounted price.

If I can be just a little more productive the Mac will pay for itself in no time.

The other thing I like about the Pro is it allows for driving two external monitors.  At the resolution the Pro provides that should be a lot of real estate give the laptop monitor makes 3. The only downside I am aware of is with the external monitors the refresh rate drops to 30Hz.  I think someone on this list brought that up and they did not like that low of a refresh rate.

I think I would find iMovie and Pages useful.  And I could add an iPhone to the mix and utilize those benefits.

If I buy the Mackbook pro 15.4 inch with 16GB of RAM what would be a reasonable life expectancy in a production environment?  What would I be able to reasonably expect working it 12+ hours a day, day in day?

Any and every thought is much appreciated.


--
Keith Smith
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