Hi all, I'm looking to buy a new mac. I previously had a mac air. I'm looking to just do some admin work, and app development. I don't need a big screen. Any suggestions appreciated.
an ad-lib reply would be a Mac Air with M3 as they are in big sale now, or if you want to be a bit future proof go for the M4. The Base would give you great start, as it starts now with 16GB RAM. 256GB of storage should be enough, if not invest in external SSD.
Unfortunately you did not tell us further about your use case, so basically the specs above would be fine for average use.
Since you're doing a little bit of appdev I presume you want a Mac with a bit more oomf. In that case my general recommendation would be the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Probably just get a new old M3Pro, or a referb if your budget is tighter.
I'm currently taking a week off my current job, and also navigating the legislative bureaucracy required to found my own tech company. One thing I've been considering, for my company's technological infrastructure, is the possibility of buying standard rack cases for top-of-line MacStudios and baseline Mac Minis, to run smaller multimodal machine learning models like Meta's recently released LLAMA 4 Scout, as well as host bare metal, Linux, and macOS virtual machines, since the sheer amount of unified memory of the high-end M3 Ultra chip and the remarkable performance / cost and energy efficiency of the baseline M4 chip make them very solid options for these purposes respectively, in addition to allowing me to take advantage of Apple's HEVC and AAC audio and video encoder licenses and rich first-party development frameworks.
Because macOS isn't exactly designed to run headless, but on the other hand using dummy HDMI dongles feels pretty lame, I decided to search for ways to create virtual displays on macOS and came across an open-source project on GitHub called DeskPad. While in its current form the project is nearly useless to me, reading its code saved me a lot of time searching for the private API that I can use to create a virtual display for the perfect headless Mac setup. The realization of the possibilities resulting from this research also led me to the conclusion that, for the last 11 years, which is how long I've been blind, I've probably been wasting money buying Macs with screens that are nearly useless to me when I could have been buying Mac Minis to use headless instead, especially given the aforementioned remarkable value of the baseline Mac Minis that Apple has been producing for nearly half a decade now.
So my suggestion, at least for people like me without any sight looking for decent Macs, is to actually consider Mac Minis as pretty solid options, possibly with HDMI dummy dongles to run headless.
What made me, an "Advanced" user, go for the MBP was ultimately the ports. The two ports of the MBA were just too few, without needing to lug around a dock. They're fine for indoor use, or domestic use, but for travelling abroad that was very painful. Never again. I now have an M3 MBP, and love it.
And, yeah, 24 GB RAM is fine, even if you want to run a Windows VM, or a Windows VM and a single Linux VM. If you find the Air's form factor to your taste (it's slimmer and lighter) then it's not really a question of performance, if you spec it up sufficiently. Just bear in mind that those compromises come at a price of the extra port and a lot more storage, as well as the nice-to-haves of the SD card and HDMI port (for the headless dongle).
Also, less well known, but important: you can't drive both ports at full power on the Air, so if you ever get the idea to use two NVME SSDs at full speed through enclosures, you will find that it won't work.
Comments
Wrong Forum
an ad-lib reply would be a Mac Air with M3 as they are in big sale now, or if you want to be a bit future proof go for the M4. The Base would give you great start, as it starts now with 16GB RAM. 256GB of storage should be enough, if not invest in external SSD.
Unfortunately you did not tell us further about your use case, so basically the specs above would be fine for average use.
Basic Recommendation
Since you're doing a little bit of appdev I presume you want a Mac with a bit more oomf. In that case my general recommendation would be the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Probably just get a new old M3Pro, or a referb if your budget is tighter.
How's your vision?
I'm currently taking a week off my current job, and also navigating the legislative bureaucracy required to found my own tech company. One thing I've been considering, for my company's technological infrastructure, is the possibility of buying standard rack cases for top-of-line MacStudios and baseline Mac Minis, to run smaller multimodal machine learning models like Meta's recently released LLAMA 4 Scout, as well as host bare metal, Linux, and macOS virtual machines, since the sheer amount of unified memory of the high-end M3 Ultra chip and the remarkable performance / cost and energy efficiency of the baseline M4 chip make them very solid options for these purposes respectively, in addition to allowing me to take advantage of Apple's HEVC and AAC audio and video encoder licenses and rich first-party development frameworks.
Because macOS isn't exactly designed to run headless, but on the other hand using dummy HDMI dongles feels pretty lame, I decided to search for ways to create virtual displays on macOS and came across an open-source project on GitHub called DeskPad. While in its current form the project is nearly useless to me, reading its code saved me a lot of time searching for the private API that I can use to create a virtual display for the perfect headless Mac setup. The realization of the possibilities resulting from this research also led me to the conclusion that, for the last 11 years, which is how long I've been blind, I've probably been wasting money buying Macs with screens that are nearly useless to me when I could have been buying Mac Minis to use headless instead, especially given the aforementioned remarkable value of the baseline Mac Minis that Apple has been producing for nearly half a decade now.
So my suggestion, at least for people like me without any sight looking for decent Macs, is to actually consider Mac Minis as pretty solid options, possibly with HDMI dummy dongles to run headless.
Ports
What made me, an "Advanced" user, go for the MBP was ultimately the ports. The two ports of the MBA were just too few, without needing to lug around a dock. They're fine for indoor use, or domestic use, but for travelling abroad that was very painful. Never again. I now have an M3 MBP, and love it.
And, yeah, 24 GB RAM is fine, even if you want to run a Windows VM, or a Windows VM and a single Linux VM. If you find the Air's form factor to your taste (it's slimmer and lighter) then it's not really a question of performance, if you spec it up sufficiently. Just bear in mind that those compromises come at a price of the extra port and a lot more storage, as well as the nice-to-haves of the SD card and HDMI port (for the headless dongle).
Also, less well known, but important: you can't drive both ports at full power on the Air, so if you ever get the idea to use two NVME SSDs at full speed through enclosures, you will find that it won't work.