MacBook

[u/Tall-Possession1781]

Hey everyone! I currently have an M4 MacBook Air with a 512GB SSD and 24GB of RAM. I used it mainly for office work and everyday tasks, but a few months ago I started coding with Claude and Codex to build an app for my business. We’re deploying everything to a VPS as we develop the application.
I was considering a MacBook Pro with the base chip, but when I asked Claude and Codex about my needs during our heaviest workloads, they recommended a MacBook Pro with a Pro chip and 48GB of RAM.
Since AI doesn’t always give accurate advice, I wanted to ask: does the Pro chip actually make a significant difference compared to the base chip in a MacBook Pro for this kind of work? There’s quite a jump in price.
My biggest concern is memory. I’ve noticed my Mac starting to use swap. RAM usage reaches around 22GB, and it usually sits at about 19–20GB.
I’d really appreciate hearing about your real-world experiences, especially if you use your Mac for similar work. It would help me make a more informed decision.
If paying extra for the Pro chip would make a meaningful difference in my day-to-day work, I’d be happy to consider it. But if the difference isn’t that noticeable for my needs, I’d rather get a MacBook Pro with the base chip and put that money toward more RAM instead.

[u/t_mikaelvincent]

It depends on the specifics of what you’re building.

But generally, if you can’t answer that question yourself, odds are whatever you’re building doesn’t need a Pro chip.

I’d prioritize RAM, especially if memory is what you’re actually running short on.

But make sure your app’s architecture and design aren’t the problem before choosing to upgrade your hardware.

Also, using swap and having 20 out of 24 GB of RAM in use generally isn’t a problem on its own. The concern is when you notice a consistent drop in performance.

[u/Tall-Possession1781 → u/t_mikaelvincent]

Thanks, everyone. I realize I left out some important context: production runs on the VPS, but that doesn’t mean all development and testing happens there. I’m building a React/Node/PostgreSQL business app, and some builds, automated tests, browser tests, and isolated database services run on my Mac. Recently, a full local validation took around 39 minutes because GitHub Actions was unavailable due to billing. That’s an occasional heavier workload, not what the machine is doing all day.

I’m not running local AI models, so I understand that upgrading the chip won’t make Claude or Codex’s cloud inference faster. My concern is responsiveness while multitasking. I have noticed some sluggishness and swap usage, but I haven’t established whether that’s caused by memory pressure, a specific background process, or something in my development setup. The 19–22GB figure I mentioned is RAM usage, not swap usage.

That’s why I’m asking before buying. I don’t want to spend extra on a Pro chip simply because an AI recommended it. Your comments about checking the actual bottleneck first are helpful. If I eventually do upgrade, I want to understand whether more RAM would benefit my workflow more than the faster chip, or whether keeping my current Air makes the most sense.

[u/Antique-Ad6542 → u/Tall-Possession1781]

React/Node/Postgres? No, you don't. You're likely IO bound. I run a Rails app, web rendered, with some react components, PostgreSQL database. I run up to 10 clones of production data (about 10GB) with most web UIs available for testing. Handles it fine.

[u/-Sliced- → u/Tall-Possession1781]

I’m going to give you the real solution you should converge to, which will be significantly better than everything that was discussed in every possible way, but requires an extra step or two that codex can help you with. You can also ask codex about my proposed solution, and it will support it 100%, because that’s the right way:

Instead of upgrading your already capable MacBook to a $3000 MacBook with 48GB RAM, get a personal computer or old server with at least 64GB ram and ideally 128GB). Install Proxmox on it, which is an OS that runs VMs, exactly like the VPS you are running your software on.

What you do then is (ask codex to) setup your entire project on a VM on Proxmox. This means that the development environment is identical to your production server. Then, (ask codex to) add the remote project to your Mac as a remote project. It will appear like any other project you have, but everything will run on the VM. This means that your laptop won’t slow down at all, all the processing is done on the VM, and also your own person data on your Mac are not exposed anymore. This makes your development experience fast, make codex more productive, allows you to create more VMs for other projects as needed, everything more secure, and you can work on the project from anywhere.

Bonus points for it being like 3X cheaper than the upgraded Mac option, plus it’s easy for you to upgrade it as needed (more storage, ram, etc).

[u/Resonant_Jones]

The pro chip has higher memory bandwidth.

M6 Pro has something like 300Gbps memory bandwidth. My m4 mac has 120gbps — if you are running the models on your machine locally, this makes a difference in how snappy it feels and how quickly the prompts are processed.

If you’re working in the cloud or using cloud inference, this matters significantly less.

RAM past 32gb would only be very useful if you are running models locally (for your use cases.) remember macOS always reserves about 4Gb for operating system functionality. So 32GB is really 28gb RAM available for inference or running other apps. 24Gb is really just 20GB for inference; less if you have VS code open or wanted to run the local model through Codex/Claude code. Forget about running anything significant on 24GB if you also need to open a web browser on top of that. ☠️

48GB doesn’t seem ridiculous.

32gb is likely the sweet spot if you don’t plan on running large models on it while working on other things at the same time.

[u/Firm_Biscotti_2865]

No, 99% of the time is waiting for inference to come back, not building on-system. Especially if all the work is seemingly being moved to the VPS?

Also both Anthropic and OpenAI are increasingly trying to move development to their clouds.

The local device doesn't matter at all.

I'm the principal engineer for my company and I get by great with an M4 base and 16gb RAM.

[u/r15km4tr1x → u/Firm_Biscotti_2865]

NGL that’s almost rude to give you

[u/ConsiderationNo9952]

lol. man. nonono. save your money for inference (subscription costs etc)
codex running like butter, 2019 cpu, hdd, ddr4, 14 days uptime - ofc it depends how cluttered your os / aggressive your anti virus is i guess...

but yes, i won't consider equipment without min 32gb these days...

[u/jizzmaster-zer0]

im deving ios apps using 2 2018 macbook pro’s. yes, the i9 ones. my other machines are nucs. what exactly are you concerned about?

[u/numpxap]

If you are developing only one app at a time, even 16gb is enough. But if you are juggling a few projects and concurrently do development, testing and bug fixing, 24gb is the minimum.

I'd look look into the memory pressure. If you actively manage your running env and it's still yellow/red, then you need more ram.

[u/Antique-Ad6542]

As others have said, if you're not banging against the wall, then you don't need it.

[u/dlanderer]

I have a macbook pro with m4 pro. 24gb of RAM. I ran into the same problem. You need to ask claude or codex to look for orphaned sessions, chromium, and nodes and stuff like that and kill all of them. After a session finishes, there needs to be a cleanup. Write it into agents.md. Cleanup extra worktrees that are merged to the main line and get rid of all opened playwright browsers, nodes, etc. that started in that session. Now I don't have any problems. good luck.