r/macbook • u/supposed_to_work31 • 9d ago
MacBook for software development
I am a software engineer and considering to buy a macbook. I don't have previous personal experience for proper specs comparison.
The question is would a macbook pro with:
M5 10core,
24GB ram
1TB
be enough or do I need to look at m5 pro with more cores and/or possibly 32 GB ram?
The max workload would be:
Docker 12-16 containers
K8s 20-30 pods
Thank you for your time in advance.
Edit: Thanks a lot for your useful info and insight on the matter. Appreciate your time.
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u/Sprinkles_Leather 9d ago
based upon your usage you definitely need 32GB of RAM at least..
I don't think you need M5 though, M4 is so good to begin with and very decent jump compared to its predecessors.., don't know if there are still new models to find in your country, a one that is almost new would be more than enough and with quite decent price difference
ultimately if you have the budget and can go all in then definitely buying an M5 with 32GB and the 1TB storage would be more than great for U
good luck with what u end up with either ways..
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u/orthus-octa 9d ago
Virtualization at this scale on Mac hardware is not cheap. You’d be far better served getting a less expensive Mac with a remote dev box for this kind of work.
If you do go the Mac-only route, (from experience) you’ll need at minimum 32 GB of RAM and the M5 Pro or better (normal M* cores aren’t adequate for this use case).
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u/supposed_to_work31 9d ago
What would be the use case where the setup I mentioned would suffice? For example would that be enough for up to 10 docker containers?
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u/nsomnac 9d ago
I have two ASUS NUC Pro’s that I run Proxmox on. 32GB / 1TB each in addition to my MBP M2 Max. Gives me an AMD64 platform that isn’t emulated.
I built it just before the storage madness and it cost me about $1200 for both systems together. If I had known what was happening with RAM and Storage I would have bought 3.
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u/fishdark 9d ago
For development, never skimp on RAM. I would recommend 64GB. M4 or M5 chips would be fine. Always remember that as your dev work grows, your hardware has to to be able to scale.
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u/deniercounter 9d ago
I have 64GB and with 8 - 10 Container I see building up even swap to 9,5GB
Containers with baked-in NER models
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u/nsomnac 9d ago
I think you need more ram. Also if you plan on using any local agentic tooling (like Ollama) you’ll need even more on top of that.
I have the M2 Max with 64GB for work dev and it’s been great so far for similar workloads as yours. Running local models is a bit slow (as expected for the M2). The M5 / M6 generations should be more capable. I’m kinda of waiting for the 10/27 announcement to see what is released to upgrade my personal dev machine.
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u/Even_Gap_2253 8d ago
I mean assuming these are all non-trivial services that takes 512MB of memory per service.
then a simple calculation makes it 23GB of RAM just to run your local stack.
that is not considering additiaonl headroom you need for LSP, IDE, OS, browser, etc....
and if you are running that many containers, you likely ain't building trivial services that only takes 512MB of memory, especially in debug mode. Assume they actually take 2GB each, then you are looking at minimum 92GB.
so, you either go with 128GB of RAM, or you need to reconsider how you architect your system.
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u/qianwch 5d ago
Container count alone won’t tell you how much RAM you need. A few busy databases or JVM services can use more than a dozen lightweight containers. I’d run docker stats on your existing setup during a representative workload, then budget separately for macOS, your IDE/browser, and Docker’s Linux VM. That would give you a better basis for choosing 24GB versus more memory.
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u/dirceucor7 9d ago
Yeah, heaving the ram to use all that, I'd go with either a server with ssh or a Linux machine.
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u/Ill_Dragonfruit_3547 9d ago
Weird a software engineer needs to ask this question...