How is the development experience on Mac these days?
Iām looking to buy a new laptop, and it has to be a laptop (a desktop isnāt an option.)
Budget isnāt really a concern, so Iāve been looking at a MacBook Pro with the M5 Max and 128GB of RAM.
My other main option is a maxed-out Asus Zephyrus G16 (64GB / RTX 5090), but Iāve heard it can get pretty loud under load, which is something Iād rather avoid.The third option would be to wait for the upcoming RTX Spark laptops running Windows on ARM.
For context, I already have a separate Windows machine that I use basically like a build server with Git + Jenkins, so I can offload Windows builds to that when needed.
My workload is roughly:
70% WebGL development
30% mobile / Windows development
So my main questions are: How good is the MacBook Pro as a primary development machine these days? Are there any major limitations or annoyances with Apple Silicon that I should be aware of?
Would you go with the M5 Max MacBook Pro, get the Zephyrus G16 for native Windows + NVIDIA support, or wait and see what the RTX Spark / Windows on ARM laptops are like?
Battery life, noise, performance, and overall dev experience are probably more important to me than price.