[gerardnll]

Well I'm on a 2016 macbook air, 8gb RAM and doing web programming everyday. 3 phpstorm windows, sometimes Photoshop open, more than 20 tabs in Chrome, iterm, figma, paw... Honestly it runs pretty well and I was waiting for this update.

[xenonite]

Lucky you, because yours still has a U processor, not a Y one.

[gerardnll]

I'll wait for some benchmarks then. Maybe there's not much improvement. I see Apple is comparing last model that had 2 cores with this new 4 cores and saying there's a 2x improvement.

[Kamshak]

Assuming PHP you just described "a text editor and remote servers"

[mekster]

Apparently PHPStorm and Photoshop aren't "text editors" one would imagine.

[jbeales]

PhpStorm = Big, Java-based IDE. It's not some simple text editor.

PHP Dev often means some sort of local server running too.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

big complex IDEs are almost never compute bound.

compilers are often compute bound (certainly on SSDs).

web servers are almost never compute bound.

[innocenat]

You severely underestimate JetBrains IDE.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

any IDE that is compute bound should be thrown out, especially for a language that is never compiled.

[copperx]

One has to wonder about the carbon footprint of millions of developers running these monstrous IDEs.

[dionidium]

Yeah, but that's a lot of us. Obviously there are some programmers out there doing computation-bound work, but an awful lot of us aren't. If you're doing web stuff or making apps, then basically any computer manufactured in the last 5-8 years is going to be fine. I do iOS side work on a 2012 quad-core Mac Mini. It's totally fine.

It's OK to geek out about hardware, if that's your thing. But it's not really necessary for most people -- even programmers.

[burlesona]

I think you’ll be happy with the update, especially if you were happy with the previous machine. Remember you can try it out for 14 days risk free, so if you have any doubts you have time to test it thoroughly before committing. https://www.apple.com/shop/help/returns_refund

[vicpara]

How are you going to return it if all Apple stores are closed due to COVID-19 ?