Macbook Pro / Bootcamp Adventure

A development machine is always a tricky thing. On one hand you want it to be powerful enough to allow you to do what you want to do (and mostly to be fast and not wait). On another hand you want it to be light and thin. I was debating between Dell XPS 15 15-8949sLV Touchscreen and Macbook Pro 15. Dell was very appealing, have to admit. At $500 (now almost $700) and touch enabled display it was a better candidate. Until I've read about overheating issues. That was a show stopper. 

So with a new MBP I have started looking into 2 options:

  1. Running Windows in a VM on OSX using Parallels or VMWare Fusion
  2. Running Windows in Bootcamp ("on the metal")

With VM option I chose to try VMWare Fustion. It was simple, quick, and painless. But performance is not as good as I expected. Perhaps because I did not allocate enough resources to my VM. At the same time, what the point of waisting those resources on OSX if I need Windows.

So I started exploring Bootcamp option. It seemed not so complicated. There's plenty of documentation and Apple makes it look super-duper simple. Until I ran into a problem.

And that's when headache started :)

I have tried contacting Apple support, explaining that I'm trying to bootcamp Windows 8.1 Update 1. Was kidly suggested to re-install OSX and get the latest version of bootcamp. Not exactly what I was looking for. Issue was with the version of Windows 8.1 Image - bootcamp didn't support Update 1. Going with plain Windows 8.1 image (w/o Update) worked just fine. Next pain point was the trackpad. Boy it felt... akward. So after research for a while, I found a wonderful trackpad++ that made trackpad usable again.

This is not over. At least not yet. I have to figure out how to backup efficiently my machine (ideally something that would take care of both Bootcamp and OSX). For now I'm a happy bootcamper :)

7 Comments

  • Reply

    I've been doing dev work on Mac laptops for years using VM's on Parallels. Never had an issue, can't tell the difference between that and "native." With SSD's in particular, there's almost no difference.

  • Reply

    @Jeff,
    My thought was that running to OSes in parallel does introduce an overhead, regardless of how good they both are. Also, there's got to be a difference on memory footprint and battery life.

  • Reply

    I love my 2011 MBP. with i5/8gb/256ssd it ran windows smoother than the much newer i5/8gb/256ssd ASUS I got from work.
    I started doing windows work on it back at the time using Parallels (6), with Win7 it worked smoothly. Fast, responsive, with xcode open on the osx side and VS+r# on parallels, no problem at all. But it did not handle Win8 well at all, and fusion at the time was almost as bad. VirtualBox did better job than both at the time, but not enough, so I went Bootcamp (with trackpad++ of course ...). Hands down the MBP is the best windows dev box I have ever used.
    It was great while I was doing mostly windows work. When I was on back-to-back rails/python/java/aws gigs, I stayed on osx with the occasional VS-in-VM.

    Both options are solid.


    After it spent about two years in the drawer I recently revived it, gave it a brand new battery for its 3.5 years b-day. But for now I opted to keep this machine windows free. I have enough windowses on my day job :). So when I do need to occasionally do some dotnet outside of work, I try to make do with Xamarin Studio and Mono. For the most part it goes well (though I do miss resharper). Not sure I'd have done so for a serious dotnet gig. Would have given it a chance, but might fall back to windows+vs+r#



  • Reply

    Sure there's overhead, but there isn't any perceived overhead. There isn't any impediment to getting work done fast. I've had 8 gig machines, and I give the VM 4 gigs. Works like a champ. I can compile 27k lines of code and/or run 800+ tests for my open source app in a few seconds. Battery lasts about 6 to 7 hours using Windows 8.

  • Reply

    Good feedback @Jeff, thank you.
    Did you use Parallels or Fusion?

  • Reply

    I use Parallels. Here's a video I did on a 16 gig machine two years ago on v8:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uIF9Z7JlYo

  • Reply

    Thanks @Jeff.
    I'm happy with it so far. If only could swap Fn key with Control key... :)

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