The performance question is subjective. Unless you buy all three models and sit them side-by-side, you won't have any frame of reference to really say that one is faster than the other. Easier way to frame it using Visual Studio: would you notice a difference between a 2.2GHz and 2.8GHz in Windows? Absolutely. How about 2.5 versus a 2.8? That's harder to notice. You're virtualizing though, so as a rule you will always be sacrificing some portion of raw power...therefore get the most you can possibly get! Personally I went the route of asking myself how long I would use this laptop for, which is 2-3 years. Worth it to me to pay the extra couple hundred bucks or whatever it was to upgrade. You're already overpaying by getting an Apple, might as well go all out was my thinking.
Check out the benchmarks for the 256 and 512. I don't think there was a big difference back when I looked. I went with the 1TB drive knowing that I was going to have a metric crapton of VMs. Cool note on performance: the 1TB drive is insanely fast, as in nothing-else-can-touch-it-fast. Not sure if the same is true for the smaller ones. There's probably a newer article than this one out there, but:
http://9to5mac.com/2013/11/04/lates...ing-ssd-performance-thanks-to-4-channel-pcie/
As for developing with VS in Parallels, lots of anecdotal things I can talk about:
1. If you're impatient, VS will feel a little clunky. When you hit '.' after a class, do you expect to
instantly see the members like you do in Windows? There will be a 50-100ms delay there. You may notice, you may not.
2. Coherence is terrible from both a usability and performance standpoint. When it isn't getting busy crashing, it's noticeably slower than normal full-screen mode. I also just found it harder to use than full-screen. You need to mentally switch contexts when you use Windows apps, and coherence fudges with that.
3. I've had zero issues regarding APIs, libraries, etc. I focus primarily on ASP.NET and some light Windows 8 dev, so I can't speak to anything lower level. Yes you can install Office; it's a Windows environment. Doesn't matter if it's running in Parallels, Virtualbox, whatever.
4. Being able to context switch between OSX and Windows is the hardest part of the whole thing. Once you get used to OSX, you think in terms of their shortcuts. Focus on the URL bar in Chrome? Apple-L. Switch over to Windows. Focus on the URL bar? Ctrl-L...d'oh, you instinctively hit Apple-L again which translates to Windows-L and locks the machine. That sort of thing is
really hard to get used to.
5. The shared folder integration is nice. I do my development in Windows, but all of my commits (using Git) I actually do via iTerm2. It's fantastic having a non-terrible terminal.
6. If you have Resharper enabled, look into Resharper optimizations in general. Agonizingly slow if you don't turn certain things off (they're the same as Windows though; symbol completion off, show member signatures off, etc. Lots of tutorials on optimizing Resharper.
Overall, it's workable. It's noticeably slower but you get used to it. I have zero regrets about the purchase, because this is the only route that lets me target every platform I need to work with from a single machine. I should point out I am not doing daily Windows development in it anymore though (as we are trying to get the hell out of ASP.NET) and Parallels 10 did just come out, so there could be performance improvements there.
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