What to buy: MacBook Pro 13 or 15?

I

IndranA

Bit poster
Hello all,

With Christmas coming up around the corner I'm looking at getting myself and early present and upgrading/replacing my current MacBook Pro 15 inch (2.2GHz i7) early 2011 model that will work well with Parallels.

I thought this would perhaps be the best place to ask which model I should get, the latest (mid-2014) 13 inch or the 15 inch? Normally I wouldn't consider the 13 inch model/s, however purely for a mobility and weight perspective it would be easier to carrier around in my backpack to and from the office. In a nutshell my job role has changed slightly where I may need to provide support out of hours and as I travel via train to and from work a 13 inch laptop would of course be much more convenient!

So, I wanted to know if there would be issues with performance running a Window 8.1 on 13-inch MacBook Pro - 3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 - 16GB RAM considering the processor is only dual core and that my current 15 inch i7 is dual core (Note: I also unofficially upgraded the RAM on my 15 inch from 8GB to 16GB of which I assigned 8GB to the Windows 8.1 VM I am currently running). Work-wise typically I will run 2-3 instances of Visual Studio 2012/2013 and occasionally SQL Server Management Studio and spend majority of time working on web applications.

OR.......

Should I go with 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7? Any help would be much appreciated!

Cheers :)
 
So you already have experience with running Parallels on a dual core, do you have any issues with that? You can answer the question yourself.
 
Thanks for the reply ahhh doh I see the mistake I made! My current MacBook Pro Early 2011 - 2.2GHz i7 is quad core processor and not dual core!
 
Defining 'issues' as problematic behaviour, then no, I'm sure there won't be any issues.
But I don't know exactly what would be an issue to you? Being slower than your current setup? Well, for some things it will be faster, as it's a faster processor, even if it's dual core, it's faster per core, for others, maybe slower (heavy multi-threading). If the processor is 2 times or more faster than the old one it will preform at least as well at multitasking (half the cores but twice as fast, one balances for the other).
 
Thank you for the answer, very much appreciated! Yes, exactly what you said:
Specimen said:
Being slower than your current setup?
Click to expand...
.. this is my major concern that sacrificing two cores may effect performance and speed of applications within Windows VM, but as you said this would mostly apply to applications that require heavy multi-threading.
 
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