full stack dev here using intellij. I personally went for the 16". My previous macbook pro was a 15". I went with the 16 cause I think the different in price was $200. I get a bigger screen, a larger battery so i get longer battery life, a 140w charger and you have a special setting on the 16 to push the cpu in return for higher fan noise. When you need to boot it up in parallels/virtualbox/vmware just plug in the hdd. :-) Check out a program called Coda. It is an awesome coding program for mac that I used all through school and now in the workplace. Liradon • 10 yr. ago. $75 for an IDE is alot of money. Especially for a student :p. The M3 Pro will be the workhorse chipset for the professionals-focused14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops; expect a “low” option of 12 CPU cores with 18 GPU cores and a “high” option The new MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch laptops are all we could have hoped for. Packing the powerful M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, Apple’s latest notebooks feature new Liquid Retina XDR Best portable MacBook for video editing. (Image credit: Future) 2. Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (M2, 2023) The one for editing on the go. Specifications. System-on-a-chip: Apple M2 chip, Apple M2 Pro Just so you know, you can buy discounted macbooks with your student email at apple education store. At present they are also giving $150 apple gift card with macbook purchase. To answer your question, it will work for coding. If you are planning to keep the laptop more than 3 years, get a 16GB RAM. 4. Checkout AlgoExpert🧑🏻‍💻 [10% off]: The Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2019) is a premium-feeling laptop that runs macOS, while the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 (2020) is a 360-degree 2-in-1 with a touchscreen. The MacBook is particularly better for workstation and business use, with a better-performing CPU and GPU and a significantly better and brighter display. MacBook Air weakness is mostly gaming, webcam, bad at workflows that consume a lot of RAM (it is fast, but not big) - which is mostly large data processing, which is mostly done on servers anyway. And yeah, buy a USB-C hub and external monitor or two. Two monitors can be connected, but it is a little tricky. 3. Can’t go wrong with any M1. Even the Air is good enough. The 14” M1 Pro will be plenty. If you want a laptop and don’t mind small monitor, get the M1 macBook Air with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD comes in $1899 list price — this is reasonably quick and capable, and stays well under your budget. wgtR.