 Should you buy the 15-inch MacBook Pro with a touch bar or the 27-inch 5k iMac as a software developer? In this video, we are going to break down the pros and cons of each one and try to figure out what might be the best bang for your buck. Let's start with the MacBook Pro. So obviously the number one benefit is portability. You have your workstation on the go. You can work from home. You can work on vacation. You can work in the office at the coffee shop anywhere you go. You have a light, small, powerful machine that you can easily move around. Portability is a big reason why people buy laptops. So obviously you want to have something that is light and easy to take around wherever you go. The MacBook Pro is very configurable. You can set up multiple monitors. You can connect a keyboard and a mouse, both wired and Bluetooth. You can use a docking station to keep your MacBook Pro charging at all times while you're using it in like a clamshell or closed mode. And it's still connected to your monitors. And then you can quickly take everything apart and take it with you wherever you go. So you have a full workstation with all the power that you need. And you still have that portability with that light and sleek design that you can take it out of the office when you're done. The battery life is pretty decent. You can get probably most of what you need to do done in just a single charge. And that's great if you're on the go, if you're on a plane, if you're traveling and you need to get some work done. Check some emails, work on a project. It's nice to know that this laptop has pretty decent battery life and you can get a lot done in just a single charge. Now here's the point a lot of people don't think about and it's the resellability of the MacBook Pro. It's generally higher for a few different reasons. One, it's an Apple laptop and people tend to put a higher value on those. So MacBook Pros tend to sell a little bit higher after owning it for maybe two, three or four years. The other reason to consider is it's small. If you keep the original box and the packaging that you have, it's easy to ship online or sell it locally. So right away, if a couple of years pass and you want to sell your laptop to get a new one, it's nice to know that you can get some money back from your original investment and apply that towards an upgraded laptop going forward. Let's talk about the cons of the MacBook Pro. The number one con of the MacBook Pro is the price. It starts off at $23.99 for the 15-inch touch bar MacBook Pro. And that's a couple hundred dollars higher than the previous generation that came before it. So they're already putting on a little bit of a price premium compared to the previous models. And that's expensive starting off. And that doesn't even include tax and Apple care and other accessories that you might need to buy or external monitors. But if you really want to get a fully usable workstation that really is kind of a desktop class, you want to probably spend the $27.99 to get the upgrades to things like the hard drive, maybe slightly faster CPU and more RAM. Now, like I mentioned, Apple care is a must. If you're going to be spending this much money on this laptop, you need to buy Apple care. And for the MacBook Pros, it's $379 for three years. But if you have an accident or something malfunctions, maybe there's something wrong with your screen or there's a cut in your charger cable, Apple care usually covers most of those things and over time it ends up paying for itself. So if you're going to be buying this laptop, you have to get Apple care. So let's take your $23.99 or $27.99, slap on another $379 and we still haven't added tax just yet. Let's talk about the keyboard. There's been a lot of complaints that Apple really missed the mark on the keyboard redesign. They really slimmed down the keyboard with the introduction of the MacBook a couple of years ago and the same butterfly key structure has made its way into the MacBook Pros. So there's reduced travel time. There is more of a loud clickety-clackety sound, I think that comes from the new MacBook Pros with the new keyboards, but the number one complaint is keys getting stuck. And I've had this happen to myself a couple of times. Dust or things get under the keys. And I've had to hit a key and really hit a key to get it to respond until I would shake my laptop around or apply dusters in there to get whatever's out from under the keyboard. So you have to keep that in mind. They've made efforts to improve this with the newer models. They've improved the keyboards by adding sound dampening. So there's less of that clickety-clackety sound, but overall I'm much of more a fan of the previous MacBook Pro keyboards by far. Now let's talk about dongle city. You need dongles if you want to connect to your monitor. You're going to probably need a dongle for maybe an HDMI port. If you don't have a Bluetooth master keyboard, you need a dongle if you want to plug in. So say you're giving a demo or a presentation, you bring your laptop, you forget your dongle and they don't have them for you at the conference room or wherever you're going. Well, you're out of luck. And that's an unfortunate thing right now. Apple's vision is a wireless future, but we're not there quite yet. So anywhere you go at this laptop, you have to remember to take your dongle or you're going to be in for a bad time. Let's talk about the touch bar. Have you guys found a real use for it yet? I know I haven't. And I've had this MacBook Pro for maybe over a year now for both professional and personal use and I just can't find any good reason for it. I think the only things I do on it is adjust the volume up and down, the screen brightness and maybe scrub through a video. But other than that, I really haven't found a real use for it. I feel like Apple could have done something else or maybe not have even included it, but that's just my opinion. So enough with the MacBook Pro. Let's talk about the 5K 27 inch iMac. So obviously one of the biggest benefits is that 5K 27 inch screen. It's beautiful and it's really great for developers or designers who need high resolution and color accurate screens. Well, this computer has that for you and you don't even need to buy an external monitor. It's already included in the computer. Third party RAM is still configurable. So if you don't want to pay that Apple tax or that really expensive RAM upgrades, you can buy it third party and you can install it in the back RAM cartridge tray right now in the current models. So if you want to save maybe $100 or $200, it's nice to know that these iMacs are still configurable in that sense and the MacBook Pros are not. So if you want to upgrade your RAM on a MacBook Pro, you're going to have to pay that Apple premium as compared to what you could get with third party RAM for the iMac. Now let's talk about performance on large projects. I have found that the desktop processors of the iMac, let's say with an Intel i5 processor can compile a large project much, much faster than the i7 processors on the MacBook Pro. Now, obviously you're comparing a mobile CPU to a desktop CPU, but if you need to work on a very large project and compiling code is something that's a big time sink for you, then you might want to give that a second thought because you can really beef up the processors on the iMac 5K and you get a little bit more for your money because you are dealing with a desktop CPU and it's a little bit faster even on the slower configuration. So I find that I save a lot of time when working on large projects by just using my iMac as compared to my MacBook Pro. Now let's talk about the IO options. On the back of the iMac, you have the traditional USB ports and the USB-C ports and really you don't need a dongle for anything. So you can plug almost all of your wired stuff into the back of your iMac. You can obviously pair things with Bluetooth, so it's just nice not having to remember you need a dongle everywhere you go. This one's more of a personal preference but I think you can have a nice minimalistic desk setup with the 5K iMac. Now obviously if you're comparing with the MacBook Pro by itself on a desk, nothing really gets more minimal than that. But if you're not adding in external monitors and docking stations and dongles and cables, then you can truly have a trackpad, a keyboard and an iMac and that's it. And it's really nice to have a nice clean work station if you don't put anything else on your desk and you can get that easily with the 5K iMac. Now let's talk about the cons of the iMac. The biggest con is zero portability. That thing is stuck on a desk. But hey, you didn't need a laptop, right? You bought an iMac so that shouldn't be a problem for you but obviously it goes without saying that is a not a portable machine. The current iMac has some pretty big chins. It has some gaps down here and up here and that's something Apple's probably gonna streamline going forward in the next refresh hopefully or maybe even the redesign. But there are some decent sized chins on the iMac and you could tell that they could get more screen real estate if they reduced those chins and bezels. So it's highly possible we may see a refresh or even maybe a redesign in 2019 for the iMacs. And that's another thing you have to watch out for. So if you're gonna invest all this money right now, it's possible that there's gonna be a new one coming out and you're gonna miss out on that and even miss out on maybe a lower cost current year iMac because you bought it right before they were gonna make any big announcements for the iMacs. And the final con is lower resellability. It's harder to sell an iMac. You wanna keep the original box. Obviously, if you try to resell it it costs a lot of money to ship that. So if you're gonna sell that online, you're gonna spend probably anywhere from maybe 75 to $100 or $50 and just shipping costs alone unless the buyer pays for shipping and it's harder to move. There's a higher risk it might break during shipping because of how big of a package it is and it has to be packed very, very carefully. So it's another thing you have to consider is it's just not as easy to sell as the MacBook Pros. So what do you do? Do you get the MacBook Pro with the touch bar or do you get the 27-inch iMac? And it really comes down to portability and cost. If portability is the main thing for you, then it's a no-brainer. The MacBook Pro is probably what you're gonna wanna do. If portability is not so much of a deal for you and cost more is or you wanna get more value for your money, then you might wanna consider the iMac and go with maybe a different laptop, maybe a 13-inch MacBook Pro, an older MacBook Pro, maybe a 2015 model or a 14 model basically before they did the touch bar overhaul. And you'll still have a relatively powerful MacBook Pro with a current generation iMac and you kinda have the best of both worlds. So let me know in the comment section down below what would you buy? Would you get the MacBook Pro? Would you get the iMac? Or would you get the new Mac Mini, which they just overhauled and you can configure that thing to $5,000 if you want to? Or would you get something else? Thanks so much for stopping by and I will catch you in the next one.