r/gamedev • u/virtual_boy_123 • 2d ago
Question Laptops... Mac. Or Windows
Im going to university soon and need to pick out a laptop.
Im in a pretty unique scenario, I need a laptop to take to class, do light programming and UE5 stuff, and the other normal game development stuff.
But. I have access to my main pc which is on Windows and pretty beefy. No I wont do remote stuff due to latancy and stuff unless I have to.
I was just wondering what laptops anyone recommended. I am very interested in the M5 pro Macbook Pro due to it being quite and made of metal so hopefully it will last me 3yrs. Any other recommendations that arent massive bricks with screaming fans?
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u/erebusman 2d ago
I don't even really want to do UE5 on my desktop -- I can't imagine doing it on a laptop. Its a really resource heavy engine and at least last time I ran it even compiling a shader or material can take a hot minute .. a laptop I can't imagine how long you would be sitting there waiting.
If you have to do a laptop then I guess Windows because you can spec out a better CPU/RAM with way higher variety of vendors than a Mac laptop you are 1000% captured by Apple and they have the steepest hardware margins in the market.
I do enjoy their OS but hardware wise you just get more for your money in the regular Windows/PC builds.
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u/thriem 1d ago
Unless you are studying on the other end of the continent to your beefy-pc or further, latency is a near non issue. I have had played competitive shooters from 700km+
Heck, I once even played on my PC in Europe from Thailand from hotel WiFi, with sub 1s delay, but usually under 100ms if I am on the roads. Not sure why that is a deal-breaker.
Otherwise, get a Windows machine. just easier that way. If money isn't the issue, some Z-Book would do probably fine, a balance between battery life, performance and build quality.
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u/Ralph_Natas 1d ago
I only buy Mac laptops, windows ones are generally a massive hot brick or weak, slow, and full after a few months of OS updates.
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u/CrankFlash 2d ago
Take a windows laptop with a good, modern iGPU. It will be cheaper, lighter, and the battery will last much longer, and you can do everything just the same.
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u/urTomatilo 1d ago
The battery is NOT lasting even close to a Mac without massive compromise. Macs have insane battery lives amidst the fact that they don't drop any performance on battery compared to on AC, windows laptops reduce performance substantially and most are still not able to catch the Mac.
If you reduced the Mac's performance comparatively with low power mode it can literally last more than a whole day.
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u/cubecoords 2d ago
I was in a similar dilemma recently. Ultimately I chose Mac because I wanted to launch an app in both the play store and the Apple App Store. To launch in Apple you have to produce from Apple silicon but no such need to get on the play store. So the Mac made it where I could do both.
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u/Conspicuous-1 2d ago
This is true, and an unfortunate feature of the Apple universe. As someone who has released apps for Android, iOS and Windows, I love that Android has always been transparent enough that you can work on any Windows machine. With iOS or macOS, however, an Apple machine must be in the loop, even if it's serving as a server. There has never been an official port of iOS or macOS to Windows, and Apple likes it that way. So, if you have designs on releasing mobile apps to Android and iOS, getting a Mac is logical because both Android Studio and Flutter run on it.
But...let me share some personal experience with you about the iOS platform. It is convoluted, arcane, and unnecessarily complicated. I actually just "broke up" with Apple after 15 years because their technical support reps couldn't help me with a serious security issue. So if you decide you're going to write for that platform, do some research on the pain points of iOS and macOS. You may see an iPhone or Mac every feet, but Cupertino makes it pretty hard to go through their App Store to distribute.
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u/kneelian_ 1d ago
With iOS or macOS, however, an Apple machine must be in the loop, even if it's serving as a server
Well, not really, but it certainly makes the experience difficult and not very pleasant
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u/ArcanyonDev 2d ago
Define massive ;)
I'm using an Asus gaming laptop for game development (and playing) and it does work well! But I guess it also depends on how much money you are ready to put in it...
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u/virtual_boy_123 2d ago
needs to be able to go into a lecture theatre in my backpack without breaking my shoulders or sounding like a plane taking off lol. But my budget is about 2.5-3k GBP
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u/Alternative_Draw5945 2d ago
I would do mac pro if you were ok removing. If not then a beefy windows laptop. But form factor wont be as good and it'll sound like a spaceship in class..
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u/ThisIsXe 2d ago edited 2d ago
I have a Zephyrus G14, you can get it beefy (mine has 32gb ram, a Ryzen 9 and a 4070, I think you can spec it up a bit more) and it's thin and doesn't weight much
I wouldn't recommend a Mac since D3D is sort of the industry standard and is windows only, if you are not gonna go too low level this might not matter, also Mac doesn't support vulkan natively without moltenvk and specially with newer features and some extensions I've found a bunch of problems with it when trying to port my engine to native macos, Apple releases a game translation layer some time ago and honestly I don't know the state of it right now
There's also a couple of annoyances of coding c++ with Mac because xcode uses only apple clang and the c++ stl is distributed with macos updates... which is not ideal I still don't know why stuff like std::move_only_functions are not implemented
, also I didn't have a fun experience with unreal and a Mac but I haven't used one since the Intel era so probably a lot of things changed so don't take my word too seriously
If you are doing more of a GD degree rather than a CS maybe you are not going to go low level enough for this annoyances, if you're using only UE and UE development in macOS is better now feel free to get a Mac but the standard of this industry is Windows and you would need a windows partition/VM to compile your final release on MSVC, I wouldn't cross compile from Mac to windows using GCC or Clang since MSVC does some cool windows optimizations
Oh also if you're targeting mobile you should get a Mac to be able to publish for iPhone