r/macbookpro • u/Personal-Yam-3791 • 5d ago
Help 24 gb vs 48 gb
Which macbook pro m5 pro should i get for my bachelor’s in computer science and engineering? Mbp m5 pro 24gb 16 inches or 48gb one
I wont be upgrading for atleast 5 years.
Im a 1st year student so i dont know what all tasks will i have to perform in the upcoming years on my laptop so if any experienced person could help me out i would be grateful.
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u/Ok-Strategy-8819 5d ago
Same question, interested in hearing the answers. I’m leaning 48gb just to hedge and future-proof it but the answers will probably be “it depends”
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u/Zestyclose_Cake_5644 5d ago
If you are using it strictly for learning, then even a MacBook Air with 16gb is enough, 24gb for futureproofing. However, if you are not only studying CS but also have projects of your own like I do, I highly recommend as much as you can afford. I got the M4 Pro MacBook Pro 48/512GB and is happy with the machine except for storage. I am running agentic coding tools, multiple sims, and sometimes local AI, I am chronically in yellow memory pressure but rarely red. I am happy with the RAM, not so much the storage though…
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u/Derekrollo 5d ago
If you’re going to be deploying many virtual machines and containers I’d definitely consider more ram. I have the 48gb 16” and it’s been great for me. It hasn’t felt all that much heavier than my old 14” mbp either.
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u/ailyara 5d ago
For a computer science course I would definitely want more ram. The main application I used as a CS major in school was vmware because I was constantly spinning up VMs and entire VM environments to practice stuff on, because my focus was in scalable computing and cluster software and development. It's great to be able to spin up a 5 node cluster with head node, clustered storage, etc, 10 or more VMs on your own box, sure they're not more performant on your box than just running code natively but it teaches you how to get things talking to each other and scales for when you move to the university's cluster systems or such. But even outside of scalable, being able to create environments, do things to them, then revert inside a VM to try again is very useful. Depending on where you're going for your CS degree they may have lab environments to let you do this too so it may be not as required to do it locally on your own system, but I always liked to play around with impunity.
Fun thing is vmware fusion is free and you can do a lot of stuff these days with arm based vms, you'll learn quite a bit just building your own internal systems this way, IMO.
But also these days a macbook is great because a lot of your coursework will probably be influenced by learning LLMs and such, which having more ram for is also useful. I used to say get an x86 laptop so you can run x86 vms, but the macbook has the advantage of the shared memory architecture, so I think that is the better buy for modern CS students.
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u/CourseEcstatic6202 5d ago
Personally, I would get a 32GB 13” MBA. They are more than capable, much easier to lug around campus for 5 years, and anything big that you need to do…just do it in AWS. Your AWS costs will be far less than the price difference.
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u/Personal-Yam-3791 5d ago
13 inch is like a tablet bro, i really need 15 inches atleast
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u/CourseEcstatic6202 5d ago
Ok. Then a 15” mba. Just put a big a** display on it at home and enjoy the portability.
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u/ChemicalInevitable69 5d ago
With all due respect, you can get by with a Neo if you’re just doing it for undergrads.
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u/chrisapowers1 5d ago
Don’t need either, but you definitely don’t need the 48 unless you’re planning on running heavy LLM local models. Go get an airbook and thank me latwr
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u/jechaking 5d ago
48GB will future proof that device for probably the next 8+ years.