When You Are Buying A Computer … Look Out For The Number of Cores

After over three years, I finally gave up on my trusted 13 inch Macbook Pro. In the past I’ve used non-Mac products, and, by the end of the year, they were often missing keys, and where the whole computer felt like it had dropped off a table a few times. But with a trusted Macbook, it often feels as fresh as it was when you bought it. My Macbooks have never let me down, and there is nothing I missing in the things I need … which is basically to do my work.

Me and “it” have been through a good deal over the past few years, including Xmas lectures for schools, some serious R-PI integration [here], and keynote talks in different parts of the world, while being pounded with an ever increasing amount of code.

And so I decided to upgrade, as my coding has reached such a scale that I often need to be running lots of different operating systems and tools. My old Mac has a grand old total of … two cores … and 16GB (and running on an i7 processor).

At one time you might say … to paraphrase Bill Gates … “that’s enough for everything that you might ever need”. But as I increasingly pushed my two core system to the limit, with 8GBs shared across Mac OSX and Windows, and then running Visual Studio on Windows, I could virtually see my battery drain by the minute. As it drained, the computer heated…