The 2019 Apple MacBook Pro, although good on paper, didn't live up to its expectations. The grunt of the i7 (and i9) models was good, however after a good 10mins of compilation or virtualisation, it was throttle back time. The fans were on and your battery dropped.
Claiming to be the thinnest, fastest computers at the time, which technically they were, was the equivalent of measuring how fast a BMW M5 Competition would be against a human over the measly 1 meter race. The MacBook simply would throttle back, going from its 2.6Ghz, down to 1Ghz. My 64GB Ram spec’ed machine cost just over £3k at the time, and the thought of living/working with this for the next 4-5 years soon put the dampers on the near future.
Back in the day, a decent Symfony project we would build would consist of using a vagrant with virtual box with some sexy setup scripts created in Chef or Puppet. Containerisation using a tech stack with Docker allows the separation of services, with simpler setting up scripts in whatever language you choose really.
What has this got to do with the 2019 Macbook Pro?
Redfire purchased a second hand HP Proliant Gen9 380. It’s a thing of beauty. Big ugly noisy machine, built like a tank, it's a wedge of metal with lights, sucking up air, exhausting its warm fumes designed to be on, but on on, in the same sense as Mikey Flanigan's, out, out.
Using this to run a Virtual Machine of Ubuntu, which then runs Docker containers is an absolute breeze. The Macbook mounts the drive and cracks on as normal. The 2019 Macbook can now once again, look good and ‘pretend’ to do the grunt work.
What if you’re out and about?
VPN in, never had any problem. Jet Brains products may moan about a network drive, but after the initial index, you’re back in the 3rd lane doing 70mph.
Just to add to this. My 2015 Macbook Pro Retina i7-4980HQ 2.8GHz is still by far the best Macbook Apple has ever made. HDMI, USB’s, Mag charger, proper keyboard, it still gets used everyday but with a small caveat, it runs Fedora.