Developers: Have Money For A New Mac Pro? Buy These Instead.

The recently unveiled Mac Pro is no doubt a gorgeous machine, engineered for a very particular group of people. While it will likely be a great machine for those who live and breathe within Finalcut and work with ProRes files, it’s overkill for a good developer machine.

So instead of spending $5,999 before tax on the base level Mac Pro, here’s a list of [brand new!] things to buy instead:

  • A Galaxy S10 for testing Samsung Internet / high-end Android experiences – $899
  • A Pixel 3A for testing the relatively low-end Android experience (or to just play with ‘vanilla’ Android) – $399
  • An iPhone Xr for natively testing iOS applications – $749
  • A Mac Mini for building/testing iOS applications – $799.00
  • A mobile development ultrabook: XPS 13/Lenovo X1 Carbon – Starting at $899.99
  • A great 27”4K Monitor (I use this one) – $399.99
  • Windows PC with Ryzen3000 series CPU (or Threadripper!)  with Turing supported GPU for playing with machine learning:  the remaining ~$1,800 budget

Now that monitor on the other hand…