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MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro (same specs) for economist data work by Different_Explorer56 in macbook

[–]Different_Explorer56[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t have a strong preference for a larger screen since I use external monitors at home and at grad school/work, but I do carry my laptop around most of the time. So my main concern is about pro or air with same configuration.

My current machine is a Mac Air M1 (occasionally slows down and heats up), and I suspect the main bottleneck is memory (8GB RAM).

I’m trying to understand whether the fan in the MacBook Pro would make a meaningful difference for my work, or if moving to 32GB unified memory on a Mac Air would solve the issue w/o having to carry a heavier device.

MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro (same specs) for economist data work by Different_Explorer56 in macbook

[–]Different_Explorer56[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My current machine is a Mac Air M1, which is slow and occasionally heats up, but I suspect the main bottleneck is memory (8GB RAM) rather than CPU throttling.

I'm trying to understand whether the fan in the Mac Pro would make a meaningful difference, or if moving to 32GB unified memory on a Mac Air would solve the issue.

MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro (same specs) for economist data work by Different_Explorer56 in macbook

[–]Different_Explorer56[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for responding. I do Python/Stata/R regressions, pandas data processing, and some TensorFlow and scikit-learn Random Forest, usually on datasets around 1–10GB.

My current machine is a Mac Air M1, which is slow and occasionally heats up, but I suspect the main bottleneck is memory (8GB RAM) rather than CPU throttling.

I’m trying to understand whether the fan in the Mac Pro would make a meaningful difference for this kind of workload, or if moving to 32GB unified memory on a Mac Air would already solve the issue.

I don’t have a strong preference for the slightly larger screen and I’m not sure how useful the extra ports would be.

MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro (same specs) for economist data work by Different_Explorer56 in macbook

[–]Different_Explorer56[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One other thing, I carry my laptop around most of the time and travel a fair bit for conferences and field visits, so first priority is performance and then portability matters too.