I have never been a huge fan of MacBooks as I feel like they cost way too much compared to the hardware. One thing though is that I need one to use Xcode and maybe some other things. I have tried all kind of options like macincloud, virtual box, and hackintosh but nothing feels right. I just need to buy a MacBook.

I because ThinkPad user after getting one from university for my studies. I need to return that at some point so I would planed to buy a new at that point. But then I faced this MacBook problem so I'm not sure if I should buy cheapest MacBook for Xcode and ThinkPad for more powerful development or just one more expensive MacBook for everything. Here I compare which option is better.

Price is the same for both options. The baseline is that I need the cheapest MacBook. Mac mini is actually the cheapest option but I'm going to cancel it as I'm looking for something portable. From Apple's website the cheapest MacBook Air is 1,155.68€ for students (some discount). But this is the latest model. From local electronic stores I can see that two years old model is 989€. The price difference is such a small that I will go with the latest model.

Then additional to this I need decent ThinkPad for real work. I have ThinkPad T490 and it's just perfect so I choose that model but it's possible to customize it on Lenovo's official website. With 8th gen i7, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB ssd the final price is 1,757.36€. The thing is that Lenovo is always giving huge discounts and there was some midseason (what is that?) coupon in use making the price 1,493.76€. Then they actually have even better discount for students that's 20% off. That way the final price is 1,406€. With a little bit worse screen or different model I'm probably available to drop the price 200€.

This way this combo would cost around 2,500€. With that money it's possible to get MacBook Pro with 10th gen i5 and even 1T sdd. So the conclusion is that it doesn't makes sense to buy both laptops but just put more money to MacBook Pro and go with the design. It maybe looks great but I'm just afraid that I will break it as it doesn't seem to be as resistant as ThinkPads.