**MacBook Pro for React Native frontend dev — M5 base 32GB or M5 Pro 24GB?**
Hey everyone, I'm a React Native developer. My daily stack is:
- Cursor/VS Code as main editor
- Android emulator (I only do frontend, no backend locally)
- Metro bundler
- Browser with DevTools
- Claude Code / AI tools (API-based, not local LLMs)
Now I'm looking to buy a MacBook Pro and I'm torn between three options:
**MacBook Pro 14" M5 base — 32GB / 1TB** (~$2,099)
**MacBook Pro 14" M5 Pro — 24GB / 1TB** (~$2,199)
I know macOS handles memory differently (unified memory, ~2.3x compression on inactive pages, fast SSD swap), so my 18GB Linux usage should translate to less on macOS. But I'm not sure how much less in practice.
For those of you doing React Native on Apple Silicon — what's your RAM usage like? Is 24GB comfortable for daily frontend dev with the emulator running? Would the M5 base with 32GB be a smarter buy than the M5 Pro with 24GB for my use case?
Appreciate any real-world experience. Thanks!