Comment by jc4p | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jc4p | Hacker News Reader

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I notice that you quoted this part:

> I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it.

but didn't mention it in your retort to the rest of that paragraph.

You can't upgrade the new macbooks. I am typing this from a 2015 Macbook Pro Retina, I bought it with the biggest hard drive they offered at the time, and am currently doing development off a thunderbolt hard drive. Do you know how much that sucks?

I would do anything to be able to just open up my computer and pop in more RAM or a bigger SSD, like I used to do with my matte 15" macbook. That macbook lasted me so long, and so many RAM upgrades / network card installations (for Bluetooth 4.0) / etc etc.

I've been using this computer for almost three years, I have have to go through a lot of trouble to do my work on it (I work at a .NET shop), and I'm strongly considering just getting a Windows 10 laptop instead of dealing with this mess. It sucks to have to carry around a hard drive for my SQL back-ups because I can't upgrade the hard drive in my computer.

> I have have to go through a lot of trouble to do my work on it (I work at a .NET shop), and I'm strongly considering just getting a Windows 10 laptop instead of dealing with this mess.

If you work at a .NET shop, why would you NOT use Windows 10? Seems like you're swimming against the current.

I work on the mobile ecosystem for Stack Overflow. I run the team that makes our Android and iOS apps, so I need Xcode at the very least. I also feel more comfortable on a UNIX environment because I know the tools more.

Most of the developers at the company either get a Macbook Pro and use Parallels for Windows (Boot Camp leads to headaches because you can't resize the partitions later on without deleting everything and reformatting, or paying for Paragon NTFS for Mac, which might still crash and lose all your data!), or build their own Windows desktop.

I'd rather continue using a laptop, since sometimes I work from an office sometimes I work from home and sometimes (like right now) I work from random locations while visiting family.

At home I mostly use a Linux desktop, I've been looking at System76 laptops but nothing grabs my eye.

None of the Win10 laptops have grabbed my eye either, it seems that Windows laptops that are performant are either massive gaming "laptops" or severely lacking in some other way (although maybe now that the new Dell XPS has the newest discrete GPUs, maybe).

You can upgrade the storage in the 2015 Macbook Pros, but the RAM is soldered on.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Disp...

The newer Macbook Pros you can't upograde the storage, and yeah, that really sucks. I get that most people don't upgrade anyway, but I spend a lot of time showing people how much faster systems can be with a few hundred bucks of upgrades when those same upgrades would have cost them a thousand or more at purchase time.

Now if I want something future-proof I efectively have to max it out even if I don't need those specs now, so I have to pay $3500 instead of $2500 because in five years I'll need that extra oomph and it's technically still cost-effective over the long term even if it's ridiculous now (and in a year or so these laptops will come down in price anyway).

Your code doesn't fit in 1TB? What kind of development is that?

Not the code, the databases. And actually the specific databases I need to run (we have minimal PII scrubbed versions we use for local testing) could live on my internal HD but I don't have enough storage for all my files + the backup files of the DBs for restoring + the restored database files.

I wonder if any of the AWS stuff would help with this. An EC2 instance or something. Sure there would be latency but if the data processing is mostly kept local to the AMI, it might work. But then I don't know your workflow.

Yeah we've been talking about setting up once-a-week-restored dev instances that people who aren't making database migrations / schema changes can point their codebase at so they don't have to have _all_ the databases. It's a struggle though, especially since most of the other devs have desktops with RAIDs of TBs of space haha.

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