Ask HN: What's your primary development laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your primary development laptop?

7 pointseuoi31 comments

Want to gauge the current situation. Especially with new ultrabooks like the Thinkpad Carbon X1 out these days.

3/4 of recent jobs gave me a macbook. Between jobs and away from my desktop, I use a refurbished HP junker. Laptops are disposable and too severely compromised to make good investments. Anything that can run emacs, git, offline docs, and shelling out to a real computer will do.

Early 2013 rMBP 15"

It's still quite the workhorse and I'm happy with it. Besides needing a new battery after ~3 years, I'm not sold on the tradeoffs of upgrading to the touch bar model. If I could just buy this same machine again today, I would do that. My only complaint really is it'd be nice to have a matte screen but I don't think Apple even makes matte displays anymore.

How does a matte screen help? less glare?

exactly

I'm not a gamer but I bought an Acer gaming laptop. It's ugly, but powerful, and it was on sale. I've gotten used to the lights and angular features. Only annoying thing I can't remove is the logo which is some aggressive looking face thing.

I'm happy with it but I get it that someone people just can't stand the aesthetics of gaming laptops. But they do have great perf metrics.

I have an asus gaming laptop. Basically the same story, even down to a logo that might be a face.

I've had it for several years now, 18" screen, and it is still plenty powerful.

The battery life is shit, that's the only drawback.

My primary development laptop for hobby projects is a 2016 ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Fedora. It is used mostly for web dev and Python dev.

This would not be suitable for all aspects of my normal day job, but I refuse to set up at-home VPN access again anyway so it's a nonissue.

Thinkpad W520. Works fine; it's heavy, but I don't need to carry it very much since it lives on my desk most of the time.

Was a 2016 15” MBP w/Touch Bar (max specs), and macOS. It's on the shelf now.

Now it's the new Dell XPS 15” (9560) (max specs), and Windows 10 - Fast Ring.

Why did you switch? (And put a 4-5k machine on the shelf)

The touch bar so horrible?

The Touch Bar is gimmicky, for sure. The only useful feature (in my opinion) is Touch ID. Otherwise it's an unnecessary battery drain.

Why did I switch? It boils down to this: after 13 years of being a hard core Mac user, it feels like Apple doesn't care about the Mac any more. It feels like all they care about is the iPhone.

This Dell? It's a better "MacBook" than Apple's MacBook Pro. Beefier CPU. Beefier GPU. Twice the RAM (32GB).

I want raw power, to do my work with. Apple cares more about thin and light, at the cost of everything else.

HP Zbook 15 first generation. i7 4xxxMQ, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD (upgrade of the original, 750 GB HD), Nvidia Quadro K1000M, Ubuntu 16.04, 1920x1080.

I have a G1 too. Biggest problem is the weight of the thing!

The laptop not much, but the power brick is really a brick.

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition running NixOS.

2016 MacBook Pro 15" w/ Touch Bar

Early 2015 13" rMBP.

Have no complaints—works perfectly.

same here. Bought it after the 2016 MBP came out, specifically because it was still a better design. Am very happy with it.

Macbook Retina 12 inch early 2016

Hi, if you don't mind sharing, what sort of development work do you do? Do you do much local development or is the heavy stuff offloaded to other computers? I like the form factor but I worry about lack of performance.

I just started my first project with my client. The project is still getting started, it's Django with Docker. It's doing fine at the moment. It's the perfect form factor for me, and it's a Mac so I don't have to port all my stuff to my Linux yet. It's great for taking out in front of clients. I'm enjoying the lack of weight on my shoulders when I'm carrying it around in my backpack. It's got 512 gb, which is a lot more comfortable than 256 gb. I haven't encountered any issue with the 8 gb RAM yet. The battery is shorter when doing development compared to an older 15 inch Macbook pro I used to use, but it's fine, I get half a day out of it. I love the thin keyboard. There's a "Turbo Speed: 2.9 GHz" that can come on if it's not too hot - I was using my Macbook in 40 degree celsius weather and that day it shutdown a couple of times from overheating - I was playing with OpenGL.

When the project I'm working become more complete and there's more processing then I'll see what happens then. ;)

TLDR: Most of the performance bottleneck from Node.JS and Django is from I/O anyway and the SSD is pretty fast. I love it because it's the perfect form and it's a Mac. People are still using 2012/2013 Macbook Pro's, Macbook Air's for development, and this computer can more than compete.

Cool, thanks for the detailed response. I was toying with getting a 13" MBP, but have always like the 12" tiny form factor. I do have a big slow and heavy 13" Dell from the day job right now, so we'll find out how this new project goes. Shutting down from overheating doesn't sound too great through, I guess that's what you pay for doing OpenGL stuff in the heat.

I play with computer vision and image processing stuff on the side, as well as some iOS and watchOS development, so I'm worried that the 12" might be a little underpowered for these applications. The turbo boost frequencies are quite significant though. So many trade offs!

Yes I think with computer vision and image processing a computer with a dedicated graphics card would be a better choice! For certain kinds of iOS development I think it's worth a try.

MB air 13"

Full Stack Dev Laravel/Rails

Macbook Air 11" from 2012

Lenovo T520. Its justice.

A 2015 Retina Macbook Pro 13

Lenovo Carbon 3rd gen

Mid 2015 rMBP 15"

It's great.

Asus zenbook :)

Mid 2014 MBP

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