Ask HN: Which laptop for development?

T420.

But to go off your list here a bit I'd say bump up to the T430. i7 versions can be had on eBay for $250.

If you have an attachment to the keyboard on the T420[1] you can easily buy the keyboard and put it on the T430 (I did this on my x230 from a x220).

Also if you become interested you can neutralize the Intel Management Engine and install something like coreboot and sea bios.

[1] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Classic_Keyboard_on_xx...

EDIT: To take it further you could even upgrade the CPU to a i7-3632QM which is a quad core.

I've got two refurbished T430 laptops. Core i5, 8GB RAM 250 GB SSD. Both work great. Unless you need a GPU that should be fine.

Much better than a cheap new one. Build quality is worth it when you're using it all day long.

But if you're going to spend 1000 on a Mac why not spend 1000 on a new ThinkPad?

There seems to be a lot of hype around the Mac. And I don't think there's a 1000USD IdeaPad that would give me 12 hour battery life.

I second this. The T430 CPU increase is worth it. I recently went with an x230 over an x220. I quite like the x230 (T430) keyboard.

I have an older ThinkPad, and can't get over the Ctrl and Fn keys being in the wrong place. I think you can swap this in the BIOS in the newer ones, but not on mine. Even if you do though, your Ctrl key is now smaller than your Fn key. I hate to say it, but it's a deal-breaker for me. It ruined an otherwise near-perfect laptop keyboard.

I have a T410 and I can swap them in the BIOS, is yours older than that?

It's maybe 7 or 8 years old now. I have it at home and use it as an internet browser on a mobile cart, but that's about it. I did use it for work for the first 4 years, but never could get over that keyboard quirk, so always used a different one laying on top of the laptop's keys.

I just looked and it's an SL510. Still going strong, albeit a bit slow. Gotta give it to the build quality though!

Yes the fn key is annoying. A friend got a modern think pad from his work and he still uses a is keyboard to this day

*USB keyboard

The microsoft bluetooth mobile keyboard 6000 is about the most awesome keyboard I've found for overlaying a laptop's default keyboard (if you can find one). I still use it to this day at home. I got tired of carrying a lot around, which is why the swapped keys on the ThinkPad would annoy me still.

You can always remap it in software too, setxkbmap or xmodmap will do it on a Linux, Windows and OSX will have a way to achieve this too.

Just to elaborate on this, the CPU performance of the T420 should not be a concern. The T420 (and T430) use 35 watt processors, whereas modern ultrabooks use 15 watt processors. A T420 from 2012 can beat today's base model Macbook Air handily in CPU performance despite the technology upgrades in the past 5 years; it will just produce more heat doing it. And that's before the possibility of a quad core upgrade.

You're absolutely right about the performance.

The good thing about going to the T430 is because it has the later Intel Ivy Bridge (as opposed to the Sandy Bridge) processors. The Ivy Bridge / newer chip sets brought USB 3.0 with them. Even the i5 version of the T430 has two USB 3.0 ports.

The T430 IS a good option. Thanks!

> MacBook air.

Still on my first 13" 2012, i5 cpu, 4 gb mem, 128 gb ssd model. The battery is shot, but otherwise it took a beating and is still running like a champ.

Hopefully next year they will still be selling these puppies. Because I can not find something with similar price, spec and build quality. Air is really one of your best priced ultrabooks.

Otherwise I recommend you don't settle for a i3, you are going to regret it. Had to give my brother-in-law advice on buying a notebook for writing docs and surfing, etc. Said a i3 should be fine for his needs... did I regret that at our next "free technical support session" :/ get a i5 atleast!

> It's 'nix but it's really not Linux.

Also, macOS is a Unix[0]. gnu/linux is the 'nix like os around here ;)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#macO...

The cheapish $999/$1099 mid-2012 A1278 4 GiB 500 GB HDD 13” MBP non-Retina can do 16 GiB and two 2.5” SSDs if the vestigal optical drive is removed and replaced with an adapter. Mine even run with TRIM just fine.

> The battery is shot, but otherwise it took a beating and is still running like a champ.

Apple will replace that battery for $120 (still on the same MBA as you!). I bought two cheap refurbs as spares, and plan on using them for the rest of my tech career (<10 years).

You can even buy OEM battery replacement kit and do it by yourself for about half of the price. It is quite straightforward.

I am still using same model as well, but I am going to upgrade this week as I've got some weird issues lately. Thinking about buying new Mac Air or maybe cheapest Pro.

I'm still on my mid 2013 Air, i7, 256gb, 8gb. The ram is the only thing holding me back but upgrade options are fairly limited in terms of value gained :/

Second the self installed battery option. I did it just over a year ago and it gave my air a new lease on life

> Also, macOS is a Unix[0]. gnu/linux is the 'nix like os around here ;)

That's technically correct, but in practice, a Linux-compatible OS is much more valuable than a Unix-compatible OS, if just because Linux is what runs in production.

MS acknowledges this with WSL.

With the BSDs and even Windows now offering Linux "kernel personalities", can Apple hold out without caving for long?

Same machine and specs here. Bought it as a refurb in Jan 2013. Still happy after almost 5 years of constant use.

The only downside for me is the 128gb drive which limits my options when it comes to VMs.

Looking at what has come from Apple since this model, I haven't seen anything tempting. I'll run this one into the ground.

What would tempt me would be this machine again with 16gb ram and at least 256gb ssd. Retina and a newer CPU would be icing.

So are you saying that the 2017 air (2015 model with clock speed bump) is not worth it, since apple did not come up with anything as good as the 2012 air?

Well have not really followed the air development/or-lack there-of. I'm not interested in the macbook, to small, to under-powered(imho) and the one usb c port does not really do it for me. The mbp also to big for me. I just like the air, that is all.

Buy a really cheap laptop and remote desktop (assuming it's Windows) into your your PC. Desktop PCs are way way way way more powerful than those shiny MacBook Pros. I have 2 desktops (3930k, Threadripper), a 13 macbook pro, a 15" XPS (2017) and the original retina iMac 27" and hands down the desktop machines (even the 3930k which is from 2011) beat the laptops in performance (yes they all have SSDs, save the macbook pro, they all have 32gb of RAM.)

I don't get the appeal of doing development on hardware that's optimized for mobility, especially if you spend 99% of the time working in the same place (like me.)

I develop on a macbook and the good thing is that it forces you to develop efficient software, so when it runs on a desktop it runs oh so nice :)

I guess it depends on the tooling you're using to develop said efficient software. I use Visual Studio + Resharper all day long and it's a hog. I've used Xcode & Android Studio on my iMac and it's just a better, faster experience than on a MacBook Pro.

Up to a threshold more power is good (and that threshold varies based on what you are doing).

I have two machines I use, the Desktop at work (Ryzen 1700/32GB) and my laptop (T470P - i7-7700P/16GB (for now)) 95% of the time I don't notice the difference and even where there is one it's simply often not noticeably different.

Take my incremental webpack build times with Typescript and some multi-thread hacking around, on my work desktop it takes ~545ms if I touch a bunch of stuff, same change on the Thinkpad is 620ms and on the Ryzen I give it more cores to play with.

Hilariously (to me) some things on the Laptop run faster (Selenium tests and anything involving heavy disk I/O (Thinkpad is NVMe, Desktop is SATA SSD).

The 5% cases are when I need to do something that really benefits from more and faster cores (like rip 60,000 hidpi multipage tiff's to multipage jpeg compressed PDF's - don't ask...) there the difference was huge (Ryzen finished in <50% of the time of the Thinkpad).

The desktop is not that powerful. The only decent thing inside is a gtx 950, which let me play Witcher 3 in medium-high and I was contend with that. The cpu is a 6th gen i3 with 8gigs of RAM and an SSD. Works well for what I need to do. The main reason for me to assemble a PC was that if some component fails, I can just replace that. Having to discard my student laptop because of an Nvidia chipset failure left a bad taste in my mouth.

I would recommend the T420/T430 . Thinkpads T series have excellent keyboards, build quality and reliability. They usually last many years. I would just suggest you get a FullHD one, it will really help with your coding. On top of that, the T series , being an old generation laptop can still have its CPU upgraded further down the line.

The MacBook air is really expensive for what it offers. It's basically a 2015 model, with an old generation processor and low resolution display: https://noteb.com/?model/model.php?conf=4423208233512210891&...

The Ideapad is not bad either for the price. It might get the job done but it's a low build quality laptop not meant to last. If you could get a Thinkpad T420 for $250, that's probably a better deal than $450 on a new IdeaPad.

There is no FullHD one. That came on the T440s, maybe the T440.

I think you are right. The best was 1600x900 , forgot about that. Anyway , the idea is to get the one with the 1600x900 screen, not the 1366x768 one.

The best tool is the closest one to what other devs are using. Why? If you have a problem, other devs won't be trying to separate the difference of the system against the problem.

(Do all your other devs really use Macintoshes? Maybe you could buy one a few generations old, to save money.)

This is the right answer. If you'll be working on similar things/running the same code as the other developers, just get a Mac (can be old/refurbished to save money). You'll save a ton of headache over trying to figure out where the inevitable incompatibilities are coming from.

Apart from one guy using a cheap student laptop and another guy running archlinux on god knows what, the overwhelming majority works on a Mac. But we deploy on Ubuntu. Also, there's no point in buying a Mac and solving problems that were not there in the first place while using Linux ;)

Soon to be former Apple (13” MBP A1278 16 GiB 2x2 TiB SSDs) owner here:

Lenovo X270

- 20-ish hour battery life

- Awesome water-resistant keyboard. Did I mention it’s one of the best laptop keyboards IMHO?

- Lightweight

- Portable size for train, plane, automobile use

- Choice of displays

- Kensington lock port, headphone jack, USBs and SD card slot

Do not buy an Apple any longer: unrepairable, $750 LB repairs, glued in batteries, soldered-in RAM and SSDs, unupgradeable and new terrible, feedbackless keyboards. Watch Louis Rossmann’s channel if you need any more convincing that Apple’s are often overpriced money-pits.

I second this as a owner of a bricked 2013 MBA with a dead logic board. Bought a Lenovo T430S for $450 a few years back and couldn't be happier with it. Never buying Macbook again.

That Louis Rossman guy does component level repair and you might be able to squeeze some coin out of repairing and selling it. I’m considering just gifting an 2010 water-damaged MBP 13 as support for his great content.

Lenovo’s are sturdy as heck too. That, standard upgradable parts and the industry best keyboard make them the most practical for both coding and corporate work. She may not be the prettiest date, but she has a great personality and is amazing at her vocation.

Too bad the x270 is waaaaaay out of my budget

Apple's weird shortcuts are definitely weird but Karabiner (now Karabiner-Elements) can make things almost bearable[1]. However, I recently sold my Macbook Pro for a Thinkpad and went back to Linux so I'm very glad to not have to think about weird shortcut issues ever again.

A 2nd gen i5 will almost be certainly fine for what you're using it for, but potential concerns here are 1. battery life and 2. feeling left out for not having a shiny Memebook Pro, although I personally prefer the Thinkpad aesthetic.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741749

I would probably go with the Lenovo T420 to get the best bang for your buck. An i5, 16gb of memory and an SSD will be more than enough. My home gaming PC used a 3rd gen processor until about 3 months ago, I was not limited by the CPU at all (I wanted an nvme SSD and the new AMD Ryzen processor)

Your #2 isn't ideal as you'd undoubtedly struggle with 4gb of ram. Chrome and Slack can be a huge memory hog, on top of what PyCharm and your actual application use. You could upgrade the ram, but you're already spending $450.

My primary work machine is a MacBook pro (2014), but it is by no means necessary. My next laptop will run linux.

T420 with an SSD no doubt.

Unless you're mostly a native iOS developer, in which case the Macbook will obviously come in handy.

Owned ThinkPads for more than ten years. Started using a MacBook pro in 2015 as my main machine and never looked back.

The good things about ThinkPads: Their keyboards are excellent. Also, I love the fact that I could replace almost every part of if. Other than that I can't say too many good things about them. Mainly I was using the x2.... line. The x2...t models (tablets) were pretty sturdy. The non-tablet version wasn't (x220, x230...). Constantly some part would break. Just by being carried in a messenger bag. Now that's the hardware. (Lenovo advertises them as super sturdy, military spec or something.) Comparing that to my MacBook Pro Retina 2015: Been using my MBP daily. It goes with me everywhere. Never failed.

I won't say much about the OS. Only so much: Windows was terrible for open source development. I heavily rely on a terminal and bash. I was using Cygwin and PuTTY. This combo gave me a decent terminal and shell. But it was far from perfect. Then I installled Ubuntu on one of my ThinkPads. Loved that. But I was missing so many tools (Evernote, OmniGraffle and so much more.) macOS gives me all the proprietary software I love. Plus a Unix environment and an awesome terminal (iTerm).

I'd go with a MacBook (Air/Pro).

You're working for cheap in a company that expects you to provide your own computer and, I assume, do your own maintenance and support for it. Do you pay for your own PyCharm license as well?

Don't let the perceived social pressure of being left out make you spend even more of your own money. If it helps any, change the context. For example, slap a Tux sticker on it, and argue that since the application runs on Linux, you feel it's best to immerse yourself in that environment.

If you have to get a laptop, go for something low-end. Either your #1 or #2. It isn't worthwhile to get a MacBook Air at 2x the cost. It does have more pixels than your #2, but if that's important you can get it without doubling the cost.

While it's sometimes hard to get things working on a Mac, Homebrew and Conda have pretty much made those problems disappear. Conda is not Mac specific.

With your #1 you'll likely have to get a new battery, so include that in your pricing. You aren't doing anything that really involves CPU.

OTOH, your #2 has only 4GB RAM, which is 1/2 the Air and 1/4 your #1.

On your desktop, how much memory do you use now, and how loaded is your CPU?

Yes, I do my own maintenance. That's ok since I kinda love doing things like that. Yes, I have to get my own pycharm license. Almost all startups give a computer and licensed software, I know. Still sticking with these guys since the engineering culture is good and the product is interesting and the people even more so. See http://squadrun.co

Also, the tux idea is brilliant. Thanks :)

I've been using used Thinkpad and Thinkpad competitors (Dell Latitude) forever. There always seems to be a big supply of used corporate computers. I just upgraded to a T450s and it's fantastic.

I don't see the advantage of the MB Air based on your requirements. Now, I haven't run into what you're saying regarding libraries on OSX. Personally it sounds like option #1 is your best bet for compatibility. Option #2 means you many run into headaches in terms of getting all your hardware to work 100% with your distro. (Assuming Linux)

https://www.flipkart.com/lenovo-ideapad-core-i5-7th-gen-8-gb..., Has a GPU, while https://www.flipkart.com/lenovo-ideapad-core-i5-7th-gen-4-gb... is too light !!

Go macbook air.

For development I've always had issues with windows machines. When learning rails I tried countless tutorials on windows, would get stuck, something isn't working, spend time trouble shooting.

After a frustrating time one night I grabbed my Wife's macbook. The tutorials worked flawlessly and I accomplished so much. I always recommend using a macbook for development.

The air is more than capable for rails/laravel/python development.

Looks like your are in India, in the states you can pick up an air at best buy on sale for around $800 to $900. Check the apple refurbished site too.

You won't be sorry, you'll fall in love with the trackpad and keyboard, and they come with an SSD.

Good luck with the startup.

Sounds like you already envy others 'Shiny Macbooks' so save up for one and go for it.

My macbook air is still going strong, it's about three years old and I plan on purchasing a new MBair over going with a MBpro when it's time for a new one.

I so development on a Linux. Windows is just slow agony when it comes to setting up a development environment. I don't 'envy' the shiny MBP s, I'm just curious. I'm just perplexed by their sense of value proposition. I've always said that buying a Mac is like buying a Mercedes (rare in India) - super sturdy and fast (fast enough at least) and shiny - but not exactly value for money.

I got the t450s recently off eBay. I would not make the same purchase again. Instead I would go for the x series models. This is because the keys on the t450s size laptop (which is larger) are too far apart for coding. Then there's the tn panel screen, the viewing angles are so bad that at 14" you have to choose whether you want the top or the bottom of the screen to be clearly visible -the other side will appear washed out. I never noticed this on the X230 which probably has an equally shitty screen, because its size is just right to never be an issue.

If I could return the t450s I would go for x240 or x230. Upgrade the battery, and toss in SSD if it doesn't already have one.

Also, check out mini PCs like the gigabyte brix. I use them as headless dev boxes on the local network. Run 24/7 without issue for months now.

I already work on a full size keyboard. So I guess keys being spaced out won't be an issue. Also, a refurbished t450 would be too expensive for me anyways. Sticking with t420 or t430

X230 sounds to be up your alley then which you can find for as low as 200$. If you're a hardened emacs user, your fingers will thank you.

If you find a machine under 400 bucks with 16 gigs of RAM, and the machine doesn't have to be portable, and it has a core i5 or better, you should probably get it. CPU is arguably not as important as ram + ssd.

But availability makes for much better buys: MicroCenter occasionally has display units or refurbs at a couple hundred lower than retail. I got a 6th gen core i7 8gb ram 256gb ssd 14" lenovo for 400 bucks, and bought a 16gb ram stick for $100, and a 1tb hdd for $35. The retail price was still closer to $850 for the same configuration (and that laptop supposedly only supports 8gb, but lenovo liiiiies!!).

Howver, if it's a relatively new machine, skip putting Linux on it. I've gone through setup hell three times this year and i'm just done with Linux on a modern laptop. It sucks.

As someone who owns a T420, I can recommend it for that price. The CPU might be a bit slower and battery life might not be as good as a modern notebook but the keyboard is extremely nice and the overall performance with an SSD is good even for modern workflows. Just be sure to not use a Samsung 840 Evo SSD, I had bad experiences with stutter during heavy I/O that didn't happen with an HDD or Samsung 950 Pro. You can also upgrade the memory by yourself, if you need to.

Remember to check if the T420 has an Nvidia Quadro card inside. If it does, the Display Port is wired to the Nvidia card and works badly under Linux and sucks the battery dry quite fast.

I am typing this on a T420 although I just have 12gb not 16gb. No complaints. I like being able to swap the hard drives really quickly instead of messing with partition and the keyboard IMO is better then the new lenovo keyboards. If you are concerned about battery remember they are removable on the T420. In fact I often carry around an extra to double the battery life.

I also on a Macbook Pro and frankly it is nicer in many ways but if you money strapped it probably isn't worth the price.

Be aware, you are not going to be able to put a generic SSD into any kind of MacBook. They all use special custom Apple SSDs and third-party replacements are few and far between.

MacBooks are fantastic but if you're not already an OS X user and you have a tight budget, it may not be a good choice for you. A second-hand Air should be way less than $1000, though (but maybe not in India).

<rant>

I tend to prefer Macs these days over Linux. The library problem is real when upgrading things like Xcode (which is a problem that just bit me trying to `pip install lxml`).

`brew` is not as good as `apt-get`/`pacman`/`yum` but it's almost always more up to date since it's like an AUR for macOS.

My issue with the Air is that they rarely update/improve it. It's a great laptop though.

</rant>

Don’t buy the MacBook Air, it is a dead product. They’re only still selling it because the margins are really good and people don’t know they’re buying old hardware. The 2017 model still uses Broadwell CPUs.

Go for the ThinkPad. For browser and Web stuff, your bottleneck is going to be memory (and I/O throughput, i.e., get an SSD), not CPU speed. For $250 you'd be getting a durable machine that runs Linux beautifully and has enough memory to handle your dev tasks.

T420 would be ok if you can check that it should run docker. That would allow you to use or test many stacks without installs and deploy them to a bigger machine if needed. For a cheap option I recommend the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Series with Ubuntu preinstalled instead of Windows. It is a Celeron processor and the 14.04 version of Ubuntu but it runs docker great. Also Ubuntu really looks better at the lower resolution which it most of been originally designed for. I got one new for €200.

I did Django dev work for 6 years... I'd lean towards the Lenovo, but it depends on a few things:

1. Are you going to do any photoshop work, or other design tasks?

2. Do you want to use an external monitor? If so, does the T420 have good specs?

One final thought: We've been moving towards using docker for most development, and Apple is behind the curve on this one, mainly due to the crazy workaround required to get adequate filesystem support. If that's at all in your future, stick with linux.

No Photoshop or design. Yeah I might plug it into an external monitor. I think any laptop can handle that. Right?

The T420 has better specs, especially on that RAM, but I'd expect the 6th Gen i3 to have superior battery life and also better single-threaded performance.

Lenovo's T-line of laptops used to be pretty good. I hear that recently they've cheapened up the production line. So I don't think you can go wrong as long as you're willing to put up with subpar battery life (Sandy Bridge, 2nd Gen Intel, has much worse battery life than modern processors)

About 3. I switch between a mac at work and a PC at home and the shortcuts are really not a problem, your brain gets used to it pretty quickly.

I see a lot of you recommending Lenovo. Only 2 years and all is forgiven[1]. Y'all should be ashamed of yourselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...

I'm on a 2014 11" MB Air. I love it. Best laptop I've ever owned. Yeah, I wish it had 16 GB RAM, and a hires display. But it works, and works well for me.

I run IntelliJ on mine, the basically feature rich version of PyCharm.

You can find older Air's for around $500 used.

The T420s are great, definitely recommend. If you need more compute power, grab something suitably sized in the cloud for a couple of hours. If you need more battery, grab a spare :).

Any PC will do the job, the Windows subsystem for Linux is legit. Docker, Vagrant, all of it just works. No reason to buy a Mac if you're not neck deep in the ecosystem already.

I'd lean toward the Lenovo. Anecdotally, I've had a 2nd gen i5 in my desktop since I built it in 2011 and still have no complaints with its performance.

Just get a Mac. The time you'll save by not tinkering with Windows or Linux issues will pay for it in a matter of weeks.

Do check out Dell Precisions on Dell refurbished. They are Quadcore and have lots of memory. 4900HQ is pretty powerful.

Can you remote into your desktop from a lightweight laptop or a decent tablet?

I have a T420s and it’s held up very well, and is very repairable.

Refurb corporate laptop I'd say

Macbook Pro without emoji keyboard

consider a gaming laptop with a desktop CPU. High CPU freq for the fastest builds!

Get a 15-inch MacBook Pro. TouchBar is the best for programming.

Could you elaborate? I have heard the exact opposite. https://www.imore.com/why-i-skipped-touch-bar-and-stuck-func...

That's interesting. Could you please share how is the TouchBar the best for programming?

Having owned one since January, I can tell you the TB has had approximately 0 impact on how I use my machine.

I think I could care less about the touch bar, because I am one of the few willing to admit that I don't use vim. ;)

However, I am _much_ more frustrated by the lack of MagSafe. I am a tremendous klutz (as are my kids, and my cats, etc), so the peace of mind of being able to not destroy my laptop, should I ever trip on a cord or step on it, is something which I am wary of. For those of you with newer Macbooks, how do you handle charging?

"Ctrl+[" is equivalent to pressing Esc to exit the insert mode in vim

The TouchBar makes the MacBook unsuitable for touch typists. Anecdotally, it’s causing the most significant exodus of developers from MacBooks for many years.

I disagree so much with this, the stupid TouchBar gets in the way 99% of the time.

I press escape thousands of times a day, and no I’m not interested in altering my muscle memory in vim just for the touchbar.