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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

Missing [2019] in the title.

I’m in the market for buying a laptop this year. What is the currently reigning developer laptop?

I'm a mostly[1] happy owner of a Framework laptop.

[1] - I have two complaints. One is screen size. I think one more inch would be ideal. I bought the laptop in spite of this. I can live with it. My second complaint is the battery drain when I suspend the laptop. When suspended, the laptop is dead within a day or two. (Yes, I have 'deep' sleep enabled. No, I'm not using hibernation.)

I think it depends on your needs, really. When I bought a laptop in December of last year, I narrowed my options down to a Dell XPS 15 and a Thinkpad T15 (both with the Intel CPUs, although AMD seemed to perform better on benchmarks, Dell doesn't even ship with them and the Thinkpad with AMD wasn't available in my region). I didn't consider System76 much because I need Windows support, and sadly couldn't go for a framework because they didn't ship to where I needed.

I ended up going for the Thinkpad even though it has a worse screen, because I read many negative things about defects in XPS laptops, the CPU was of a lower tier but apparently more energy efficient (also I learned that laptop CPUs are a mess), the Thinkpad has more varied ports, and it has the trackpoint.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many top of the line laptops (not counting Apple of course) now have user upgreadable components -- both of my options had upgradeable hard drives and ram.

Back to my original point, for my workload I didn't need more than 16gb of ram, or a dedicated GPU, or good Linux support (although I heard it's pretty good for Thinkpads at least), so my option made sense to me -- and still it set me back almost 2 grand, so not an easy choice. I expect this device to last at least 5 years, which puts the cost into perspective to me.

> still it set me back almost 2 grand, so not an easy choice.

You can't just buy a laptop from Lenovo when you want it. You have to wait for the right time.

I'm still trying to figure out Lenovo pricing in the US. Without any discount their laptops are way to expensive compared to the competition. But then, they do these massive random 50%+ discounts and make their laptops priced less than anything else on the market. The question is why would they do that? It's as if they want to dump some old stock. But the laptops they discount are not old, they are top of the line.

When it's time for me to upgrade I'll go with one of the framework machines. [0] It's fully customizable, with room for future upgrades. I've been looking into a Dell machine for a while, but they just seem to have too many issues.

For what it's worth, I'm currently using an m1 macbook, and the battery life is absolutely incredible.

[0] https://frame.work/

I have an M1 mac for work and I am seriously impressed with the battery life. I prefer my asus laptop that I loaded ubuntu on for my daily driver (gaming, coding, fun), but man, I can leave my work machine unplugged all day while running the work VPN, firefox & chrome, remote desktop, vscode, slack and mattermost, and finish out the day with above 70% battery. I wasn't planning to like this laptop but I do.

I'm in the same boat. Unfortunately, I have run into odd compatibility issues when trying to compile and run a handful of Rust projects that are generally meant for x86 platforms. That issue and macOS prevents me from adopting the m1 as my daily driver.

The Dell Precision 5560 is still a great Linux machine. Most things worked out of the box for me (the one I got has an nvidia card if that bothers you)

Battery life does not beat my 2019 MacBook Pro but it’s still pretty good (don’t have hard numbers)

Edit: also, nothing so far competes with the MacBook trackpads imo. YMMV

I've been having very good experiences with my Lenovo P15v dual booting Fedora/Windows. Intel graphics aren't speedy but are reliable. Absolutely gorgeous 4k screen. The usual nice Thinkpad keyboard.

If you want hardware that actually works with Linux, System76 all the way.

Which one you chose is a matter of taste, preferences, and finances.

ThinkPad graphics workstations with Windows 10 Pro like P80.

Depends on what you're developing.

If you are okay with 16Gb RAM the Huawei Matebook Pro will not disappoint. The quality is top notch and the price is true value for money. For me the light weight, 3000*2000 display and how nice the keyboard and touchpad is makes it nice to use. Ubuntu works perfectly.

I also have a small armada of XPS efforts and very nice Lenovo laptops but the Huawei just feels better engineered.

You also get goodies with it, like fancy speakers and other accessories, depending on the promotions available at the time.

Huawei are a tech leader, not a race to the bottom clone. But after the Trump ban on Huawei you would never know.

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