The main takeaways I get from this are that HP is now getting on the Linux developer bandwagon, and that they chose Pop!_OS as their distro due to the success and reputation of System76. And I think these are both good things, and a sign that we'll see more of the same with laptop hardware vendors.
If HP also had that license - even a second or a third tier one - they’d have priced it $2989 and make everything not upgradable and announced “Pre-installed Linux for the first time ever in any…… HP laptop” and HN would be filled with comments like “I only have 3GB RAM in my HP laptop and it even lifts my pickup truck. Best ever $3K spent. You don’t need more RAM. If you need then you’re doing it wrong”.
A new M1 Macbook Air starts at $999, and will put that Ryzen to shame. Not to mention infinitely better build quality and battery life. Apple has always been a great value for the price, even if that price is slightly higher than the bargain bin stuff.
With the M1 dominance (and inflation) there’s basically no premium at this point (although there is little to no low-end options).
SSD is very annoying, though.
If you want to match those specs it jumps up to $1,649 which is $550 more than the HP.
Is the Mac better though? Of course it is, but not everyone needs the latest and greatest and not everyone needs to pay $550 more for it.
From the benchmarks I’ve seen the M1 chips swap so fast that the penalty for less RAM is much less that I would expect on an Intel based laptop.
I’m pretty sure that if I was to move back to a mac right now I’d get 16Gb over 32Gb because there just isn’t much advantage to doubling the RAM.
I mean there’s a bit but to honest I don’t think I’d notice day to day.
For that Macbook Air, it is still a good deal but I'd wait for an M2 version. As for that HP laptop, no thanks and no deal from me.
It’s hard to compare the values of macOS and Linux because they are very different, but it’s still easy to say that an M1 has excellent uses on macOS and everyone interested in non-Apple machines is (to some degree) waiting to see what Qualcomm or Nvidia can come up with in the ARM chipset space for non-macOS laptops… I think ChromeOS laptops prove that iPad-like performance is possible, but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips.
FWIW, ThunderX will sell you a 96 core arm64 desktop that definitely offers x64-like performance. And Ampere will sell you a 256 core arm64 2U server node that matches the performance of the fastest AMD Epyc Milan CPUs. AFAIK there is no desktop case that supports the motherboard of the latter, but there is no reason why you couldn't make one.
These things are a bit niche, since the main benefit of arm64 is the reduced power demand at a given performance level, which desktop/workstation users seldom care much about. In the data center though they are killing it, I believe Azure is using the Ampere Altra stuff for their Graviton2-competitor.
This looks like their current generation Pro/EliteBook lines. I have one of the higher end ones (EB 845) and oh boy does the screen suck. Not just compared to my 9 yo MBP. But even on its own. Very low angles, washed out colors. It's only advertised as 72% NTSC IIRC. Cheaper models have 6-bit panels on which you can see the dithering in the window shadows. It's laughably bad. And it cost more than similarly-specced MacBook Air.
Other than that it's a usable PC, plenty fast for my needs, and the RAM and SSD are easily upgradeable. Battery life is OK-ish (I get around 6 hours).
Also, everything works under Linux and is even less of a hassle to get going than on Windows (you need an external mouse to install it).
Then again, if you get to run Linux on the M1 some day, this might be slightly different.
Freedom is value.
I have ported Linux to previous gen macbooks employers insisted I use and it was a mess to maintain.
Also consider your warranty void, so good luck with sanely priced repairs given only Apple can get parts or make repairs in most cases.
I have a Dell XPS 13 Dev Edition 9370 and tried to replace the Killer brand wifi unit that’s about 80% reliable waking from sleep.
Turns out wifi is soldered in on that edition forward.
I think the same is true for RAM, although it came with 16Gb, which is the mac its processor supports.
Anyone else remember the days of socketed chips that would work themselves loose due to heat?
Putting everything into a single chip is a pain to upgrade but it does mean there’s less chance of things going wrong.
I’ve never had anything break on a laptop[1] I’ve owned regardless of brand since 2005.
I can’t be that atypical.
1. Apart from maybe the wifi on my XPS13 which I can just about live with by turning wifi on and off.
If they are made with discrete components and still can't be repaired then you'd loose nothing by going to a higher level of integration.
People are like we listen to music, have a few docker instances running and we use VScode, we need 32 gb Ram or more.
Why do you need a text editor/ide which consumes so much ram? Is this the reason that apps have gotten more bloated and slow on older devices?
Idk, I'm not a programmer.
I think the price is fair enough, and if the ram isn't soldered (one would be and the other would be upgradable probably)
Had it launched a few months ago, I'd have probably picked it up. Because AFAIK, this seems to be a fairly decent laptop.
I often have to defend Linux because unknowing colleagues blame the OS, when htop shows it's this or that mandated background process.
The corporate security software is so awful mine stays at an ambient temperature of around 60°c with the constant background tasks. That can't be good for the hardware.
Of course there were numerous ways to make a 2 GB machine starve if you wanted to or just don't think what is feasible or not and run several crazy Electron apps or worse. Some lightweight containers are not a problem, I have run those.
I remember phones from 20 years ago using something like 150 kB, admittedly they had no real operating system, just a simple task scheduler. Probably color display required a bit more already.
I laugh at discussions like this. Linux with a slim window manager and vim can run on just about anything and provide a productive programming environment for a codebase of virtually any size provided you can use a remote system for compiles and a slim browser like elinks to access online documentation.
That said my primary workstation runs separate VMs for every application for high security, so I appreciate my 64 cores and 256gb of memory these days.
On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I have no idea about Windows, but I don't think anyone would argue that there's much more room on Linux to adjust and optimize for lower RAM usage than on MacOS / Win
I wonder if anyone is tracking the average amount of memory somewhere from 1980-forward. I'd take that value * 2 for a developer.
If you don't work on such code bases then yes 16GB is more than enough and 8GB you can live with on your day to day life.
People who need 32 GB of RAM are where you do mobile development for multiple phones. I don’t think the price can be judged. If the RAm is ddr5 or if the SSD is very fast or how it behaves in real world developer workflows is much more important.
I'll admit, I'm delighted to see HP announce this, if only because it means System76 will (probably) get more funding for Pop_OS and that this may "legitimize" the Linux Desktop more with three major manufacturers carrying supported options.
My main development machine is a simple Ryzen 3 with 8GB RAM, and I run two electron apps (VS Code and Slack) at all times.
A comment in a separate thread here mentioned virtualization. That and gaming would be two legitimate use cases, but for plain-jane development, "8gb ought to be enough for anybody" (har har)
not really, you can just leave a leaky or script-laden page open for awhile to see the same behavior, depending on how things are put together.
example: blue iris is a cctv package that has a webui module. That web-ui client-side browser tab will inflate to system-memory size if allowed within a few days.
Not much of a point other than there are other (probably pretty esoteric) things that one can do to a browser that'll make them fall apart even on modern hardware.
This looks like it could be a compelling choice for my next laptop but will have to pass if it's not possible to go to 32gb
I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
When running Linux, you do not incur the VM overhead for containers (Docker) that you do on Mac or Windows. This allows for isolated production like environments, without carving out multi GB chunks of RAM. Additionally, if you are targeting Linux for production, you often don't even need to containerize, unless you need to run three different versions of node/python/ruby or something else that is just library conflicts all over the place.
> I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
My 2012 daily driver was a well spec'd HP, and it had 8GB of RAM. It did not support more - I tried and had to take the RAM back because the machine would only address 8GB. A look at Macbook specs in 2012: 4GB or 8GB models. I think the 16GB becoming the norm was a few years later.
I want 64 GB but I will say for my current needs, 32 GB is the sweet spot. My normal daily use is around 20GB. And it is a MacBook Pro. One day I’ll probably go back to a laptop running Linux. It is the fastest for code compilation in my experience.
But it's not just memory, I find running code on MacOS generates a lot more heat causing the CPU to spike and harder to run in the first place.
By default a Java app will set its max heap size to 25% of RAM (Java 11 and above). While it may not use all of that, it’s likely to. So, by default, running two Java apps on Java 11 on 8GB of RAM has the likely potential of eating 4GB RAM. Then there’s the OS needs, browser needs, etc.
Clearly 8GB isn’t enough for such a developer. I’ve had this discussion countless times with people over the past two decades. It always ends the same — with people from both sides of the discussion shaking their heads.
The only claim that I feel anyone can make, given enough experience, is that RAM needs vary. So making a claim that N amount of RAM is enough for many or most will always be patently wrong in my view.
Running multiple OS' is always demanding. They could fix it by just using Linux for the dev environment in the first place since all their tools are always electron or Java based.
Perhaps it's a windows thing?
I agree. My only beef is the keyboard:
PLUS: No numpad so trackpad is more less centered (I hate using off-centered trackpads and usually don't care much for the numpad)
MINUS: half-sized arrow keys. As a developer I tend to use those for navigation much more than hjkl, and the half-size arrows get mistyped all the time by my muscle memory.
Not a dealbreaker, though. If I use it often enough the muscle memory will adapt.
The rest of the specs are in line with my expectations for that price-point.
Developers are always going to have very specific wants for laptops and classify anything else as a dealbreaker, which makes sense:
If you're used to one thing that fits your work flow and you use it every day, why would you not stick with the thing that works well for you?
The experience is really good. It is not too polished and not too barebones.
And it is extremely reliable which, in my personal experience, matched by only Linux Mint.
I use an high-end Asus TUF series laptop. And my experience with the laptop + OS is really good.