Ask HN:Best Development Laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN:Best Development Laptop?

22 pointssmallegan46 comments

Anyone have any opinions on this? I've generally gone with macs in the past but it has been a good year or 2 since I have paid any attention to hardware and I'm not sure I buy the hype of the i3-i5-i7 performance increases. I want a solid performer and I don't want a glossy body that I feel like I have to wipe down every time I use it. If there is a site that you use that provides good rankings/ratings and isn't full of junk like cnet I'd love to hear about it!

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I recently purchased my first ubuntu-linux laptop from system76 (http://www.system76.com/) --theyre a hardware company that ships exclusively ubuntu-linux laptops.

I've been meaning to try them for a while now, but just had the chance to purchase one a few weeks ago. So far, I'm loving it.

Among other things, here's what I enjoy presently:

* They sell large screen models (17.3", here). * The hardware is completely linux-compatible. I installed ubuntu fresh (just to check hardware compatibility out of the box), and had 0 issues getting __all__ hardware components working (primary SSD drive, wifi, nVidia card, webcam, mic, etc.) * Their laptop has a really sturdy feel to it and looks very 'clean'. They use beautiful metalic casing which makes it look really high-quality. * They have one of those really sturdy 'programmer' type keyboards that I love to type on. Big win. * Their hardware upgrade option are, in my opinion, excellent. I purchased a 120G SSD primary drive, and 8G of RAM, and this thing is insanely fast. I'm talking 2 second boot time, insta-opening of even large applications (K3B, I'm looking at you), and quiet operation.

Furthermore, their screens are absolutely beautiful. I'm not sure what distinguishes it from the $1,000 laptops you see around most stores, but the screen itself is top-notch.

As a side note, I use a laptop as my primary computing device--programming / movies / etc., and only run linux. I enjoy high-resolution laptops (like the one I purchased from system76), as I can have more vim-splits open :)

NOTE: I'm actually in the process of writing a full review on my blog about this laptop at some point in the near future.

How good is the battery-life?

It's not a laptop, but I did buy my wife and kids a small system76 desktop. Good company, decent hardware. I would personally recommend doing a fresh Ubuntu install as well. Mine froze up using their default install. On the other hand, once I did a fresh install everything worked beautifully. No hardware problems and no hunting for extra drivers(which I deplore having to do). What I like best about them is that they charge reasonable prices for upgrades.

If you don't want a pure linux laptop, I concur with many of the other poster's here and recommend a Lenovo Thinkpad.(I have one and dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu.

I'm not sure I buy the hype of the i3-i5-i7 performance increases.

The hype about the performance of the i* line over the Core 2 Duos is rarely exaggerated, in my experience. The increase in performance is vast. Whether you need that performance boost is a different matter entirely, of course, but an i5 or i7 of the same clock speed is a huge leap over C2D.

Is the 'wipe down' comment related to the finish on macs? I've got a lenovo with a soft-touch finish (orange in my case), and it is great. The finish is durable, and I'm amazed how many mac owners look at my laptop and comment on how nice it is.

It has a much warmer feel than the air or it's copycats. I never thought I would buy lenovo, but I'm sold. They do need to improve battery life. I thought I'd never run down a 3 hour battery, but I'm surprised how often I do.

I'm with you. I just recently got a U260 and I love it. My wife, who is a mac user, is even impressed.

http://i.imgur.com/R5aw8.jpg

It's a sexy beast. Performance is good. It is quiet and cool too. Battery life is fair, but I keep it plugged in most of the time.

Yeah, the lenovo finish is very nice.

I have a '10 MBA 13. It's really an almost ideal laptop.

Pros:

-It runs a Unix based OS, but one that I don't have to install and configure myself.

-It's thin and light

-Battery lasts 7 hours (although recently I've been getting ~5:30, which is not quite enough for "all day usage")

-The display is high res. Has the same res as many 15" displays.

Cons:

Limited storage and RAM with huge markups for upgrades.

edit: love is probably too strong a word for any machine, esp. one you didn't design & build yourself.

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of development do you typically do on your MBA?

I have a 15" MBP, and considered a MBA, but I am worried that having available real estate a tad smaller would be a detriment, even with the high resolution.

I have a 15" MBP and I've played around with the 13" MBA and I will say that the real estate issue isn't noticeable. Unless you have difficultly in reading smaller icons and fonts, having the same resolution made very little difference to me.

I will also note that the keyboard feels better on the MBA and the weight is a SIZEABLE difference (~3lbs vs. 5.5lbs).

The downside of course is if for some reason you need better specs, the MBA is only an i5 and maxes out at 4GB of RAM.

I do mostly C and Python in Emacs, but have recently switched to using Emacs in a full screen terminal (iTerm). It works pretty well, and is the only environment I can make consistent across every platform that I use. All I need is an terminal and an SSH client :)

Is MBA short for MacBook Air?

Yes it is

I have an mid '11 MBA 13' i7, running windows 7 and I develop with Visual Studio 2010. It runs great, never a lag.

The keyboard setup isn't ideal for Windows, but I adapted to it pretty quickly.

The SSD is the big deal. Whatever you get, get something with an SSD.

Really a question I thought I should have asked. I am a long time Thinkpad use, I am thinking of getting a personal laptop.

I visited the showroom and had a look at the various entry level HP and Dell models and not very much impressed with the build quality of the ~ 1000$ range. I have seen people recommending MBP in many forums and thought I would give it a try.

I visited an Apple showroom last week and played with the 13 inch MBP for sometime, the build quality and looks are extremely good, but I felt a bit strange when trying to use it (that was my first experience with Mac), I had used Windows and Linux with various UI (GNOME,KDE,XFCE) etc but I couldn't navigate comfortably on Mac , It felt a bit different. I came to know that Mac doesn't have a backspace key, I was also not very much comfortable with the touchpad in Mac (I was apparently searching for the trackpoint)

I will be using a Thinkpad for my office work (client mandates windows XP). How useful would be to get a Mac, will the transition be easy? I would have to work on the Thinkpad in office and Mac by evening, will this won't affect my productivity by causing confusion due to different keyboard layout and mouse.

I think you'll be fine. It IS great hardware and even if you don't fall in love with OS X the way so many of us have, you can install your favorite flavor of Ubuntu/Windows. Of course some things will be a bit jarring at first but a little time with something new goes a long way. Personally, I never click my trackpad (tap to click, two-finger-tap to right-click, three-finger to drag) and don't look directly at the finder all that ofter (command-space to go to open spotlight search, return to open something).

Of course, if you work in an SSH terminal, there will be basically no difference.

Unless you absolutely need the higher resolution of a Pro, hands down MacBook Air. It's fast, small, light, and reasonably priced.

I'm a bit torn over the RAM limit of 4GB. It's ok now, but if I buy a machine in that price range I'd like it to be good a couple of years.

I've got myself MacBook Air (last year's model) with 4GB RAM and now I realize that I could even be fine with 2GB model.

It works just damn smooth because of SSD, much better than my iMac with 4GB and faster CPU but regular HDD.

Memory requirements vary a lot depending on the task at hand. You may get away with 2 GiB, but I have 12 GiB and it's not quite enough. I compile huge pieces of software that require insane amounts of memory at compile time.

2 GiB is a ridiculously small amount these days, 4 GiB is not a lot on today's standards. A 4 GiB hard limit for max memory is definitely a minus for the computer in question.

To tell the truth it looks to me that if something requires even 1 GB of memory during compilation than you have a bigger problem than lack of RAM on your laptop :) So I'd like to know about some real-world example when you need that much RAM for compiler.

For most cases when people claim they need more RAM the actual bottleneck is I/O rate which is kinda improved by having RAM to use as cache, but SSD usually works out even better.

Forget compiling; if (for example) you want to have a couple of meaty java projects open in an IDE plus an appserver plus a db tool you're way over 4Gb before doing any work. And then if you want to run the database as well, or say virtualbox, or use a browser...

Plus RAM is ridiculously cheap; I've just seen 24Gb for £100 plus VAT.

Swapping is far more efficient on SSD and so RAM isn't such a problem. At least it works good enough in cases when you have a lot of data in heap which isn't used frequently (your example of multiple projects open).

RAM is cheap, but it still would take additional volume inside of laptop + use more power.

Compiling new Android systems requires 16 gigabytes of RAM at compile time. Trying to compile it with 6 gigabytes will end up swapping so much that the system becomes unusable. I have 12 gigabytes and it's a bit slow and painful.

I have no idea why it takes so much memory and I consider it to be somewhat a problem. However, it's not a problem I can do anything about but I still have to live with it daily and get my job done.

Linux has excellent caching for I/O operations, so having more memory makes things faster, so even if something does not explicitly need the RAM, having it there will make thing s go faster.

Sure that having more RAM won't make things slower. But for most uses cases SSD compensates for lack of RAM, as swapping becomes reasonably fast.

You need to swap our more than 200 MB per second to saturate SSD in MacBook Air, it is hard to produce that much of non-garbage data.

I use a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 that I purchased in August. The battery life with the 9-cell battery is downright amazing -- I just leave the charger at home now. The keyboard and screen are really nice too, although the widescreen aspect ratio takes a while to get used to. I also like the simple, matte black finish and the fairly utilitarian design that seems to have good ventilation and heat dissipation. Even the humble Core i5 in my build is also noticeably faster than any Core 2 laptop or desktop I've ever built or owned.

My only regret now is not getting the convertible tablet version, since I underestimated how much I use wacom tablets, and having one built into the screen would be extremely convenient for me.

However, what's best for me isn't best for you. If you use Linux and don't like tap to click or the Thinkpad trackpoint (the famous red pointing stick in the center of their keyboards), you might test drive the X220 before considering it, because the clickpad they put on these models will probably drive you nuts -- especially if you're used to the multitouch clickpads on Macbooks.

Also, about the screen size. It's big enough to see what you're doing, but since it's a lot wider than it is tall, you should consider how the development software you use will work with it. I spend most of my time inside of VIM, so I just maximize the window and split everything vertically. With a nice bold 9 or 10pt font (96dpi), I still get about 100-110 columns of text in each vertical window and almost 50 lines, without having to resort to small fonts (I don't like squinting). So for me, this screen size and ratio actually works out very nicely. If you spend all of your time inside of Eclipse or Visual Studio though, the lack of screen height will probably cause some pain.

Some people also report problems with noisy fans on this model. I haven't had this problem at all, but I intentionally avoided getting a soup'd up Core i7 configuration.

That said, I would also suggest considering a Macbook Pro. They usually have excellent battery life and a fairly solid design.

Here is the thing you need to look at

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5177/holiday-2011-laptop-buyer...

Since I do mostly development nowadays, and little photo/movie-editing or other CPU intensive tasks, I'm looking for laptops with large battery times.

The Macbook Air (battery: 7 hours?) is a decent contender.

However, whenever I look at Lenovo or Dell laptops, they don't state how long the battery lasts, but instead state how big their battery is in kWh. I'm not sure but, while that may be more precise, it doesn't give me an overall clue to how many hours I should get out of the laptop on reasonably normal use.

I use macbook air. No quibbles with it. Maybe if it upped the Mhz to 2.5Ghz it would be ideal.

  - Quiet.
  - SSD = Fast
  - Works all day on one charge.
  - No glare (only purple light is reflected...)

I have a 12.5" lenovo thinkpad x220. i5, 8gb ram, kingston hyperX SATA III ssd. The screen is an IPS screen.

I run 64-bit ubuntu.

I have a 9 cell battery which, after running powerTop, I get ~12 hours battery life out of coding.

This machine is great because I can travel, but it also has VGA out and HDMI out so I can connect to a larger monitor. The SATA III drive was VERY easy to swap out and is ridiculously fast (~500mb/s read/write)

The other benefit of this machine is that there is an mSATA port...you can boot off of the mSATA and use a larger platter drive for storage, even boot other OSes that you don't use too often.

The i5 vs i7 performance isn't too big of a deal unless you're utilizing multicores all the time. I have a desktop at work with an i7 and honestly, I don't feel much of a difference. In fact, the SSD makes my laptop feel a lot faster.

My wife has a MBA 13" that I use from time to time to maintain my IOs app...Thank goodness I didn't get it as my main laptop.

As for the review site, try notebookreview.com. I've always used it and is pretty good

edit: formatting

Also, Lenovo has some good deals on their site. You should check it out.

I got a Macbook Air a couple months ago and couldn't be happier with it. Traveling with it has been great. And the battery is awesome so I don't even carry a charger when I take it to the office/a cafe.

I should point out though that I'm strictly using it for development. I'm not putting Photoshop or anything on it. I haven't even loaded anything in iTunes yet.

I got a p151hm from Malibal with the better matte screen, 16gb of RAM and an i7 processor. I went with SSD in the main slot and had the optical drive swapped for a spinning hard drive.

This thing is a great workstation replacement: I run Linux as the host OS, with Windows 7 in a vmplayer VM for work. The VM gets two cores, 8 GB of ram and both sides stay really snappy. It also runs cool.

It's certainly no macbook though: in comparison the battery life is poor, it's heavier and the fans are a little noisier. None of these things have been an issue at all for my usage patterns: I walk to work with it and haven't noticed the weight, I use it plugged in at home and work, and ambient noise generally outweighs any fan considerations.

I couldn't recommend it more at this point. Malibal's customer service has been great, and I got more hardware for my buck than I could find from anyone else.

I'm using a mid-2010 MBP 13", which was meant for iOS development only but just after a few weeks of using it I switched over to it as my main development machine.

I have modified it to 8GB RAM and removed the DVD ROM to make space for a SSD/HDD combo. Compared to my previous Windows based desktop PC, it is just so much more silent. The SSD makes up for the spec difference between my desktop and the MBP, so cannot complain there. Compared to my Asus Laptop the MBP provides less battery time (Asus ~8hs, MBP ~6hs) but it is much faster, so that it works out quite well for me.

The only regret I have is that I didn't buy a 15" or even the 17" MBP, since for development work the 13" just doesn't provide enough screen estate, so for me an external monitor is a must.

I'm using an X220 with 8G RAM + Core i7. I did not buy the SSD-enabled version from Lenovo, but replaced the factory's SATA disk with a 128G SSD I previously had on an X200... Had to hack the disk a little to fit on the X220 though. It's the fastest laptop I've had, screen is super bright, and with the large battery, I get 6-8h hours depending on the use.

I'm pretty much sold on Lenovo/Linux laptops when it comes to development, although I'm pretty sure that the even-lighter Macbook Air would cover 90% of my current needs (after a huge RAM boost ¬¬). Were I more on the run, I'd probably go for the mac. Right now, I need the raw power of the X220. :)

Oh and BTW if Apple started selling ARM based laptops, I'd get one for sure.

Lenovo w520 here. Running kubuntu 11.04. I have no issues with it now, but there was an issue until recently with Intel's speedstep and power management. They just released a new bios that seems to have fixed it. Here's a long thread on it: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-S...

Other than that, it's a great dev laptop. Also keyboard and screen are great!

Lots of MBP/Air users here... :-)

However, at my office we've just ordered some Lenovo x121e's. All have an i3 processor, 8GB RAM, and SSD's. The speed is great, but the screen isn't so large for those of you that need large screen real estate (11.6"). We ordered them for portable "workstations" or something powerful and speedy enough for basic development tasks.

Battery life is great at about 6-8hrs, however the price can get quite high depending on your configuration.

My x120e, the immediate predecessor, is my everyday machine. I'm sad that I've just got an AMD Fusion instead of an i3, though.

Lenovo Ideapad != Lenovo Thinkpad

I made that mistake once and only once, the Ideapad is trash, like your average, low-end Dell/HP/Toshiba laptop.

What type of development do you do primarily? For web dev, a mac is still the best choice in my opinion b/c you can VM to test all browsers.

I think hardware-wise, most laptops have more than enough power for local development needs. What's more important to me is screen size/quality and keyboard quality. In general, I plug in when I'm at home, so even these qualities aren't a deal breaker.

I've really enjoyed my MBP 15". I've heard the next gen MBP will be thinner and lighter as well, so likely I'll hold out on upgrading until those come out. http://thetechjournal.com/electronics/laptop/apple-macbook-p...

Lenovo Thinkpad, running Debian GNU/Linux (or your favorite Debian-derived distro).

Presently a T520i. Needed to upgrade to wheezy and 3.x kernel for full HW support, but it's a dream now.

Toshiba Portege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook#First_phase_.28Q4_20...

Like @lucisferre, I've been enjoying my 15" MBP for dev work. I miss my old 17" Dell for the higher resolution and vertical space, but it's a small price to pay.

using a 2011 MBP 13" 8gb ram, now hooked up to a 30" monitor. It's honestly overkill for me.

I like it more than the legendary Lenovo T500 I formerly had (screen wasn't bright enough, wireless/sleep issues bugged me)

11" Macbook Air i7 + 256GB SSD has been pretty great for me.

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