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Comment by 0xAFFFF | Hacker News Reader

The XPS 13 I bought a few years ago ended up being a decent development machine, with a price point hard to match for the form factor and specs. And the Dell crapware on it was relatively low.

What are good alternatives for non-Apple slim 13' laptops with good screen real estate, low weight, loads of RAM and a decent price range?

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> The XPS 13 I bought a few years ago ended up being a decent development machine, with a price point hard to match for the form factor and specs.

Good experience for me as well, although the point about not great Linux compatibility is correct (it seems that some hw fixes were not upstreamed in the kernel).

> What are good alternatives for non-Apple slim 13' laptops with good screen real estate, low weight, loads of RAM and a decent price range?

Thinkpad X/Z/T likely fits the bill (of course, within the limits of YMMV). They optionally ship with 32 GB RAM, and Ryzen 6000 series.

Unless you are actively using all that RAM simultaneously (instead of simply leaving a few applications open and switching between them) modern SSDs and zram significantly reduce the need for loads of main memory imho; it just isn't an issue if the web browser uses xx GB over time or the IDE requires a few gigs or a VM here and there needs a couple gigs because almost all of that is going to get paged out when not used actively, and once you get back to it, no big deal to have it paged in at a few GB/s. Laptops with 16 GB are common, 32 or 64 a lot less so. And laptopts with fixed memory are going to be more power efficient and somewhat higher performance (usually).

Thinkpad carbon x1? new ones are 14" with 16:10 aspect ratio. Very slim and lightweight compared to macbooks (new 14" macs are rather heavy). They are a bit on the pricey side.

>loads of RAM

Same! I'd love a laptop with a P or even U series processor that can handle 64 GB of ram.

The H series processors that you typically need to step up to generate more heat than small computers can dissipate and are thus frequently throttled.

Have you looked at framework? I have not used them but you can load them up to 64 gigs of ram by buying the memory on your own.

Framework laptops look decent to me - Tempted to get one at some point

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