

Ask HN: What laptop to buy? - seanalex

What does everyone use as their primary development laptop?<p>I&#x27;m in the market looking for a new laptop that would be smaller than 15&quot; and is geared towards development above anything else.  Lightweight and fast is the key.<p>My IDE of choice right now is Visual Studio 2012 and I don&#x27;t plan on doing any gaming on it.  Anywhere &lt;= $1000 is ideal with SSD&#x2F;1920x1080 (at least).  No DVD drive.<p>Any suggestions?
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jfb
Right now, because I'm spending a lot of time flying across the continent, my
dev laptop is a maxed out 11" MBA. It's a little light on RAM (only 8GB) and
the screen, while a decent PPI, is too small. But I plug it into a Thunderbolt
display and bam, it's plenty enough for day to day work.

Of course, it was a lot more than $1000.

~~~
seanalex
A macbook air sounds great, but I am concerned with the screen-size as well. I
would definitely need more than 11" as I wouldn't be using an LCD monitor 95%
of the time.

It definitely seems like the macbook air is the go-to lightweight development
machine these days.

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benologist
The 13.3" is 1440x900 which gives you a little bit extra screen space. Asus
Zenbook and Sony's VAIO ultrabook both look really nice, also in the 13.3"
range.

I work primarily from my 13.3" screen in a wide variety of IDEs, you get used
to it.

------
T_T
macbook air 11 inch.

~~~
seanalex
Yeah, I've considered a macbook air. It's definitely in my top choices. It's
been so long since I've looked at laptops, but surely there are cheaper
options with similar hardware right?

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jfb
Keep in mind that with these custom designed laptops, price is determined by
volume, and by logistics, and Apple sells a lot more of these class of
machines, and has by far the best logistics -- you're not going to be able to
get much cheaper than Apple in the same class of machine any longer.

~~~
seanalex
Very good point. I guess the days of same-hardware laptops being 50% less in
price are gone. I would love to just jump in and get the 13.3 macbook air, but
$1200 for the 128GB SSD and 8 GB ram is just a bit above my budget.

~~~
jfb
Yeah, the "Apple soaks you for 50%" meme is largely invalid these days. FULL
DISCLOSURE: I work for Apple.

