
Ask HN: What is the best laptop for programming/data science? - devilmoon
I think I could&#x27;ve phrased the title better, but I will be asking on your recommendations for what you think is the best laptop for someone wanting to go back to university and study Data Science and subsequently come back to the workforce in a programming&#x2F;data analytics&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;etc. role.<p>It doesn&#x27;t have to be a specific model, you can also list things you&#x27;d look for in an optimal laptop if you were to buy one for the same reason as me.<p>I would exclude Apple products from this discussion simply because the only worthy laptop in this case would be a Pro, which is way too pricey for what it offers.
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PaulHoule
I currently work on an Alienware 15 and it is sweet.

Two requirements I had were: (i) NVIDIA 10-series discrete graphics, and (2)
32MB of RAM. I wasn't excited about the 4K display until I saw it, now I am
never going back. Also the build quality is great.

Apple backed the wrong horse in the GPU wars a few years back, I think all of
their machines still ship with ATI GPUs if the have a discrete GPU. I think
for gaming and creative work ATI is OK but if you do neural networks or other
heavy calculations software support is not universal for tools like
Tensorflow, Torch, etc. as it is for NVIDIA.

Most of the time I would also tell you that you can get a lot more computer
for your $ and not be complaining about drivers for your OS or you don't like
the ports by getting a desktop machine.

I recently bought a tower machine built from refurb parts, put in 32MB of RAM
and a GTX 1050 graphics card (largest that wouldn't need special
considerations for power supply) for a machine that I mainly use as a media
server but may also want to run some Tensorflow. What I paid for the 1050 card
was crazy because the price has been driven up by bitcoiners.

My only bitch about ML on a laptop is that it is not necessarily the kind of
thing you want to do on a machine where you close the lid. For instance on
evening I closed the lid when the system was uploading a model to a server and
the server never got it...

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devilmoon
I have your same requirements, except I'd probably settle for 16GB of RAM.

And yeah, I know I could get more bang for the buck with a tower machine, but
since I'd be using this on the go in university I'd prefer to have a decent
laptop before starting. I already have what is now a low-spec tower that I'll
probably bring along, but when I had to run some TF for my thesis it handled
it well enough, so I'm more interested in investing into a more mobile option
to carry with me at all times.

I'll look into the Alienware, any idea how it compares to the Omen 15?

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PaulHoule
The Omen machines are certainly cheaper, and you can get one with a GTX 1050.

Many times laptop vendors will charge crazy high prices for preinstalled
memory. You could probably get one with the minimum memory, buy 32 GB of RAM
from crucial.com and come out ahead. I did that with a Lenovo desktop
replacement laptop in 2012 and it has been going strong with a midlife upgrade
to an SSD C: drive.

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andreicon
my favorite is the thinkpad t4xx series, the keyboard is just marvelous and it
runs great, if you don't necessarily need a gpu

