

Ask HN:Best Development Laptop? - smallegan

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!
======
b14ck
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.

~~~
thejteam
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.

------
petercooper
_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.

------
pedalpete
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.

~~~
markkat
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.

------
alf
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.

~~~
ryanhuff
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.

~~~
jimmyhwang
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.

------
tutysara
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.

~~~
rgbrgb
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.

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

~~~
thomas11
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.

~~~
vgrichina
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.

~~~
exDM69
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.

~~~
vgrichina
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.

~~~
exDM69
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.

~~~
vgrichina
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.

------
jodoherty
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.

------
jsvaughan
Here is the thing you need to look at

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/5177/holiday-2011-laptop-
buyer...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5177/holiday-2011-laptop-buyers-guide)

------
typicalrunt
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.

~~~
dlikhten
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...)

------
pyeek
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

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

------
_neil
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.

------
smashd
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.

------
OSButler
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.

------
ephoz
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.

------
jwingy
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...](http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-
Laptops/W520-Speedstep-not-working-properly-on-battery-
BIOS-v1-26/td-p/504029/page/14)

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

------
smadam9
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.

~~~
tdoggette
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.

------
postfuturist
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.

------
jollyjerry
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.

------
lucisferre
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...](http://thetechjournal.com/electronics/laptop/apple-macbook-pro-
goes-ultra-thin-next-year.xhtml)

------
dredmorbius
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.

------
known
Toshiba Portege
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook#First_phase_.28Q4_20...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook#First_phase_.28Q4_2011.29_2)

------
Rust
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.

------
seltzered_
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)

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

