
Ask HN: What's your primary development laptop? - euoi
Want to gauge the current situation. Especially with new ultrabooks like the Thinkpad Carbon X1 out these days.
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prodigal_erik
3/4 of recent jobs gave me a macbook. Between jobs and away from my desktop, I
use a refurbished HP junker. Laptops are disposable and too severely
compromised to make good investments. Anything that can run emacs, git,
offline docs, and shelling out to a real computer will do.

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tedmiston
Early 2013 rMBP 15"

It's still quite the workhorse and I'm happy with it. Besides needing a new
battery after ~3 years, I'm not sold on the tradeoffs of upgrading to the
touch bar model. If I could just buy this same machine again today, I would do
that. My only complaint really is it'd be nice to have a matte screen but I
don't think Apple even makes matte displays anymore.

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vram22
How does a matte screen help? less glare?

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tedmiston
exactly

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jjaredsimpson
I'm not a gamer but I bought an Acer gaming laptop. It's ugly, but powerful,
and it was on sale. I've gotten used to the lights and angular features. Only
annoying thing I can't remove is the logo which is some aggressive looking
face thing.

I'm happy with it but I get it that someone people just can't stand the
aesthetics of gaming laptops. But they do have great perf metrics.

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mod
I have an asus gaming laptop. Basically the same story, even down to a logo
that might be a face.

I've had it for several years now, 18" screen, and it is still plenty
powerful.

The battery life is shit, that's the only drawback.

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drakonka
My primary development laptop for hobby projects is a 2016 ThinkPad X1 Carbon
running Fedora. It is used mostly for web dev and Python dev.

This would not be suitable for all aspects of my normal day job, but I refuse
to set up at-home VPN access again anyway so it's a nonissue.

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marssaxman
Thinkpad W520. Works fine; it's heavy, but I don't need to carry it very much
since it lives on my desk most of the time.

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akulbe
Was a 2016 15” MBP w/Touch Bar (max specs), and macOS. It's on the shelf now.

Now it's the new Dell XPS 15” (9560) (max specs), and Windows 10 - Fast Ring.

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5_minutes
Why did you switch? (And put a 4-5k machine on the shelf)

The touch bar so horrible?

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akulbe
The Touch Bar is gimmicky, for sure. The only useful feature (in my opinion)
is Touch ID. Otherwise it's an unnecessary battery drain.

Why did I switch? It boils down to this: after 13 years of being a hard core
Mac user, it feels like Apple doesn't care about the Mac any more. It feels
like all they care about is the iPhone.

This Dell? It's a better "MacBook" than Apple's MacBook Pro. Beefier CPU.
Beefier GPU. Twice the RAM (32GB).

I want raw power, to do my work with. Apple cares more about thin and light,
at the cost of everything else.

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pmontra
HP Zbook 15 first generation. i7 4xxxMQ, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD (upgrade of the
original, 750 GB HD), Nvidia Quadro K1000M, Ubuntu 16.04, 1920x1080.

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GordonS
I have a G1 too. Biggest problem is the weight of the thing!

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pmontra
The laptop not much, but the power brick is really a brick.

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mbrock
Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition running NixOS.

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kevinherron
2016 MacBook Pro 15" w/ Touch Bar

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sotojuan
Early 2015 13" rMBP.

Have no complaints—works perfectly.

~~~
qfeuigffugi
same here. Bought it after the 2016 MBP came out, specifically because it was
still a better design. Am very happy with it.

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meric
Macbook Retina 12 inch early 2016

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kejaed
Hi, if you don't mind sharing, what sort of development work do you do? Do you
do much local development or is the heavy stuff offloaded to other computers?
I like the form factor but I worry about lack of performance.

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meric
I just started my first project with my client. The project is still getting
started, it's Django with Docker. It's doing fine at the moment. It's the
perfect form factor for me, and it's a Mac so I don't have to port all my
stuff to my Linux yet. It's great for taking out in front of clients. I'm
enjoying the lack of weight on my shoulders when I'm carrying it around in my
backpack. It's got 512 gb, which is a lot more comfortable than 256 gb. I
haven't encountered any issue with the 8 gb RAM yet. The battery is shorter
when doing development compared to an older 15 inch Macbook pro I used to use,
but it's fine, I get half a day out of it. I love the thin keyboard. There's a
"Turbo Speed: 2.9 GHz" that can come on if it's not too hot - I was using my
Macbook in 40 degree celsius weather and that day it shutdown a couple of
times from overheating - I was playing with OpenGL.

When the project I'm working become more complete and there's more processing
then I'll see what happens then. ;)

TLDR: Most of the performance bottleneck from Node.JS and Django is from I/O
anyway and the SSD is pretty fast. I love it because it's the perfect form and
it's a Mac. People are still using 2012/2013 Macbook Pro's, Macbook Air's for
development, and this computer can more than compete.

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kejaed
Cool, thanks for the detailed response. I was toying with getting a 13" MBP,
but have always like the 12" tiny form factor. I do have a big slow and heavy
13" Dell from the day job right now, so we'll find out how this new project
goes. Shutting down from overheating doesn't sound too great through, I guess
that's what you pay for doing OpenGL stuff in the heat.

I play with computer vision and image processing stuff on the side, as well as
some iOS and watchOS development, so I'm worried that the 12" might be a
little underpowered for these applications. The turbo boost frequencies are
quite significant though. So many trade offs!

~~~
meric
Yes I think with computer vision and image processing a computer with a
dedicated graphics card would be a better choice! For certain kinds of iOS
development I think it's worth a try.

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saluki
MB air 13"

Full Stack Dev Laravel/Rails

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ggregoire
Macbook Air 11" from 2012

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imhustler
Lenovo T520. Its justice.

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janus
A 2015 Retina Macbook Pro 13

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simplehuman
Lenovo Carbon 3rd gen

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improvemewrong
Mid 2015 rMBP 15"

It's great.

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cverna
Asus zenbook :)

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canhnm
Mid 2014 MBP

