

Ask HN: What is the best laptop on the market for programming right now? - rodly

Ultrabooks are a given in my opinion. I'm curious to hear yours though.
======
yesimahuman
Macbook Air 13". I love it. It's my first Mac and I realized I will never buy
a non-mac laptop again. Yes, it's more slightly more expensive, but the
quality is so much higher it's unreal.

Your $1200 buys you more than your $1000 for an "Ultrabook"

~~~
bsimpson
Our X-mas bonus this year at work was a MacBook Air. I've got a 15" Pro at
work; and at home, a 24" iMac, a TabletPC, a Chromebook, a Galaxy Tab, and
four smartphones (thank you, Google I/O). The Air felt a little bit like
overload at first ("yay - another gadget"), but it quickly became my favorite
of the lot.

13" is a great size (I don't miss the extra 2" from my Pro), and it's
unbelievably svelte. If I take the bus, I just throw it under my arm - no bag,
no charger - just my MacBook Air. It's plenty fast. The screen has great
color, and will go as bright or as dim as you need.

Heed this man's advice - get an Air.

~~~
bsimpson
I just realized that working outside on a gusty day is a challenge with the
Air. I'm a little afraid it's going to blow off the roof.

~~~
yesimahuman
I can't work outside with it really at all, it's hard to read the screen even
in minor light.

------
endlessvoid94
Here's my progress:

17" Dell <\- beginning of college

13" Lenovo T61 <\- end of college

13" Macbook <\- post-college

11" Macbook Air <\- latest

These have all gotten better, faster, and more powerful. They've gotten
smaller. I feel like I've done a lot of different types of work: I ran gentoo
on the T61 for a few months, did some photoshop work on the 13" macbook, and
everything in between. The Macbook Air's CPU has a lower clock speed, but it
literally hasn't been a problem. The combination of long battery life, being
incredibly light, and the speed of the SSD makes me 100% recommend a macbook
air of whatever size you like.

Thinkpads are definitely popular for a reason, but it's been a few years since
I've used one. I'm sure there is a similar offering that has all the same
sorts of benefits -- I'd wonder about battery life, though.

~~~
netpenthe
i have a thinkpad x200s, with 9 cell battery, get about 8 hours.

------
Kurtz79
Since I have bought a Macbook Air I can't think of switching to another
machine.

Light, durable, great keyboard, fantastic display, support for the biggest
three OSs.

If Apple really releases the next Macbook Pros with the Air form factor and
retina display, it will really be a no brainer.

As an alternative, I have been always fond of Lenovo laptops (T41/T61),
although I honestly haven't tried their ultrabooks.

~~~
jh3
Are the new Macbooks being released in the summer?

~~~
pooriaazimi
All the evidences point to newer 13- and 15-inch MBPs.

Looke here: <http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/>

~~~
jh3
Awesome. This is what I was expecting. Hopefully they are released in the next
month.

------
huskyr
I love my Macbook Pro 13". I really like the form factor: it's not too big and
not too small. I would really like to have a Macbook Air, but unfortunately
the small HD space and lack of an optical drive and firewire port are
dealbreakers to me.

~~~
aculver
The dealbreaker for me with the MacBook Pro 13" is that you don't have the
option of upgrading the display for a higher density display. The MacBook Airs
come with this standard, and the larger MacBook Pros have an upgrade option
available. Between having one of these displays on my MacBook Pro 15" and
using a retina display on my iPhone and my iPad, I can't even stand to look at
the display on the MacBook Pro 13" or the older iPads anymore.

------
nextstep
I think either a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air is still the best option for most
everything. I love my display and keyboard and OS X is truly the best for both
usability and flexibility. At risk of sounding like a fangirl, I think that
Mac laptops are the best on the market. It will be exciting to see what
happens in June if Apple unifies their two laptop lines.

------
pooriaazimi
I've had a 15" MacBook Pro for about three years and I absoloutely love it.
Its trackpad is far, far better than any other laptop's, its keyboard is very
easy to type on, its display is gorgeous, its pretty, runs OS X and Linux (and
on OS X, you can run most unix tools and a huge number of great development
tools and editors that run only on OS X - like TextMate).

MacBook Pro is the dream machine for a developer. But if you're not in a
hurry, I suggest waiting for a while. Rumors say a 15" Air-ish MacBook Pro is
on its way (with fast, quad core processors and 4-8 GB ram).

~~~
pimeys
>MacBook Pro is the dream machine for a developer. But if you're not in a
hurry, I suggest waiting for a while. Rumors say a 15" Air-ish MacBook Pro is
on its way (with fast, quad core processors and 4-8 GB ram).

I have to oppose this. OS X's Mission Control is not at all good for a
developer. Not at all as efficient as using some window manager with dedicated
and numbered desktops, e.g. Xmonad.

The other thing which annoyed me when I worked with OS X machine was the
absence of a good package manager for every application. I had to use my
Macbook for work when I was working from home. I had to install GCC and MySQL,
which took almost an hour of my precious time. Never had that kind of problems
with Arch or Ubuntu.

~~~
pooriaazimi
You can download GCC and LLVM from apple's website (requires a free
registration though) - a 140MB file. After that, you can use homebrew[1] to
install MySQL, or hundreds of other development tools - For example, I have
redis, MongoDB, Node.js, MySQL, ffmpeg, wget, ocaml, lynx, mit-scheme, gsed,
cmake, ack, clock, coffee-script and about 200 other packages installed.

You're quite right that it wasn't as easy as ubuntu, but things have got
infinitely better in the past year. `brew` is now comparable to `apt-get` (for
everything I've tried at least).

And I'm positive things will improve still. About 70% on this topic
recommended MacBooks. Last year, it'd been 50%.

[1] <https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew>

~~~
pimeys
I know Homebrew. I've been using Apple computers for the last 10 years. The
first time I couldn't do my stuff with a Mac was when I started programming
professionally.

There is still important stuff missing. I'd like to have rc.d for daemons and
the ability to change the awful desktop to more powerful window manager.

I still like macs, but not as my work computer.

------
gramsey
Macbook Air 13". Absolutely love this laptop. Weighs less than three pounds so
it's extremely portable, only .68" thick at the widest point. It's got an SSD,
so disk operations, shutdown, and startup are super fast, plus 4GB of RAM.
Been using it for programming for eight months now, couldn't recommend it
more.

------
gduplessy
My vote goes to the MacBook Air 13". Best laptop I've used ever (coming from a
Windows and Linux world and Dell/Asus laptops)

------
Killswitch
I'm jumping on with the MacBook bandwagon... I have used exclusively a laptop
with Linux on it for years, went to Mac and haven't looked back.

------
netpenthe
[http://www.laptopreviews.com/macbook-air-vs-
thinkpad-x220-co...](http://www.laptopreviews.com/macbook-air-vs-
thinkpad-x220-comparison-the-gloves-are-off-2011-12)

i've been trying to weigh this up for a while Macbook Air vs Thinkpad x220,
seems close.. this reviewer is pretty expansive and (just) gives it to the
x220...

not sure tho, ppl here seem to LOVE MBA's.

------
gnufs
I can recommend Lenovo Thinkpad X and T series if you are using GNU/Linux.

------
malyk
11" Macbook Air with a "base-station" where you can go to plug it in for times
when you just have to have more screen real-estate.

------
hkarthik
I've had MacBook Pro's for about 3 years and I've been running a MacBook Air
for about 9 months.

I love my Air, it's easily a very solid machine. But the small screen size can
be a little constraining, and the machine does noticeably lack power. Not
having a dedicated graphics card also limits you from trying out things like
WebGL. And anytime you hit a Flash-based website, your MBA will sound like a
jet engine.

I think if you're very mobile (i.e. travel a lot) go with the Air. If you're
at home most of the time, get an iMac and an 11" air for the few times that
you are mobile. If you need the best of both worlds, go with a MacBook Pro.

My next machine will be a 15" next gen MacBook Pro. Those should incorporate
design elements from the Air in a more powerful package.

------
rauar
there's nothing but a solid (aluminium), fast (SSD), brilliant (display) and
coding-ready (dev. environment) like a Macbook Pro.

Thinkpads clearly are a second choice as long as price does not matter.

And yes - I've used most available hardware and OSes for several years.

------
skun
Most companies i think provide like Lenovo / HP . My company gives out Lenovo
T520. Personally i think its too bulky but sure does pack the power .

But i own a Macbook pro 13" and i'm loving it . The track pad and the keys are
unmatchable IMO.

------
GlennS
I recently went for a Dell XPS 17" with the monitor resolution upgrade
(1920*1080). I bought an SSD separately. I wanted something to code on and
screen resolution seemed like the most important thing for that.

I've been pretty happy with it, but I've never had another laptop, so I can't
really compare.

It's reasonably weighty: I've walked half hour journeys with it, which makes
my arm ache. You'll likely want a shoulder strap if you're going to be
carrying it around a lot.

I also usually take a mouse along with me. While it's mainly for gaming, it's
very helpful for coding as well. If you're a VIM or Emacs expert maybe you'll
disagree.

------
kmiyer
I use a Lenovo X220 with an SSD and a 15" MBP (also with an SSD). They're both
fantastic machines. The Lenovo lets me use Linux with pretty much perfect
compatibility and has the best keyboard I've ever used. The MPB similarly has
the best trackpad I've encountered. The main unexpected advantage of using OS
X has been the presence of readline-style keyboard shortcuts at an OS mediated
level (in any text field). Once you get used to that, using any other OS for
incidental typing (in search fields or forms) feels slow.

~~~
Michiel
"the presence of readline-style keyboard shortcuts at an OS mediated level"

What does that mean? Do you have an example comparing it to non-'readline-
style' shortcuts?

~~~
tsm
I'm assuming it refers to the fact that most simple Emacs-flavored shortcuts
work in any textfield. C-A for <Home>, C-E for <End>, C-K to kill to the end
of the line, etc. Certain tookits do this on Linux (Qt for one, I think), and
I agree that it's hugely helpful.

So I believe non-readline-style shortcuts would refer to, for example, C-A to
select all text.

~~~
kmiyer
Exactly. I should probably have referred to them as emacs-style as readline
can be configured to have vi-bindings as well.

------
Joeboy
What qualities would make a laptop particularly suitable for programming? I
guess you want speed and build quality, but you probably want those whatever
it's for. My T410 does me fine.

------
Ecio78
A friend of mine has just told me yesterday he had seen in a shop the new
ultrabook Asus Zenbook and he's thinkin about buying it:
<http://zenbook.asus.com/zenbook/?c=original> The 13" model he has seen should
be 1.1kg, 7hours battery and 1000euro (even thought the normal price should be
1200), so it's cheaper and lighter than a MBA 13". Has anybody experience with
this ultrabook? especially with linux?

~~~
LoneWolf
While I can't speak for the zenbook, I can speak for Asus every laptop I had
so far is Asus, never had any problems with them. My current one is an old V1S
(about 5years old) and still works pretty well, I had it with linux and
windows, no problems at all with linux drivers. Call me a fanboy if you want,
but I try to buy asus when possible and have no regrets so far. About
macbooks, for me its just overpriced hardware, I buy something because it
works not because of its design, and comparing my laptop with a friends
macbook I have seen no diference except the OS, nearly the same specs with his
monitor being smaller. (maybe thats just me, I was never a fan of apple stuff)

------
dagw
Macbook Air 11" if you want a great laptop in a really small package. Thinkpad
T420 If you're willing to accept something slightly larger in exchange for a
larger screen with higher resolution, support for up to 16GB of RAM, better
battery life (with the 9 cell battery) and a proper nvidia graphics card.

Also I find the keyboard on the Thinkpad (slightly) better, but the trackpad
is worse. Then again it does have trackpoint which some people really like.

------
mankash666
I see a LOT of people mentioning the MacAir. I'm an Electrical Engineer and
need an absolute powerhouse to do signal processing simulations, or other
involved tasks. MacBookAir would never cut it for me. I prefer Ubuntu on a 13"
quadcore processor + 8GB RAM. The HP Pavilion dm4t Beats Edition has all of
the above, and weighs a mere 4.5 lbs.

------
w1ntermute
I've got a ThinkPad T410 running Arch Linux with Xmonad. I've been running
Arch on the T410, and a T400 before it, for the last 2.5 years without a
hitch. I think I've finally found a setup I can stick to indefinitely - when I
tried to switch to Xfce, I found the hit using a non-tiling window manager had
on my productivity to be unbearable.

------
debacle
I've got a cheap Asus K50, and it's been my friend for a long time. Good
keyboard, audio, and brightness settings, and enough processing speed for my
needs. The best part about it is that if I drop it in the bathtub I'm only out
~600 for a new one (I do my best programming in the bathroom, it seems).

------
blzn
I'm running on an excessively expensive 15" Dell Precision Windows 7 quad
core, ssd, nvidia quaddro laptop. It's not that great on its own (but one
screen is inadequate for real productivity anyway). Plug in a monitor (or
three!) and a keyboard/mouse and this thing hums.

------
molecule
I've been very satisfied w/ the portability of the 11" MacBook Air.

------
sakopov
You're not going to get much here other than Macbook. :) Check out Dell's XPS
series. I own the quad core XPS 15 and absolutely love the performance and
battery life.

------
fourmii
Love the Macbook Air, I have the 13". I particularly love that I never have to
shut it down. With OS X and SSD, the wake up time is great.

------
thomasloh
Macbook Pro/Air FTW. I have a 15in Pro w/ SSD. It's awesome but kind of heavy
to be carried around. So pick Air if you travel a lot

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chrislomax
Dell quad core with SSD's, 8gb ram. I haven't had to format it yet, which is
good for a laptop 9 month on!

Very fast

------
drucken
ASUS Zenbook UX31 or Toshiba Portégé Z835 or 13″ Macbook Air.

------
al3x_
x220 with i5,IPS screen and 16Gb ram (SSD is good too but not mandatory). MB
air/Pro can go fly a kite.

------
omarchowdhury
ThinkPad T400

