What laptop do you use for personal development?

DefinitelyMarc

Hey folks,

My old Sony Vaio (4 years old now) is in need of retirement, so I'm looking around to see what people here are using outside of work to work on their projects.

The Vaio cost me 750 quid in PC World back in mid-2013 and has been pretty reliable (6GB Ram, around 2.5Ghz I3/5 I think) and it worked great for Android studio and Rails, but I can definitely see that it runs slower than other peoples machines when performing the same tasks.

I'm not big on laptop gaming, so that's not an issue (I have a PS4), but if it runs development projects really well then great! I'm a bit wary of falling into the Apple ecosystem, but again if it works... :eek:

Creamy Goodness

MacBook Air that bought in August 2011 is what I use. It's still great for web stuff and is fine for Xcode as long as I don't open any huge gigantic storyboard files with it (with storyboard references now the need for giant storyboards are lessened). Not sure how good it is at running Android Studio though however but it would be grand at rails.

srsly78

You can get these things called desktop computers which are more comfortable to work with imo. Definitely need a proper keyboard and screen at least.

For work I have a thinkpad t460 (plugged into proper monitor ofc). Power/performance is irrelevant for my work because laptop is only used as a terminal to hpc cluster etc.

Dubba

If you don't already have one, a SSD would make a big difference in speed. It should be easy enough to swap out the existing HHD with an SSD. You could probably upgrade the ram as well, for relatively small money.

That said, if your budget allows and you current laptop has a low resolution screen... Lenovo ThinkPad are nice laptops.

DefinitelyMarc

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

MacBook Air that bought in August 2011 is what I use. It's still great for web stuff and is fine for Xcode as long as I don't open any huge gigantic storyboard files with it (with storyboard references now the need for giant storyboards are lessened). Not sure how good it is at running Android Studio though however but it would be grand at rails.

One of my big problems with them is the price for the hardware though. Check this out. 8 gigs of RAM and a good but not stellar processor . I fear that the machine will simply not be powerful enough for the price I'm paying. I mean it's barely more powerful than my Vaio and that was almost half the price four years ago. Not knocking your help by the way, it's just something I've spent a lot of time mulling over lately. I can't tell if it's worth the money or not.

srsly78 wrote: »

You can get these things called desktop computers which are more comfortable to work with imo. Definitely need a proper keyboard and screen at least.

For work I have a thinkpad t460 (plugged into proper monitor ofc). Power/performance is irrelevant for my work because laptop is only used as a terminal to hpc cluster etc.

Desktops I'm going to avoid because I like to bring my work around with me. I bought a keyboard and monitor for home too :cool:. Thinkpads are definitely good though, we use them too in work. They'd be along the right lines of what I'm after. Have you had any issues with yours?

Dubba wrote: »

If you don't already have one, a SSD would make a big difference in speed. It should be easy enough to swap out the existing HHD with an SSD. You could probably upgrade the ram as well, for relatively small money.

That said, if your budget allows and you current laptop has a low resolution screen... Lenovo ThinkPad are nice laptops.

That T470p looks pretty damn good, I'm not going to lie. Would the SSD give the laptop a fairly longer life? In terms of usability? Also how good would Thinkpads be in general? They seem to be used in most workplaces.

srsly78

Had a T420 last year and it was awful. This was to be expected tho as it was already old when I got it, only 4gb ram, no ssd, battery wouldn't hold charge etc. New T460 has higher resolution, skylake processor, more ram, ssd etc - huge difference.

Dubba

You'll defiantly get longer battery life with an SSD - no moving parts. In terms of SSDs lifespan, they've supposed to have gotten a lot better than they were before. I've had multiple SSD in my desktop over the years and never had an issue.

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 for the past year, which has been running great. Its high spec apart from the ram, which is only 6gb. If I were to buy again I'd opt for 12gb ram. It's soldered into these laptops, so un-upgradeable. This has only been an issue running VMWare workstation, which I don't use much, so not a big problem.

The_B_Man

I got mine off PC Specialist in the UK, which lets you customise the laptops components before you buy it.
I got an i7, an SSD and 8GB of RAM for the price of that top end Lenovo, and that was 4 years ago! The only main difference is my i7 is 4th Gen, and Skylake is 6th Gen.
The minor differences are mine is 15" 1080p, geforce GTX660.

But ye, its 4 years old and still works perfect with Android Studio/IntelliJ and VMs and what-not. I attribute that to the SSD and i7.

Creamy Goodness

DefinitelyMarc wrote: »

One of my big problems with them is the price for the hardware though. Check this out. 8 gigs of RAM and a good but not stellar processor . I fear that the machine will simply not be powerful enough for the price I'm paying. I mean it's barely more powerful than my Vaio and that was almost half the price four years ago. Not knocking your help by the way, it's just something I've spent a lot of time mulling over lately. I can't tell if it's worth the money or not.

If you're buying your laptop - whatever you choose apple/lenovo/ANOther - don't buy from Harvey Norman.

The mac may not suit your needs but as you say in your OP your Sony is nearing retirement after only four years, my 2011 mac is 6 years and still going strong. Your mileage may vary of course but I'm a firm believer of you get what you pay for.

Dermo

The_B_Man wrote: »

I got mine off PC Specialist in the UK, which lets you customise the laptops components before you buy it.
I got an i7, an SSD and 8GB of RAM for the price of that top end Lenovo, and that was 4 years ago! The only main difference is my i7 is 4th Gen, and Skylake is 6th Gen.
The minor differences are mine is 15" 1080p, geforce GTX660.

But ye, its 4 years old and still works perfect with Android Studio/IntelliJ and VMs and what-not. I attribute that to the SSD and i7.

The Optimus IV? I got one of those nearly 4 years ago now and it's still in perfect working order, especially for development. Normally hooked up to another monitor and separate keyboard & mouse if I'm doing extensive development.

Apart from that I find the type of development can definitely dictate what you need. For any node/javascript projects I also have an environment on codeanywhere.com that allows me to work through my phone or tablet.

srsly78

Yeah, I use jupyter notebook a lot these days - and the notebook itself runs on hpc cluster. Accessed via web browser on whatever.

Notebook for rough work and presentation, IDE for debugging. About the only time I really need to use physical monitor connected to workstation is to visualise large 3d datasets.

Hollister11

I run a Lenovo with a i7, 8GB Ram but it has a HDD. It'd 3 years old, runs web development stuff just fine and ides are good. But I have noticed it is starting to lag a lot more now, and isn't 100% reliable.

I'm thinking about upgrading to a Mac. But undecided as to which.

Buford T Justice

I use a Fujitsu Lifebook U745. Its an i5 and I've maxed it out to 12gig of ram and stuck in a SSD.
Battery life is (was) brilliant and after two years it getting to the stage that if I know i'll be using it for more than 4 hours on dev work then I'll need a power supply.
High resolution on this which i wanted, and none of those poxy number pad keyboards to the right of the main keyboard. Its light, quite and has run android studio quite easily in the past.
Think it was somewhere in the region of 1500 retail at the time I bought it.

Only thing I miss occasionally is the lack of hdmi port - only display port

jmcc

Desktops and paper notebooks. Laptops tend to have a strange way of limiting creativity as the screen sizes seem too small.

Regards...jmcc

John_C

This question really depends on your preferred OS. For the same physical specs a Linux machine will run a lot faster than a Windows one. I don't have much experience with Macs.

daymobrew

jmcc wrote: »

Laptops tend to have a strange way of limiting creativity as the screen sizes seem too small.

I have an Asus N76V with i5/2.5GHz, 8GB, 1TB and 17.3 inch full HD screen.

It's heavy and big but is my only machine so I'm okay with that.
I think that I got it in late 2013.
Sometimes I consider adding a SSD drive.

matrim

Another shout out for PC specalists. I got an Optimus IV about 5 years ago and it's still running great today. I've also found that when I had to contact them that their support was very good, ( I had to change the keyboard because of a sticky key and they sent me a replacement without any hassle). I've know 2 other who have gotten one since and they are both very happy too.

threein99

The_B_Man wrote: »

I got mine off PC Specialist in the UK, which lets you customise the laptops components before you buy it.
I got an i7, an SSD and 8GB of RAM for the price of that top end Lenovo, and that was 4 years ago! The only main difference is my i7 is 4th Gen, and Skylake is 6th Gen.
The minor differences are mine is 15" 1080p, geforce GTX660.

But ye, its 4 years old and still works perfect with Android Studio/IntelliJ and VMs and what-not. I attribute that to the SSD and i7.

Got my Laptop from them last year, not overly impressed considering what I paid. The build quality was not of the standard I was hoping.

The fan is constantly going off too and its annoyingly loud

Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte HD+ LED 16:9 Widescreen (1600x900)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB Kingston SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card INTEL® HD GRAPHICS MEDIA ACCELERATOR 4600

BrokenArrows

Lenovo T440 i5 4300 @ 2.6ghz with 1 TB SSD, 16GB ram.

It does the job. Compact laptop and enough power. Its a couple of years old now but still more than up to the task .

The SSD makes all the difference when building large solutions.

BrokenArrows

threein99 wrote: »

Got my Laptop from them last year, not overly impressed considering what I paid. The build quality was not of the standard I was hoping.

The fan is constantly going off too and its annoyingly loud

Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte HD+ LED 16:9 Widescreen (1600x900)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB Kingston SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card INTEL® HD GRAPHICS MEDIA ACCELERATOR 4600

Check for some bios updates.
I had similar fan issues with another laptop years ago and it turned out the problem had been fixed in a bios update.

The fan was only either off or on 100% speed, laptop fan should never be running 100% unless you're doing something very intensive.

threein99

BrokenArrows wrote: »

Check for some bios updates.
I had similar fan issues with another laptop years ago and it turned out the problem had been fixed in a bios update.

The fan was only either off or on 100% speed, laptop fan should never be running 100% unless you're doing something very intensive.

I generally play a lot of Football Manager which would be resource heavy but just generally browsing can have the fan at full speed

matrim

threein99 wrote: »

Got my Laptop from them last year, not overly impressed considering what I paid. The build quality was not of the standard I was hoping.

The fan is constantly going off too and its annoyingly loud

Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte HD+ LED 16:9 Widescreen (1600x900)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB Kingston SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card INTEL® HD GRAPHICS MEDIA ACCELERATOR 4600

The case isn't the nicest but it is functional and bang for your buck they are great. I saved about €400 - €500 on what I would have paid for an equivalent Dell, Sony etc (if I could have even gotten it). I've also found it more robust than the dell laptops I had before it.

The only time I have noticed issues with the fan is when using the build in Nvidia graphics card instead of the intel one. But I think those are more related to Linux than the hardware.

14ned

DefinitelyMarc wrote: »

My old Sony Vaio (4 years old now) is in need of retirement, so I'm looking around to see what people here are using outside of work to work on their projects.

The Vaio cost me 750 quid in PC World back in mid-2013 and has been pretty reliable (6GB Ram, around 2.5Ghz I3/5 I think) and it worked great for Android studio and Rails, but I can definitely see that it runs slower than other peoples machines when performing the same tasks.

By far and away the best bang for the buck you can make is buy at least a 250Gb Samsung SSD and replace your hard drive. It'll be like a whole new machine, trust me.

Past that, any new laptop for less than €1000 isn't worth the money compared to buying a used laptop a few years old which used to be top of the line corporate build costing €3000 a few years ago. You'll get far better build quality and components than a new consumer build laptop. Fit it with a SSD, obviously. A few years ago I put together a five year old Dell E6410 bought for €160 from eBay imported from the US and upgraded it with new SSD, battery, charger etc and for less than €500 I had a superb laptop, easily beating anything new for under a grand.

Past that, a Dell XPS 13 is the laptop to get unless you really need a Mac. The thin bezel display, ultra high resolution with superb colour reproduction and high build quality plus PCIe NVM SSD are best in class and for a price far below a Mac.

Niall

John_Mc

I only recently upgraded my laptop from a Dell XPS 13 to a Dell XPS 15. It's the flagship laptop model with an i7 chip with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD etc.

It's got a nice build quality feel off and looks nice enough it but it's not particularly fast - I actually find it sluggish running a single instance of Visual Studio 2017 with Resharper.

The UHD screen looks good when you're using applications designed to scale but most Windows application haven't been so a lot of stuff was a 1/4 of the size it should be on a normal screen resolution. It was really annoying up until the Creators Update of Windows 10.

For an expensive Laptop, over 2k ex. VAT I haven't felt it's been worth the money. I was using a Lenovo at work up until recently which had 32GB RAM and it was a beast. I was running 6 or 7 instances of Visual Studio without any problems at all. It's not the difference in RAM either as my Dell is only running ~60% RAM when running slow

14ned

John_Mc wrote: »

I only recently upgraded my laptop from a Dell XPS 13 to a Dell XPS 15. It's the flagship laptop model with an i7 chip with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD etc.

It's got a nice build quality feel off and looks nice enough it but it's not particularly fast - I actually find it sluggish running a single instance of Visual Studio 2017 with Resharper.

Did you get yours with a discrete graphics card? If it's using system memory for the VRAM for such a high resolution display, you'll notice general system lag.

The UHD screen looks good when you're using applications designed to scale but most Windows application haven't been so a lot of stuff was a 1/4 of the size it should be on a normal screen resolution. It was really annoying up until the Creators Update of Windows 10.

For an expensive Laptop, over 2k ex. VAT I haven't felt it's been worth the money. I was using a Lenovo at work up until recently which had 32GB RAM and it was a beast. I was running 6 or 7 instances of Visual Studio without any problems at all. It's not the difference in RAM either as my Dell is only running ~60% RAM when running slow

Those Skylake CPUs don't run well with DDR3 RAM, they prefer DDR4. If you had an older XPS 15 it would be DDR3, for that Lenovo it has to be DDR4 because laptops top out at 16Gb with DDR3.

Latest XPS 13 or 15 shouldn't have that problem. And I think the very latest CPUs come with 128Mb VRAM now, so even non-discrete GPUs don't cause a hefty performance hit with ultra hires screens. Though a real GPU is still better, obviously.

All that said, you're right they're not worth 2k, not by a long shot. You can pick up a used XPS 13 or 15 for a fraction of the money and similar performance. Laptops have become very similar to cars in recent years, a five year old car is only a very little worse than a new car, but there is an amazing price drop.

Niall

John_Mc

14ned wrote: »

Did you get yours with a discrete graphics card? If it's using system memory for the VRAM for such a high resolution display, you'll notice general system lag.

It's a Geforce GT 750M with 2GB of memory. Probably not enough to run a UHD screen?

14ned wrote: »

Those Skylake CPUs don't run well with DDR3 RAM, they prefer DDR4. If you had an older XPS 15 it would be DDR3, for that Lenovo it has to be DDR4 because laptops top out at 16Gb with DDR3.

Latest XPS 13 or 15 shouldn't have that problem. And I think the very latest CPUs come with 128Mb VRAM now, so even non-discrete GPUs don't cause a hefty performance hit with ultra hires screens. Though a real GPU is still better, obviously.

All that said, you're right they're not worth 2k, not by a long shot. You can pick up a used XPS 13 or 15 for a fraction of the money and similar performance. Laptops have become very similar to cars in recent years, a five year old car is only a very little worse than a new car, but there is an amazing price drop.

Niall

I bought it back in September 2015 - not sure if this is a Skylake chipset? Regardless, I'm not pushing it hard to get this type of performance.

I was incorrect about the price though, it was 1800 ex. VAT, which is still not cheap.

Are you running a laptop Niall? If so, which make/model?

14ned

John_Mc wrote: »

It's a Geforce GT 750M with 2GB of memory. Probably not enough to run a UHD screen?

Oh far more than plenty. A 4K screen is only 40Mb of VRAM or so.

I bought it back in September 2015 - not sure if this is a Skylake chipset? Regardless, I'm not pushing it hard to get this type of performance.

I was incorrect about the price though, it was 1800 ex. VAT, which is still not cheap.

2015 XPS 15 was Haswell. To be honest you'd barely notice the difference to Skylake, it's at best 10%.

I'll tell you something odd, all the reviewers for that particular model keep mentioning it felt a bit underpowered somehow and it was weird given the spec. Some say there is a thermal throttling problem. It's been fixed in XPS 15's since.

Are you running a laptop Niall? If so, which make/model?

I'm a bit unusual

Between 2008 and 2013 I made heavy use of a MSI Wind Atom 220 netbook running XP with a SSD fitted. Indeed I wrote a 200k word book on its excellent keyboard, and ran hefty C++ metaprogramming Visual Studio runs on it where the slow CPU was really great for finding performance bugs. Great little thing. I only gave it up because it ran Windows 8 very poorly due to the Atom's tiny L2 cache. Its battery was still going very strong after five years, it lasted far longer than I could sit on the toilet.

Between 2013 and 2016 I ran an ex-corporate Dell E6410 which was top of its range in 2008. As I mentioned, assembled as if new for under €500. Big brick of a thing, very heavy, but my two year old can and did dance all over it and it made not a jot of difference to it. I also dropped it down the stairs once, whilst open and running, again it didn't even remotely care. Superb build quality.

Just before Christmas 2016 my Accountant was nagging me to spend some pre-tax money on anything, so I bought a max specced MBP 13 and gave the Dell to my sister which she's delighted with, it's roads faster than any other computer she has access to, 2008 top end technology is still very good today. I don't care much for OS X, so I've ended up running Windows 10 on the MBP almost exclusively and I'm typing to you now on it.

The new generation MBP is a pretty good laptop, but it would want to be for 3k. It's not worth 3k, or even 2k by any measure, and if it weren't bought out of pre-tax no-VAT money I'd never have bought it because Macbook's are a waste of money. My favourite feature by far is the battery life, you get six to eight hours in Windows, and its NVM SSD pushes 3Gb/sec without much effort which is important for me non-work open source hobby coding. My least favourite feature is the USB-C sockets, they're already quite worn from constant use, and cables are getting loose, but thanks to Apple you get zero alternative choice on that. In terms of performance, the CPU is okay, it's a dual core unit, but my four year old desktop is noticeably quicker despite being Ivy Bridge era technology and having a SATA SSD instead of this fancy NVM SSD stuff.

If I were buying out of post-tax money, I'd buy another ex-corporate and retrofit it to as new without question. Whatever €500 gets me all in, it's the most anyone should spend on a laptop.

Niall

billyduk

For me it's a Macbook Pro with an external Mouse, Keyboard and twin 25" ultrawide infinity edge monitors (with one 27" monitor at home). This allows me the real-estate and comfort of a desktop, but also the portability of a laptop.

L.Jenkins

After my HP Pavillion G6 went t?ts up, all I could afford was an Acer Aspire ES1-533. No trouble running Eclipse, Android Studio, Visual Studio, Net Beans and IntelliJ.

It's powerful to run a single VM at a time, as long as I'm not using any resource heavy applications at the same time.

The_B_Man

Dermo wrote: »

The Optimus IV? I got one of those nearly 4 years ago now and it's still in perfect working order, especially for development. Normally hooked up to another monitor and separate keyboard & mouse if I'm doing extensive development.

Ye, thats the one. It's a bit heavy, but otherwise grand. In the same period, I know people who've gone through about 3 laptops at about €500 each so that justifies the €1200 to me. But they don't do dev, I suppose. Either way, I'd defo go the PCS route again.
However, similar to a poster above, I might need to get a pre-tax Macbook Pro. This is mostly so I can learn iPhone dev at home but it'll make me sick giving them that money. €3300 is shocking for a laptop!!! I've a MBP in work and its grand, but jaysus its not worth anywhere near €3k. The other kicker is, like I said, this PCS laptop is still going perfect and I don't need to replace it. The one thing it can't do though, is run MacOSX and XCode, which is why I'm even entertaining the idea of the MBP. :mad:

14ned

The_B_Man wrote: »

However, similar to a poster above, I might need to get a pre-tax Macbook Pro. This is mostly so I can learn iPhone dev at home but it'll make me sick giving them that money. €3300 is shocking for a laptop!!! I've a MBP in work and its grand, but jaysus its not worth anywhere near €3k. The other kicker is, like I said, this PCS laptop is still going perfect and I don't need to replace it. The one thing it can't do though, is run MacOSX and XCode, which is why I'm even entertaining the idea of the MBP. :mad:

I won't link to it here, but there are websites near the top of Google search results which list PC laptops known to work perfectly with OS X. If you possess a legal licence for OS X, under EU law you can install it onto whatever hardware you like. There is a program available by a guy called Tony which converts your OS X install DVD into a bootable USB stick which will install on any PC. You simply install it, your PC laptop now runs OS X.

Apple could crack down on those guys, but for fifteen years now they have chosen not to, even when Steve Jobs was in charge. I would assume that they see it as a path for really keen, but broke, developers to develop for Apple products. For similar reasons Microsoft gives away Visual Studio for free in recent years.

Edit: A completely legal copy of OS X costs €22 from the Apple store.

Niall