Ask HN: Screen Size for Primary Development/Professional Laptop?

1 point·ohyoutravel··2 comments

I'm looking at getting a new laptop. I seem to be less productive on my current 12" screen than on larger screens. Primary use is coding in an IDE and primary need is portability.

I'm looking at 13" Dell XPS, but may also look at the 15". Are productivity gains moving between 13 and 15 worth the extra weight?

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Resolution and PPI is generally more important to look at instead of physical size when it comes to productivity.

If both sizes run at the same resolution then the 13" is going to offer more PPI which will make things look tighter but the downside is things will be smaller.

Personally I find 13" at 1080p to be pretty readable without needing to scale.

There's no chance I would ever want to use less than 1080p for a development laptop. Don't be fooled by "retina" resolution numbers too. A lot of manufacturers will label their displays at a much higher resolution but when you run them at "retina enabled" resolutions they are either 1080p or less when it comes to screen real estate.

I'm currently using an Asus Ultrabook that is 15". I also have a Macbook pro that my wife now uses that is a 13" screen. I just love the 15" so much that I think it would be hard to go down in screen size. It is 1080p, so the resolution isn't a problem but with the screen size I'm easily able to see more in Visual Studio at one time.

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