Thoughts about developer laptop 2018
I liked the concept of Purism Librem laptops, but since they have to disable ME it's somewhat ageing hardware at a premium price. Also limited to 16GB.
I liked the System 76 Galago Pro since it's a good balance between power and portability on the System 76/Clevo line, but I read they have terrible battery life since they have an extra SATA bay so they come with a very small battery.
There's the much hyped Dell XPS Developer Edition, which again it maxes out at 16GB RAM.
Same applies to Lenovo X1 Carbon.
So we may wonder, why all these laptops max out at 16GB RAM? Because Kaby Lake supports DDR3 but not LPDDR4 (Low Power RAM which draws less battery), so they use LPDDR3 which has lower density and maxes out at 16GB.
Coffe Lake doesn't improve on this, and 10nm architecture Cannon Lake has been pushed to end of 2018 (so Ice Like eveb more) so if you can wait to get new laptop until 2019 great. If you need a new laptop on 2018...
Then they showed T480 and T480s on CES which ia still Kaby Lake but uses DDR4 (like the Galago Pro) so it can get 32GB, and has a 2 battery system which means you can hot swap your battery, neat!! And with the extended battery it gets impressive battery life. Good selection of ports, Thinshutter to blind the webcam, Wi-Fi AC 2xMIMO, option of SIM slot, SD slot...
Downsides is not sexy like a MacBook Pro, a XPS DE or a X1 Carbon, as it's slightly bigger, thicker and heavier than those... but not by that much!!!
T470 had good compatibility with Linux, it's to be expected T480 will too.
Your thoughts?