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Comment by cobbzilla | Hacker News Reader

I really like the Purism design aesthetic, but hardware-wise they just don't pack enough punch for me to work with.

Last year I ended 10+ years of developing on macos because their latest "pro" edition had a weak CPU and didn't support more than 16G memory (don't even ask me about the TouchBar).

After some research, I went with a quad-core System76 with 32G memory (could have gone to 64) and 4TB SSD. The laptop is an absolute beast for software development; various compile/build times were cut nearly in half (versus my previous MBP), it is a screamer. While I do love it, I must admit it's pretty heavy.

If Purism made a quad-core laptop with 32G+ memory, I'd be very interested.

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An alternative pattern is to have a super light moderately powerful laptop, then SSH into a more powerful box when you need it.

This way your lap doesn't get hot and your battery doesn't drain. Plus, you don't have to carry around a paving slab.

Yup! My ThinkPad 25 might not be super light but this side of 2011 it's the only seven row layout so it'll do and it's 3.5-3.9lbs depending which battery I take with me. I have a server rented at Hetzner which few laptops could match and none you want to haul around if you don't drive.

I did that for years with great success. But it does depend on the nature of the work; for the past year or so I've been needing to run multiple VirtualBox VMs, a heavyweight IDE, and other memory-hungry desktop apps.

Cloud servers aren't great for interactive work like developing/debugging in an IDE or running a VM of a graphical OS (windows). I still use remote servers when I need real CPU/memory horsepower.

> If Purism made a quad-core laptop with 32G+ memory, I'd be very interested.

Seems like it's difficult to get 32G+ RAM on recent Lenovo models. There's not so many options out there actually.

I've got a p51 with 64GB.

The P series is an exception.

The E480 or E680 can take upto 32 GB.

The Lenovo "search by specs" page ignores their own customisation options, which is a bit frustrating. So Lenovo will tell people that they offer laptops with 16 GB RAM, when many of their laptops can be customised from Lenovo with 32 GB.

You are repeatedly posting false information stop it.

T480S will do 24GB, T480 will do 32GB

Wow, really? I've got a five-year-old W530 that has had 32 GB since the day I got it.

Yeah, the more recent versions are limited to one slot of 4GB or 8GB that's soldered on the MB, and then the second slot is maxed out at 16GB. So, you can't get to 32GB.

You are repeatedly posting false information stop it.

It's the same reason why the macbook pro tops out at 16 GB, most laptops use U series CPU's and optimize for thinness.

The U series CPU's are typically matched with (soldered) LPDDR3 for battery life and thinness, which maxes out at 16 GB. The Xeon and H series CPU's are matched with DDR4 for performance and therefore can go past 16 GB. AFAIK the U series CPU's with 32 GB will come with the cannon lake generation with LPDDR4 support, which should start shipping this year.

Lenovo used to sell the T470p which marries an H series CPU with a small (but not thin) form factor, but since the 8th gen U series chips now also have 4 cores / 8 threads (basically matching the 7th gen H series for performance) they've silently dropped that line, opting for a simpler line-up based on U series across the board, topping out at 16 GB in many cases.

I bought my t470p last year (2560x1440 variant) and its the best software dev laptop I’ve ever bought.

Damn shame imo their won’t be a t480p.

I have a 32gb t460p (skylake) myself and it is still an awesome machine. All day battery life during normal web dev with the extended battery pack, but it can also handle a 20 gb ram hadoop vm without bogging down, and bioshock infinite ran nicely on the nvidia graphics. It has just one real compromise: it looks very dated.

It seems they intend the t480 series to be its successor, now that you can get quad core cpu’s with dedicated graphics in that line.

Yep but the P was special because they put the insane HQ's in, the new 15w Quads are impressive but still way behind the 35w in raw crunch power.

That was the thing I liked about the T470p for performance it was the last step before doubling the price and getting a bigger heavier P-series.

The amount of power they put into 14" that stays cool under heavy load was damn impressive.

The T470 and the T480 both support 32GB just fine. They didn't drop a thing especially because the T470 and the T480 is the exact bloody same aside from generational IC swaps but it's the same chassis and the same planar. So yeah both have the same two SO-DIMM slots. The T480s is an entirely different matter. Finally, the T470p has a very limited life because it doesn't have Thunderbolt 3. The ignorance in this thread is painful.

The 8th gen U series is not "basically matching" the 7th gen H series, the base clock (i.e. what you actually get under load) of the i7-7700HQ is 47% higher than the i7-8650U.

Only the small ones, X2.0 and T4.0s models arrive with one soldered module limiting to 24GB. Once you switch to real workhorses, even the T450 from 2015 supported 32GB which was quite rare for DDR3 https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/3kmlzv/people_kee... and every T4x0 since then did because they sport two DDR4 slots. Same for T5x0. The P50, P51, P71 support 64GB. You were saying...?

HP ZBook series is readily serviceable and supports 32GB RAM through 2+ non-soldered slots, even on the gimped versions running Intel U-series processors. They also make non-U versions with the HQ-series processors (and I think the suffix got changed for more recent versions?).

We use these as our default machines for devs in my organization.

They're solid machines and well built. Their chiclet keyboard is a little bit off from others' in a way I cannot accurately describe, so it is a bit of a muscle memory learning curve - this has been a repeated experience for all our employees, but it's not a huge deal. Maybe a week or two to get back to your normal speed.

I'm looking for a new laptop for work now. Ideally I'd get a matte 4k screen, mechanical keyboard, full Linux driver support - and minimum 16gb ram (I've been bit by my oracle db vm pausing due to too few resources - especially when running a separate windows vm in order to gain access to a client network via some godawful vpn that doesn't play well with Linux (there are a few)).

But getting 16gb+ of ram, I really start to think I need ecc - a fair chunk of that's going to be file system cache, and I really don't want bitflips.

Any decent, light-enough, laptops with above specs and ecc ram?

> I really like the Purism design aesthetic

But Purism doesn't design these, Clevo does. Purism pretty much only chooses the anodization colors and stickers.

I am not quite sure but I do believe Purism actually designs their own hardware. They are pretty open about hardware selection, which would be weird if they only sold branded Clevo.

Maybe your confusing them with systems76?

Besides the case matching perfectly with the Clevo barebone of the year (except for the hardware switches, which are in a plastic bezel on the display hinge, so that's a custom/modified part), there are teardown pictures online and the innards perfectly match Clevo machines as well.

Good to know, thanks

It'd be neat to instead so this with the latest 8th gen i7 mobile chips that have 6 cores or the Ryzen 2700. Those 6 cores will make a huge impact for most software development people. Maybe 32GB is possible if you can change it yourself unless it's unsupported.

> Those 6 cores will make a huge impact for most software development people.

I'm a software developer, and I fail to foresee such an impact. For me personally, and for the vast majority of the people I worked with directly in the past.

Could you explain how 6 cores (and possibly 32GB of memory) it would make a dev's life easier, as opposed to 2-4 cores and 8-16GB?

Indeed, an over generalization, it of course does not apply to every software developer. But as a C++ developer I would appreciate extra cores to cut down compilation times. And even this won’t be true for every C++ developer in case their code base is relatively small, very well modularized, or you can use something like distcc.

Ah, unacceptably slow compilation times… I agree C++ is really bad at this (at least by default). This is especially frustrating when you know of Jonathan Blow's language, Go, and Wirth's compilers.

C++ is compilation is relatively fast with incremental building and linking on Visual C++.

Maybe UNIX compilers need to do some improvements here.

And when using the experimental modules support it is even faster.

We shouldn't need incremental builds to be fast. Incremental builds have their own problems, which I'd rather avoid if at all possible. (They're more complex and leave more room for error than rebuilding everything every time.)

I want to compile 100K lines of code or more in less than one second. Compared to that, C++ is slow as molasses.

Compiling and building. A really big C++ project can take hours to build. My 18 core/128GB iMac Pro builds in 2.25 hours what it takes a 64 GB, 12 core Mac Pro over 5 hours to build.

I’m probably on the far extreme of normal, but more cores and more RAM make a huge difference in tasks like rendering, compiling, building projects with huge dependency chains.

For writing some JavaScript web application, the serious horsepower makes a only marginal difference in actual productivity. But on “big” stuff, it can save hours per day, which means savings of real money.

It still can on JS toolchains. There is multiprocess webpack (happypack) now, Flow threads really well, and the extra cores can even help when restarting a bunch of processes at once and live reloading. Shaving off even a second helps productivity when you do it dozens/hundreds of times a day.

> A really big C++ project can take hours to build. My 18 core/128GB iMac Pro builds in 2.25 hours what it takes a 64 GB, 12 core Mac Pro over 5 hours to build.

While I understand such monsters do exist, I cannot help but balk in horror at the though of millions of lines of code written in such an unsafe language. Things must have gone wrong on several levels to get to this point.

> If Purism made a quad-core laptop with 32G+ memory, I'd be very interested.

What could you possibly need such a humongous processing power for? Do you develop games or edit videos or something?

Well this review is concerned with using a laptop of Krita drawings and Blender modeling/rendering on the move.

The time taken to render the Blender BMW test scene was listed as 27 minutes.

I'm typing this on a late 2013 MacBook Pro that I really love but if I could upgrade it to a similar sized laptop running Linux really well that could render Blender in a performant manner I would.

> Well this review is concerned with using a laptop of Krita drawings and Blender modeling/rendering on the move.

I confess I am surprised Krita pushes this laptop to its limits. It's a freaking 2D drawing program, how does it manage to hog the CPU like that?

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