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Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint, would you buy a machine in 2020 to service as a developer laptop or desktop with 8 gb of ram and 512 gb of storage? Saying that the premiums are "just the upgrades" sort of ignores what those upgrades actually are and how much they cost.

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512GB for a dev laptop? Yes I would. For 16GB RAM you pay +$200, even with that added the total price is still pretty low given what you get.

would you buy a machine in 2020 to service as a developer laptop or desktop with 8 gb of ram and 512 gb of storage?

As my only computer, probably not. As a portable computer that I can easily carry around with me and use for ~70-80% of my work, absolutely. The M1 Macbook Air is the first Apple computer in I don't know how many years I'm seriously considering buying.

Not really related but I got a surface pro to replace an Android tablet and even though I'm a native Linux user I find myself doing some light dev work on it. It's quite pleasant even with only 8gb of RAM. It only cost $700 though. If it was more expensive if be pretty unhappy about all the many, many deficiencies.

My partner has a new MacBook, a lot more expensive, and the performance is atrocious.

Wait, the base spec has 8gb? Can you even start chrome up on there? I'd be scared of running out with chrome and a few tabs....

I've been running Chrome on my Arch desktop with 8GiB of RAM just fine for the last couple of years. Usually averaging to 20 tabs

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