Ask HN: Best Developer Laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best Developer Laptop?

3 pointsNewlyDev6 comments

So, as an upcoming dev, which laptop will server my career best right now?

Does 'CUDA' mean anything to you and do you need the maximum number of cores for training and/or inference? Then get whatever is available in your locale with an RTX 4090, from Alienware, MSI, ASUS, Dell, or whomever. Hope you enjoy garishly-lighted logos, proprietary power supplies, and carrying a hefty backpack, though.

Do you need to run Linux natively, and/or need built-in 4G/5G WWAN, and/or have above-average RAM requirements? Then, get a ThinkPad X, T or P-series (the latter for up to 128 GB of memory).

Is Visual Studio (or any other truly Windows-only app) a requirement for your job, and/or do you want a true Linux shell experience without the hassle of native Linux? Then, get any Zen4-or-i7 / 8-or-16GB / 1TB+ NVMe Windows 11 laptop from Lenovo, HP or whomever. A clean-wipe-the-OEM-crap-away Win11 Enterprise + Office install (which your workplace most likely will have available, or you can create yourself as part of an Office365 subscription plus a bit of work) will do just fine. That plus WSL2 is a thing of, almost, beauty.

Otherwise, get an M3 MacBook. Air if it works for you (no fan! no noise!), 'Pro' otherwise. Crisp display (but heed the limitations on external monitors!), excellent performance, slightly-weird-yet-tolerable OS, not great for Linux-shell-things (I mean, Homebrew is just excentric...), but a great default choice.

However, do keep in mind that laptops will always have a limited thermal envelope, and that if you just need to wring every last bit of performance out of hardware, offloading at least a fraction of your workload to a properly-preferably-water-cooled desktop and/or server is inevitable, and may fundamentally change your requirements for said laptop...

Going to add my vote for Frame.work:

It's repairable, upgradable (MB swap for processors (3 generations of Intel and one AMD so far), ram and storage are socketed), linux support is fairly good with most things just working (running NixOS personally on my 12th Gen Intel 13").

Performance is average (but the i5 I got was a improvement over my 2012 Retina MB Pro) and battery life is average to poor (but I am plugged in most of the time), size and weight are okay (for me!).

Bought a frame.work about 6 months ago, not thrilled, it feels really underpowered and so many little things don't work well (physical switches for cam/mic) or broke (frayed cable, been years since I have had any cable fray, this on in 6 months, and it is a right angle cable, even more perplexing)

So I'm moving on...

My advice, just get a Mac, I pulled the trigger on an M2 Air this week. Macs are very popular with devs and will be capable for many years.

To each their own I guess.

A year and a bit on mine. Cable is still fine but like I said though it's plugged in all the time and don't really travel with it. I generally leave the cam and mic switch off so no experience there either. Performance was a step up for me and in a year or two I'll get what ever is current for AMD so it'll be another bump.

A Mac would have been at least an extra $1000 (CAD) and isn't upgradable so I need to pay the Apply premium on RAM and storage up front to future proof.

It ended up being about $700 more for the Mac, and that includes 3 years of accident coverage and max mem.

Like you, I have it plugged in all the time, rarely travel with it. The cable frayed at the right angle.

Depends on what you want to develop. If you want to develop for iOS you really need a Mac. Mac hardware is great quality too, particularly now with ARM chips.

On the other hand, I've had good luck with Dell, Alienware and Lenovo machines too and personally prefer both Windows and Linux to MacOS. One advantage is that machines like this can have a powerful NVIDIA GPU which at the forefront of AI model training, though Apple is doing a lot to make their platform usable for that purpose too, particularly the unified memory model could let their machines hold bigger models even if they don't run quite as fast.

If you really want to "think different" get a full-sized desktop machine as this can be much more powerful.

See also the discussions here: https://tildes.net/search?q=laptop

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