HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's your primary development laptop?

59 points by pandeiro ↗ HN
- Macbook Pro

- Macbook Air

- Macbook

- Surface Book

- Surface Pro

- Chromebook Pixel

- Thinkpad X Series

- Thinkpad T Series

- Thinkpad P Series

- Ideapad / Yoga

- Dell XPS

- Asus Zenbook

- System76 Lemur / Gazelle / etc

- Other

Feel free to share your overall evaluation (positive/negative), technical specs, anecdotes, etc.

143 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] thread
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matthieugrieger
Personally I use an Asus Zenbook UX305FA.

Positives: * Great 1080p screen * Great form factor * No apparent incompatibilities with Linux * Keyboard is fairly good * Fast despite its fairly low-power CPU * SSD * Battery life

Negatives: * Track pad isn't great * UEFI * Some small dents appeared on the body of the laptop after only a few months (never dropped it or anything) * A small bright spot has appeared on the bottom of the screen

Although I have a few negatives listed I believe the positives far outweigh them. I have really enjoyed using this laptop for development.

As far as development goes, I have a dual-boot of Arch Linux and Windows 10. I primarily do Go and Python in Arch, and C/C++ in Windows.

I apologize in advance if the formatting of this post is messed up. First time posting on here. :)

imakesnowflakes
Macbook Pro 13 inch - Mid 2012 - Upgraded to 16Gb ram and 256Gb Samsung SSD. It cost me 70000 INR (Approx 1000 USD).

Absolutely love everything about it. The charger, the backlit keyboard, the El-Capitan OS, everything. Everything about this machine is beautiful.

I think it is the best value for money if you are looking for a laptop.

The only thing I miss is my mechanical keyboard. But the trackpad makes up for it, to an extent..

partisan
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013. 2.3 GHz i7, 16GB, 512GB running OS X Mavericks (10.9.5).

I almost nothing bad to say about this machine, in fact I love it. I run Windows and Linux VMs through VMWare Fusion for work and for personal development. It's nice having one machine to handle all of these tasks.

The one downside is that the battery life can be pretty low depending on what I have running on my Windows VM so I find myself taking my charger with me everywhere nowadays.

Edit: I purchased it refurbished and saved about $400. No issues whatsoever. It was indistinguishable from New save for the packaging which was just a plain white box shipped from Apple. I have AppleCare and have extended it beyond the initial 1 year warranty that came with the machine.

iLoch
Conversely, I have the 13" model with these specs (i5 not i7, though) and I was able to get from Toronto to Vancouver and watch a TV show for the whole 5 hours. This was a year after I bought it too, so the battery had some wear. I tend to bring my charger if I'm going to be using it for extended periods of time, but I have no problem getting 5-7 hours on it if I'm not doing anything CPU intensive.

Best computer I've ever owned.

partisan
>> Best computer I've ever owned.

I can definitely say the same thing.

Regarding battery life, I am extremely impressed with the amount of use I can get out of it when using just OS X with no VMs running processes. ITunes is a battery hog, but most other uses will give me 6 hours at least, now 2+ years later.

ag_47
Macbook Pro.

Pros: "it just works" (mostly, nowdays, :)), it seldom overheats/has the fan turn on, it makes a good impression (read: 'dress for success'), I like the screen size, its got enough RAM for me to run a couple VMs, Unix/terminal power.

Cons: Price. Accessories.

piyush_soni
Personally, for me though, for some reason a person using a Macbook just gives the exact opposite impression of what you think (just some guy doing it for "show"). I will thus not take then seriously, at least to begin with. I think it might have something to do with people I met in the past ... But I agree that on most people it will have a good initial impression.
mrits
Having it make an impression either way says more about you than the other person
piyush_soni
Yes, may be. But it still does. Everyone has a MBP these days, and more people I met before bought it for style more than any other reason. What looks sincere to me? Thinkpads. Only sincere people work on them. :)
jpgvm
Except for the fact they no longer run Linux well or are even good hardware. The MBP -is- the new Thinkpad, atleast for everyone that used to rock the T60 era gear.
hluska
With Lenovo's security record, I don't think 'sincere' is the best adjective to describe their users.
piyush_soni
All MBP fans flocking to downvote a comment which just lists a person's 'feelings' or his opinion. :) Seriously?
runjake
For me personally, it was your pointless arguing, which borders on trolling, and dumb comments like "Thinkpads. Only sincere people work on them."

(And for the record, I use both a MBP and a Thinkpad. They're both good, in different ways.)

piyush_soni
I feel it was still a relevant reply, the parent comment had told one reason for buying the MBPs, which I had earlier personally (clearly noted) found to be not just "one corner case" but a very frequent reason for buying them. I was just telling the other person that one reason he bought it for might work the exact opposite on people like me (which I don't know are in majority or minority). Also, the smiley at the end indicated that I was saying the Thinkpad thing just in a lighter note, not as a serious fact (I have none of the two, if it helps).

To be fair to the commenting system, we generally don't downvote comments just because we don't agree with them. We downvote them if they don't add to the general discussion. I think mine did add to what the immediate parent was discussing. Of course, you have the right to disagree to that, in which case you'd have downvoted it for the 'right reasons' :).

sreenadh
I too looked at mac users are phonies BUT when I got to know some serious users, I was impressed by what I saw so much; that I replaced my thinkpad with mbp. I do not regret getting a mbp. I do have my tower for other things. As a long time windows user, homebrew & BASH has to be used to understand its benefits. Words cannot explain it. Windows is missing out on MANY things. Hibernate works seamlessly in mac. That being said, YES, many mac users buy it just to show off. It's same with people rushing to buy the next version of iphone not even trying to find out what is special about the new version.

All I can say is "looks are deceiving" & "do not judge a book by its cover" or "do not judge a person by their appearance".

drakmail
MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), 15-inch, 2,3 GHz i7, 8Gb, 250Gb, OS X El Captain 10.11.2

Love almost anything about it. Have about 6 hours of work without charging, it's lightweight and very comfortable for me.

dman
Thinkpad t series (t440). Built like a tank, ~12 hour battery life, great keyboard, every thing just works under linux, silent, bottom does not get warm.
therobot24
Thinkpad T Series - but i'm probably going to get a Surface Pro/Book as my T410 is beginning to show it's age. Before this I had a T61 and assumed I'd be a thinkpad fanboy for a long time. Unfortunately I don't trust Lenovo enough to continue purchasing their products.
kenOfYugen
MacBook Pro 13", Early 2011, 2.3 GHz i5, 4 GB, 120 GB Samsung SSD + 320 GB stock Hitachi HDD, OS X El Capitan
mtrn
Sticking with a MacBook Pro 13" as well. Gives you a hard limit on the length of functions that fit on a screen. Upgraded to 16G RAM, 1TB SSD + 2TB HDD (not really possible with Retina), since I work a lot with data. Would love to upgrade to 2 x 2TB SSDs some time.
kenOfYugen
That's my plan as well. Glad there are more fans of the non retina 13" ;)
groovy2shoes
I have a Lenovo Ideapad Y410P running Slackware-current. It's intended to be a gaming laptop, but I don't game on it. I mostly bought it because I figured if it were good enough to run today's games, then it ought to be good enough to run a couple VMs, and I was right. It's not perfect (the screen resolution is a little lower than I'd like, and the trackpad kinda sucks), but overall I've been happy with it.
jws
Acer Cloudbook 14" 2G ram, 32G eSSD. N3050 dual core Braswell. $189 at Walmart. (Careful: it is the bait and switch model. Do not believe the "in stock" indication on the web site. I went to pick one up at four different stores and none actually had them when I arrived. I finally got lucky with my second attempt at their "deliver to store today" option.)

It was a rough Linux install, ( noapic edd=off use a new kernel, Debian has the iwlwifi drivers in nonfree, don't use uefi, touchpad in legacy mode. I used both "grub>" and "grub-rescue>" before it was working) but it does just fine for OS development.

The display has such a narrow acceptable angle of view that you can't angle it to get the center and the top and bottom all with a decent black point at the same time. But I use it for programming, so that isn't too important.

I'm really pleased with the eSSD storage. It is much nicer than USB or SD card and supports ext4's discard option.

The power connector is optimized to fracture the solder connections.

This is my "where is cheap hardware" excursion. I tried repurposing a Chromebook into a computer, which was great until it failed to sleep, ran down its battery, and lost the setting that let it "legacy boot" then ate all my data in the restore operation. On the road, away from Internet and any synchronizing. Grr.

Most of my work is at a proper desktop with as many displays around as are helpful for the task, and I generally use a MacBook as my laptop, but I needed to rotate the extended family laptops a little faster than I wanted, so my wife was sharing mine, but she doesn't share well and I found myself with a laptop deficit until Intel can get a Skylake processor into Apple's hands and then they feel like having a rollout.

TobLoef
An Acer Chromebook 13. It's really easy to run Linux on it, which is all iup personally need. It's light, cheap and has great battery life.
vermooten
Home: Macbook Pro 15" late 2011 Work: Dell M4800 with Windows 7. They're threatening to upgrade us to Windows 10 :(
heromat
Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (2015). Had to replace the Broadcom WIFI with an Intel one. Works perfectly well with Ubuntu 15.10.
bufo
What's the battery life you get?
heromat
About 6 hours of heavy use.
awinter-py
Did you replace the wifi card yourself or mail in the whole laptop? Was dell helpful diagnosing this, and what was your general impression of their committment to linux support?
heromat
I replaced it myself. Actually, I didn't bother to ask Dell for support ;-)

Regarding their general commitment to linux support: frankly, I don't know. Everything just worked out of the box (besides the Broadcom WIFI, which gave me a hard time), so I have not spent much time to investigate this further.

Nihilartikel
MSI GS60 w/ 16G ram, 256Gb Raid-0 SSD, 1TB disk & Ubuntu
trentmb
RCA Pro10 Edition II tablet/keyboard combo, with DroidEdit.

https://rcaav.com/tablets/android/pro10-edition-ii/

Until I can afford a new laptop.

vram22
You login to a server to work? Or work locally on the tablet?
trentmb
Both? I have a samba folder on a small VPS that I work from in DroidEdit, but switch to JuiceSSH when I need to make commits/compile stuff.
fbomb
MacBook Pro, mid-2009, 17" 8GB. Original 100GB SSD + 120GB SSD in slot on the side. Replaced the battery a few months ago. Still runs great. I think the DVD drive died from lack of use (and dust).
wje
Thinkpad T430: i5-3320M @ 2.60GHz, 8GB RAM, 256GB Samsung SSD + some nondescript 32GB mSATA SSD I picked up from work. I'm usually running Debian Unstable, but I distro hop pretty regularly. It "just works" for whatever I feel like doing at any given time. I even spent a while running 9front (with working wifi!) as my daily driver OS. I'm not a huge fan of the chiclet keys, but I've a Model M for use at my desk, and I can deal with them while I'm on the go.
CodingGuy
HP Elitebook 8460p: i5 2.5 GHz, 16GB ram, 512GB ssd - bought refurbished for 500$ - best deal ever.
ld00d
Mid 2014 rMBP. 8GB RAM. It's super quiet, has an awesome trackpad, keys feel a little short-travel, battery does pretty well, the screen makes text so much easier to read, and the only time the fans are audible is when I'm playing games.
vojant
MacBook Pro 13 (2012 - 8gb of ram, ssd) but I replaced OSX with Ubuntu.
daigoba66
In the past I've used Dell Latitude E54xx. It's essentially the same as a Latitude T series (size, specs, and price). And fairly equalivant to a 13" MacBook Pro.

I loved that machine.

Now at work I'm stuck with a Latitude W series. While certainly powerful, it barely qualifies as portable. I hate it.

I'm considering getting a 13" MacBook Pro, for myself, whenever they announce an upgraded model this year.

I wrote a bit about it here: http://josephdaigle.me/2015/12/03/search-for-ultimate-dev-la...

bliti
Past: Lenovo R61e Worked beautifully and it still runs perfectly with Ubuntu. Its about 10 years old now. Only downside was the display which had their anti-glare thing and it was a bit dull.

Current: MBP 2012 Works fine. Upgraded to SSD and 16GB ram. DVD player stoppped working. Trackpad needs adjustment and/or replacement. I run OSX and virtualize everything else. Would buy a MBP as next machine if I can upgrade (none of that soldered on parts).

s_q_b
MacBook Air. Top of the line in mid-2012. But anything remotely computationally intensive is either on my beast work laptop MacBook Pro or in a cloud-based cluster.

It's pretty badass to type one shell script name that spins you up an supercomputer for a couple of hours.

mdasher
I use a 13" Retina MBP for work. But I recently got a Surface Pro 4 for personal project and I'm falling more in love with it every day. Being able to pull the keyboard off the laptop, flip it vertical, and read on the couch is a big plus.