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Ask HN: Which laptop brands are worth shortlisting for Windows work/development?

32 points by petecooper ↗ HN
I have been reading previous HN submissions on this subject (e.g., [1]) and I am interested in a late-2014 perspective on this.

Currently, I have a MacBook Pro 17"(Mid 2010). I work in OS X 10.10 and Windows 7. I work on my own projects (mostly OS X) and also client projects (mostly Windows 7). The OS split is currently 40/60 and the trend is for more Windows 7 client work. With that in mind, I wish to split my own projects from client projects and have a Windows 7-only laptop.

The last i386 laptop I bought was an IBM Thinkpad T21. It's been that long. I loved that laptop, and used it until its untimely death. What I'm looking for is a 2014 equivalent to my T21; solid, reliable and built to be used all day. I will stop short of saying `price no issue`, but I'm willing to drop 800-1200GBP on the right laptop.

HN, my question is: which laptop brands are worth shortlisting for Windows work/development?

Thank you in advance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5088260

50 comments

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sarciszewski
I've heard good things about Asus and Acer, but my *nix buddies seem to like Lenovo better for driver support. I don't think the brands mean much; it's the specific models and their technical specifications that are worth investigating.
huhtenberg
Acer is a good bang for the buck, but it lasts exactly [the warranty period + 1 month].

In my case first the RAM stick died, then the LCD inverter, then the WiFi and then the HDD. All in a scope of one week, three weeks after the end of the warranty. It was spectacular.

johnatwork
I've had a similar experience. I thought it was just me. It's amazing how they can get it so accurately down.
notauser
I have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon (with real F keys) and I love it.

It is solidly built, very easy to pack, and the keyboard is great for an ultrabook. The trackpad is also good.

I also have a Yoga 2 Pro, which was great value for money and pretty lovely, but I wouldn't want to type on it all day.

teach
I think this is really important. Right now I'm not sure there are any brands where every SKU is good.

Within each brand, there seems to be a lot of variability in quality from model to model.

btb
All the Asus products I have had have worked OK, and decent driver support.

I have on occassion bought Acer PCs for non-devs at the office, and have regretted it every time. Sure they are cheap, but they also break down very fast and/or have lousy driver support, its just not worth the hassle. I still remember the stationary Acer PC I buy for one of our salesguys. Everytime he went above 50% CPU usage it sounded like a vacuum cleaner, and could be heard from the hallways.

sarciszewski
Thanks for the info. I've never purchased an Acer product but heard from people that they were decent. :)
arca_vorago
Depends mostly on what form factor you want? I can highly recommend both Asus and Dell ultrabooks. Have had no driver issues with linux or bsd on either. If you want more power though, and care less about support, I would probably say MSI. Stay away from Lenovo in my opinion, they have been going downhill fast lately.
bradfa
Lenovo Thinkpad T series are still quite good, if not the best, Windows laptops on the market. Although some things have changed since the T2x days, the overall design is still very robust.

I owned a T22 and T41, now I have a T530. All ran/run Windows well.

molsongolden
I also have a T530 and it runs well. I bought the docking station and use it as a full desktop replacement with no trouble.
marcuniq
I have personally tested 40+ business laptops(Lenovo, HP, Dell) in 50+ dimensions (performance, display, wlan, heat,...) . In our assessment Lenovo came first, then HP and closely after Dell.

The difference between consumer and business laptops is enormous in terms of reliability and how long they last, even from the same manufacturer. In our experience, the only "consumer" laptops which can keep up with the mentioned business laptop brands are from Apple.

PS: Check out projektneptun.ch for reasonable configurations of Lenovo/HP/Apple laptops. I own a Lenovo Thinkpad T440p.

basch
Dell XPS and Lenovo Yogas are pretty decent machines. Dells Inspiron 7000 is a near complete mac clones.
PaulHoule
I have a Lenovo W520 which has discrete graphics, 32GB of RAM (added aftermarket) and it is a beast. I also upgraded the HDD to an SSD and that is something to do right.

Some minuses are that the bluetooth quit working with Windows 8, although I got a USB bluetooth dongle. Also I got the dock for the W520 and found it doesn't work ~quite~ perfectly in terms of the USB ports realizing you just plugged something in and connecting on the first time.

tomswartz07
The only thing to be cautious about when going with Lenovo devices are the models that have Whitelisted hardware in the BIOS.

We've run into a few devices with this 'feature' that makes it impossible to swap out faulty wifi, bluetooth, what-have-you devices.

larzang
Clevo is a major Taiwanese OEM you may not have heard of but builds excellent business-class laptops. They don't sell direct to consumers, but any small system builder you buy from (FalconNW, System76, etc) is probably selling rebadged/modified Clevo laptops, and you can buy barebones or custom systems from retailers like AVADirect in the US.

They're very reasonably priced in addition to being well-built.

Afforess
I use a Lenevo W530 at work. It's great, it has a mobile i7 quad core processor, discrete graphics card with 2GB VRAM, 16GB DDR3, etc. It's a very powerful machine, and does not weigh much.
basch
Lenovo Thinkpad T440S or X240 or ThinkPad Yoga or Yoga 3.

Samsung ATIV Book 9.

Acer Aspire S7-392

MacBook Air/Pro

btb
We have a handful of lenovo's at work(the T-series). Havent heard any complaints about them so far. And we had one very vocal dev that wouldnt use anything but lenovo :) (he had like 5 different generations of T-series and X-series). They also have some consumer series, which (according to the before mentioned vocal dev) one should avoid.

But I also see alot of people running windows on macbooks. So I guess that could work too.

mkoryak
I used to swear by IBM thinkpads, but I think the quality has gone down hill since being sold to lenovo.

I have a Thinkpad T43p with 2gb of ram from 2006 that still runs pretty good today (with a new battery), on the other hand pretty much every lenovo I have bought since (2 or 3 of them) have all had some problem that prevented me from using them.

I no longer recommend thinkpad to anyone.

lowlevel
I've been buying HP's higher end notebooks for a number of years now. There have been some build quality issues, mostly cosmetic.. but they are repaired promptly and correctly, and turn out to be fairly reliable machines at least for the first 3 years of use. (EliteBook, Zbook)
headgasket
mbpr 15 with 16GB of ram, 1TB ssd, parallels 9. Best windows experience bar none, seriously. If you absolutely want a second physical device, get a second one and boot it directly in windows.
chrismeller
The entry-level 15" MBP with the 1TB SSD and AppleCare is $3,148 and the higher-level comes to $3,348, which isn't even close to his desired budget ($1287-1930 USD) and your answer is to simply get two of them...
thenipper
Lenovo's are decent, however I'll say beware of this year's model of the Lenovo X1. I have one at work. The keyboard is really funky. The caps lock doesn't exist and instead is split into two keys home & end. The backspace key is splint into backspace and delete. Finally the ~ key is down on the right in between the right alt and right control key. It is incredibly annoying. Oh and the function keys are some weird eink style touch bar. You can switch their function easily enough but still it is really really annoying. Besides that I love the machine, though for the price point I think MacBook's are a better deal.
iLoch
A MacBook Pro is one of the best Windows laptops you can buy.
Robin_Message
Came here to say that + VMWare is what I use and it seems at least as nice as any Windows laptop I've used.
Artemis2
Not really. The drivers are terrible under Windows: I can't get my MBP 2014's wifi to work under Windows 8, the Thunderbolt ethernet adapter does not benefit from plug and play, the trackpad is terrible... I would have expected a lot better from Apple.
tdicola
Why not run inside a virtualization environment like Virtual Box, Parrallels, etc. so you have everything working without any pain?
chowyuncat
All the virtualized GPUs I've tried are buggy. One pain point is that they don't support Direct3D 11 for Kinect 2 development.
Artemis2
I intended to use Windows for gaming, so having a system running directly on top of the hardware is a must to enjoy the dedicated GPU.
unkoman
I like Lenovos for everything except the trackpads. It's impossible to use other trackpads after using a macbook - they are just that good.
ceedon
Read your post after I submitted mine.

I'm curious what you disliked about the Lenovo's trackpad.

For me, the MBP's is disagreeable bc of the additional friction.

hack_edu
Texture, glossy-plastic feel, size, two or three bulky protruding buttons in between your keyboard and the pad, and being very distinctly sub par in regard to multi touch functions or detection (though OS integration seems to be the main factor). Size and an offet layout (some are unfriendly to lefties) relative to the rest of the case is a factor on most of their line as well.
virmundi
I use a Sager gaming laptop. At the time, it was fully tricked out with an i7, 16 GB, 1.5 GB mobile NVidia. I hate the keyboard, but it was only $1800. I've had a few years now. Aside from being a hulk with poor battery life and a crummy keyboard, it is a great portable desktop. I'm using it now. I put my split-keyboard over the laptop keyboard easily. It also helps with ergonomics. Since the trackpad is covered, I use my external mouse that I've used at clients for years.

One the whole, it's a powerful workhorse (I bought it when I was using Scala and SBT). It is also $600 dollars cheaper than my similarly spec'ed new MBP. I would buy again when I need to upgrade this box.

Zikes
I'm also using a Sager gaming laptop which I bought a few years ago for ~$1300. Ran into an issue with the GPU overheating and needing replaced a year or so ago, but other than that it's been a fairly rugged and reliable machine. I will likely be buying my next laptop from Sager.
ceedon
Supported a fleet of 500+ Lenovos (T400s-T430s). They were solid machines.

We had a bad run of LCDs on the T410s and Lenovo had folks on-site to fix all of them as they died. Pleasant overall experience.

I have a maxed-out 15" retina, and I still miss my T430s sometimes... (dat trackpad)

w1ntermute
I would recommend a ThinkPad T420 or X220 (if you want the classic keyboard) or a T430, X230, or 2013 X1 Carbon (if you don't mind the new one). They're all pretty cheap on eBay, and you can get ones that have been barely used. Make sure you don't get the 2014 X1 Carbon, as it's an unmitigated disaster.

Also, remember to get a machine with maxed out RAM (if the RAM is not user-installable) or max it out yourself (if it is user-installable). Also, make sure you get the max resolution screen and replace the HDD with an SSD, if you get one with the former.

AndrewKemendo
I have a T420 and I generally agree, but since the OP mentioned he will still be working with OSX, that means he will probably set up a VM on it.

Since this is exactly what I do, I will say that running XCODE with the emulator in OSX (iAtkos) on the VM is painfully slow even with Maxed everything.

I would strongly suggest scaling back a bit on the ThinkPad settings and also having a Macbook for OSX/iOS dev.

I think it also depends on what OP is developing - ours is super heavy 3D graphics intensive so that is why we need as few layers between us and hardware as possible.

smrtinsert
Lenovos have great specs and the best keyboards, but Dells (used to) at least win on support.
southphillyman
I use a Sony Viao FW series laptop I purchased in 2008 (swapped in a SSD about 2 yrs ago). At work I use a Lenovo T430 and I'm considering buying a Yoga Pro 2 for home as an upgrade to the Sony. I looked into buying 15" MB Pro but I can't really find a justification for the price premium.
zamalek
We're running DELLs here. As a developer I really can't complain - the Latitude E6530 is a performance beast. I'm hitting mine with 3 HyperV instances right now and it isn't even breaking a sweat.

We've had horrific experiences with the top-of-the-line Asus and Toshiba laptops.

kyriakos
I was using dell for years and 3 years ago switched to Asus. If you are not after an utrabook you can get a very powerful Asus machine in your price range.

Also recently bought a lenovo yoga pro 2. Everything is nice about it but default windows installation is a bit bloated.

AdamN
Get a new 15" rMBP for OS X and take your old MBP and boot directly to Win7 on there.
shepardrtc
I've had the Samsung Series 7 NP700Z7C-S01US for the past 3 years and its been rock solid. Fast, big screen, and huge battery. Very, very good on power. Easily lasts 5 or 6 hours just browsing. Not sure if Samsung makes them anymore, but if you can find one, you won't regret it. The newer laptops barely beat it in specs.
awa
Our team went with Lenovo Carbon touch and Asus Zenbooks for our devs
danielki
I personally use Lenovo laptops (Yoga 2 at home, Thinkpads at work) and have had good experiences. A word of caution if you're planning on installing Linux - there's a known issue with the ACPI driver for certain models that will "hardware disable" your WiFi even if you don't have a hardware disable switch. I found this fix to work: http://billauer.co.il/blog/2014/08/linux-ubuntu-yoga-hardwar...