I mostly use Macs and dislike most windows laptops. That said, I am impressesed with this ThinkPad I have to use for a client.
Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
361–370 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#362Thinkpad X1 (Yoga/Carbon) do great for heavy use developer laptops. I use them since the first generation, with Linux as operating system. Never had serious issues with drivers, even wacom, digitizer and auto display rotation are working nowadays, not to speak of USB-3, fingerprint sensors, etc. The whole device is a no-brainer and just works.
A place I work used to order them for developers, they're awesome little machines but not without their issues too. We had constant issue with them no longer charging for people, something on the motherboard related to charging would just die sometimes machines only a few weeks old would do this. You'd start your day, try to start up your laptop and it would be dead and require sending back to Lenovo (which to their…
In the company I currently work, we have the option of MacBook Pro's or ThinkPad X1 Carbon. I never seen such a problem. I am not saying that it does not exist.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
In May 2020, my wife's Dell laptop blipped out during her morning coffee from an over-weekend break, and by noon there was a Dell technician sitting at a card table in our garage, 32F/0C degrees, socially isolating from any germs we could have, and he swapped motherboards inside of an hour. Incredible.
Where are you located where it's 32F in May, lol
Reaching freezing in early May is not at all uncommon in most of New England, for starters. I imagine it's also not completely rare in the upper Midwest.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#364I still enjoy the Thinkpad T series. They’re older and not sold new but they’re tough as rocks and meant to be user serviceable. Plus, reduce, reuse and all that. If you’re doing bleeding edge graphics engine programming or ML it wouldn’t be my first choice unless you can deal with an external GPU.
The T series is still available for purchase, it’s a workhorse for corporate use cases and the most popular model for corporate IT deployments.
There’s the P series which is a bit more premium and usually better specs.
Just beware of overheating & throttling issues with some high end P/X models, especially with 12th gen intel chipsets.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#365You don't say where you are located, but unless you are in one of the few places where Dell doesn't offer on-site next business day support then XPS 13 is a great laptop. Their support is amazing: "We're not sure what is causing it, but we'll send someone to replace the whole motherboard tomorrow." "OH, your currently halfway across the world on a island? No problem, we'll be there tomorrow" I really don't understand…
I really do not understand the love the XPS 13 gets. We have several here at the office. We will never get them again. They break, the keyboard is not pleasant, the machine is not really fast, two handed openings are painful when you come from a different brand, charging it takes forever, we just leave them plugged in, switching wireless to wired in linux (several distros) takes too long, did I mention the keyboard makes me want to vomit?... I think my office neighbors has broken at least 7 times. I stopped using mine as I liked my ancient MBP better, and I really do not like apple that much.
Although I do not have an alternative that I have used, I know colleagues who love their new (last three or four years old) Lenovos, like the X series.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#366Apologies in advance for being off-topic, but — is it just my perception, or has it become increasingly common over the last year or two to end questions with _in _? I vaguely associate that with SEO spam sites, and I feel a little pinch each time I see an actual person pick up that pattern. It is as if a black hat SEO trope has invaded our consciousness.
also adding my own nitpick... *its 02022
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#367You don't say where you are located, but unless you are in one of the few places where Dell doesn't offer on-site next business day support then XPS 13 is a great laptop. Their support is amazing: "We're not sure what is causing it, but we'll send someone to replace the whole motherboard tomorrow." "OH, your currently halfway across the world on a island? No problem, we'll be there tomorrow" I really don't understand…
I really do not understand the love the XPS 13 gets. We have several here at the office. We will never get them again. They break, the keyboard is not pleasant, the machine is not really fast, two handed openings are painful when you come from a different brand, charging it takes forever, we just leave them plugged in, switching wireless to wired in linux (several distros) takes too long, did I mention the keyboard m…
Idk, I'm on my 3rd XPS and I've had none of these problems. Even the keyboard I consider to be above average. I will agree that opening the lid can bit a bit difficult/awkward, but it's hardly a problem.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#368FYI, Ubuntu has a list of certified laptops: https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops
But who wants to run Ubuntu with Snaps?
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure most dev work is single threaded. Test suites can be multithreaded/multiprocess and so can compiling, just for two examples.
* IDE * Docker daemon * backend container * frontend container * database container * local web server * browser with Gitlab, Slack, Email, etc. No idea how dev work is suppsed to be mostly single-threaded.
For instance, when you send a message from the backend container to the database container during ordinary CRUD, the backend container will largely be waiting for the database to start processing. Something similar for most frontend requests - usually in dev work, you press a button, it sends an API request and awaits the response; the API request sends a message to the database and blocks on the response. The database sits around idly waiting till it receives a message, and sends something back. Then the backend postprocesses the reply and produces the response, and then the frontend postprocesses the response. There is some degree of joint action during the actual communication phases but it wouldn't put a huge load on the multithreading capacity of your CPU.
Something similar can be said for Gitlab/Slack/Email - in the background, they could easily be using the spare CPU time rather than competing for time, and you wouldn't actually notice it. But they also should spend most of their time waiting around doing nothing.
So I think the claim is specifically true for some stacks with poor test coverage.
But if you have compiled code, it should probably be compilable in parallel (and if it isn't, you should be complaining to the compiler writer and/or refactoring your code). Likewise, unit tests should in practice be runnable in parallel - if they are not, they're probably closer to integration tests. Even integration tests should be writable so that they can run in parallel, because you hope to have more than one user acting in parallel. And you generally shouldn't be testing your feature development manually. Even if you prefer to visualise your process, you can code it up in something like cypress so that you can run them later or check up why you missed this special case when the bug reports come in.
So I disagree with the original assertion, but I don't think you've provided an effective counterargument.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
#370Legion gaming laptops (and I guess all similar) are fast. If they can run games, they can run compiler. At least this is an issue for me, compiling server on my own laptop takes time if there's not enough power.