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Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

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Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#751

Post by TheCycoONE »

prewett wrote: post #433
rmbyrro wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Mac seems to attract so fanatic behavior? They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth". I think this is a result of some marketing tactics Apple employed for decades, and it only pushes me away from this brand.

Macs have a certain set of features which is not even close to being matched by any other laptop, as far as I'm aware. Not everyone values these features, and for them, the Mac is just overpriced. - solid and beautiful chassis, no plastic-y uninspired 2008-Dell design here. - large, beautiful, high-DPI screen looks great and has crisp text. You can seamless rescale the UI to get effectively a 17" resolution or 13", d…

Just because you brought it up, sleep hasn't just worked for me on MacOS. I use to have a problem where it wouldn't connect to an external monitor again after sleep. I currently have a problem where my external keyboard isn't recognized until I unplug it and plug it back in.

Didn't have that problem with another keyboard on the same MacBook, and I haven't had that problem with the same keyboard on a Windows machine.

I have mac, linux, and windows machines at home and in the words of Three Dead Trolls "every OS sucks"

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#752

Post by incanus77 »

tshaddox wrote: post #684
rmbyrro wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Mac seems to attract so fanatic behavior? They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth". I think this is a result of some marketing tactics Apple employed for decades, and it only pushes me away from this brand.

Consider the possibility that people can like Macs for reasons entirely unrelated to Apple's marketing tactics. Reasons can include things most people would agree are legitimate qualities to look for in computers, like build quality, display quality, keyboard quality, performance, battery life, etc. Those seem to me as more legitimate and less "fanatical" reasons to prefer computers from a particular manufacturer tha…

Here's a vote for a twenty year, seven Mac user who buys for those reasons, not the marketing or wanting to fit in. In fact, circa 2005, I got the side-eye for wanting to get on a cafe's wifi or, god forbid, print something at FedEx Kinko's from my Mac.

For me — FOR ME — it's a great platform that lets me focus on all sorts of things that I want to accomplish with computers.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#753

Post by ajb »

tsak wrote: post #324
ajb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tuxedo pulse15 is great. Only issue I have so far is that I have a crumb stuck under the shift key and haven't figured out how to get it out without damaging the key. It's a very flat keyboard which may not be for everyone.

Have you tried compressed air? I had a similar problem with an old 12" MacBook with the old super shallow keyboard and compressed air helped me blow crumbs out.

That just worked! Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#754

Post by swozey »

barbacoa wrote: post #749
swozey wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unique devices is definitely a concern! I wasn't sure when I got my Garmin watch if I'd be able to update it from my mac. Thankfully I can.

I had to connect a work Macbook to Ethernet. It didn't have a port so I bought a no-name brand USB-to-RJ45 adapter off Amazon. Come to find macOS doesn't have driver support for the adapter even though Windows and Linux are both plug and play. And I wasn't willing to do some backdoor process to install drivers on a work laptop. I had to buy a Apple branded adapter, which was 2x the price and only USB 2 vs the other o…

I have a random off-amazon 2.5gbps usb ethernet adapter on my M1 and it works great. I did specifically make sure someone said it worked on a mac, but wasn't sure about on ARM.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#755

Post by resonious »

OJFord wrote: post #333
resonious wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow. Indeed I haven't experienced this. How's the battery drain while suspended? I can't help but wonder if you get better suspend in exchange for...everything segfaulting.

I haven't noticed that it's been bad, but then I've had more to worry about... I have the same CPU (and, I thought the same config...) on my work laptop and no problem with battery drain there; I use 'hybrid-sleep' (suspend to swap & RAM, resume from the latter if possible but tolerate power loss). It sounds like you might be using 'shallow' or 's2idle' (suspend to idle) sleep mode? You might need to write 'deep' to…

That makes sense. Thanks for the tip, too - I might give it a shot. If I start getting segfaults then I'll know what happened!

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#756

Post by aunty_helen »

sfhdfhsdsdfh wrote: post #739
aunty_helen wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server side dev here, I use mac. I picked up using mac when I was working in a company making hf forex systems where everyone used a mac. Why? Because Linux desktop is garbage (I daily one now too) and gets in the way. Mac you can do anything you need to do in Linux, open terminal nooo problems buddy. brew install whatever you want then switch to a nice interface with a good touchpad that you don't have to half compi…

> Therefore, if my linux laptop was to die (like one of my dev's linux laptops did on Monday night) and then I was to miss a day of work, I could afford the difference between a linux craptop and a mac in lost productivity. As a Linux laptop user with an overbearing asshat of a boss, I fucking love this misconception. Getting my working environment set back up after a fresh install is a git clone and 2 minute Ansible…

Some people have very basic setups and use everything out of the box and that's fine. I could have an editor with git checked out and publish code in probably 20 minutes.

But there's so much extra stuff to have everything functioning like keymap, licensing, vpn, restoring file backups, password manager, slack, web browser with security / personalisation settings, aliases, zshrc, ssh keys, every other program that I need to function as a dev (zoom etc). At a speedrun my local machine would take more than 2 hours to setup. That would be after I sourced a replacement, installed whatever os.

As for my dev missing the day, that wouldn't be a happening thing. If he wants to take time off he's entitled to but turning up for work means turning up ready to go. I handed him my spare linux laptop and told him to fix his one in his own time. No B players on my team.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#757

Post by mvkel »

Freaken wrote: post #276

I can vouch for the Framework. It doesn't feel beta at all. I'm running Xubuntu 21.10 on it an it rocks. Someone created a repo with salt scripts which works all the kinks of the laptop under Ubuntu. The only thing I needed it for was to fix the touchpad issue after resume from sleep (it would be at max acceleration) and to enable hibernate (just note that you must disable secure boot first). https://github.com/light…

It doesn't feel beta, but requires salt scripts to make it work correctly?

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#758

Post by taneq »

scns wrote: post #743
falcolas wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why Mac seems to attract so fanatic behavior? The same reason console wars exist. If there are multiple choices, and it's not practical to take/use/buy all the options, people feel the need to justify the choice that they did make. When someone's starting from a defensive position, unemotional rationality is uncommon. AKA, it's human nature.

In one word: Tribalism.

Ugh, tribalism sucks. I can’t believe those tribalists are so tribal, us non-tribalists are much better. /s

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#759

Post by supreme_berry »

emptyfile wrote: post #409
kayodelycaon wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> result of some marketing tactics Apple employed for decades Or perhaps people really like macOS and their value system is different. I don't think a lot of developers are buying macs due to marketing. Also, Linux attracts the same fanatic behavior. If you like linux, you don't notice see how many people are pushing it. If you like macOS, you're more likely to notice the people pushing linux because you disagree wit…

>I don't think a lot of developers are buying macs due to marketing. I've never seen a developer with a macbook in my country. The idea sounds absurd. Unless you need Final Cut or whatever, Apple is considered a status brand in many parts of the world.

The dumbest comment in a thread. MacBooks are default developer laptops over the world, even at Google.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

#760

Post by supreme_berry »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #626
gzer0 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doubting your expensive purchase Except, there is not a single Windows/Intel based laptop that can offer the same performance as say, for example, an M1 Macbook air ($750). There really is no comparison and there is nothing that comes close on the Windows side at that price point. If there is, please link me because I would love to know. M1 has made Macbooks not only superior in performance, but also more economica…

To provide a counter argument, the base spec M1 MacBook Air is 1130 Euros on Apple EU website, not $750, and that's with a pitiful 8Gigs of RAM and 256Gig SSD which, IMHO that SSD space is what phones come equipped with these days, and too low for a dev machine/daily driver computer, without needing to ductape a slower external USB SSD to your laptop, and 8Gigs of RAM is too low for the year 2022 + futureproofing a c…

You need to refresh your knowledge because macbooks have fastest ssd on the market so the ram and ssd memory is shared. You can run apps that require 64gb of ram with same performance as with native 64gb ram
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