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Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#501
post #454

I'm working on Xiaomi Notebook Pro 15" i7-8550U/16GB/256SSD (+ one empty slot for ssd)/Nvidia MX150. I'm using it with Ubuntu for python development and it costed me around 1200$. Battery life is around 8h of work in PyCharm (Jetbrains IDE based on the same technology as android studio). I know that some people overclock gpu under windows because of cooling capacity. I'm overally very satisfied and recommend it if yo…

I'm considering buying the exact model as it seems that has the closes form to a MBP trackpad.Is 3/4 finger swiping working? mainly for the workspace switching. I'm guessing there is option/support to use it, but don't know if Ubuntu supports that out of the box.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

#502

I went through this last year. I looked at Macbook Pro, Dell XPS15 and Thinkpad T470P. In the end I went for the T470P (i7-7700HQ (4 core/8 thread) w/ 2560x1440 screen, 16GB of RAM (upgraded myself to 32GB)) and the bigger battery (pretty much no optional with a 35W TDP processor). I tried the XPS15 but the keyboard was bad and the fit and finish wasn't awesome. I've had zero issues with linux support or the machine…

This!! I couldn't agree enough. I went with the T470p, i7700HQ, 32GB RAM, and 1TB SSD. This this is amazing. I unfortunately must dual boot just in case I need to use software or services that require Windows. I just wiped their default installation with Windows 10 Education edition, gave it 256GB of space, then installed Arch on the other partition. I mainly use Arch and have only used Windows for the first day or t…

my 2c on T470p I had a change to compare T470P and P50 with same config. Benchmarks are very similar, so no diff. there. I own a P50 and colleague has the T470p and the biggest diff is the size of notebook of course,but what I hate on P50 is the keyboard offset b/c of the numpad keys. It's hard to type with arms straight and screen at center, so there is always a slight angle to that .. 8h+ daily work on that and you start to feel the strain on that. So wouldn't go with p50 if i could choose now. On other hand 470p is 14" and keyboard is symmetric (no numpad) so much better ergonomics, but the fan noise and heat that this notebook creates is more than usual. I guessing because of the smaller form factor they were not able to cram a better colling system. So on idle this thing just blast hot air like crazy. When we do team work and sit next to each other, it blows so much hot air that i need to move further away,b/c it burn my hand from the fan duct. So can't imagine what will it do in full load and in summer...
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