Dell's latest XPS 14z (14") and 15z (15.6") are designed after MBP. You can easily get an i7/8G RAM/1080FHD screen/750G 7200RPM HDD XPS below $1000 ( http://bizspeaking.com/?q=dell+xps+15z ) compared to Apple's $2199 i7/4G RAM/1440x900 screen/750G 5400RPM MBP. How about the OS? Give all the RAM to the MacOS VM. And if you sneer at VM, with the $1000+ saved, upgrade to 16G RAM / 512G SSD and still have some change left for beer.
Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
31–40 of 84 posts
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#32You should consider buying an mb air instead of an mb pro. The ssd makes it unbelievable fast and paired with an extra display it's a power house for development. the mb air is just a solid piece of hardware. I have no regrets buying one so far.
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#33The hardware is definitely solid, whether you go for macbook pro, which has faster cpu but needs aftermarket SSD, or macbook air that is slower but has SSD integrated and has better resolution. The OS ... depends on what are you developing. Mac OS is about as good for consuming stuff as windows 7, i.e. pretty good. For developing web apps, with textmate and github you're golden. But for full scale unix coding, you ca…
Homebrew is awesome to solve the gcc issue and get lots of other packages without messing with the system.
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#34> I'm ok using Linux too, but I'd rather spend more time developing and less time messing with driver issues and a crappier user experience like I tend to in Linux.
Issues 5-6 years ago. No longer a problem.
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#35It all comes down to the development you like to do. There was a time when i really didnt like paying extra cash for a macbook (that at the time) seemed like it was more expensive then the equivalent spec'd windows laptop for no reason.
However now, i cant do without my macbook because for web and mobile you really dont need anything else and the frameworks can be configured locally without silly things like cygwin.
Alot of the developer tools are built in and you can do iPhone and android development also (obviously on windows or linux you cant do iPhone dev ) which means if you ever do decide you need to develop an iPhone app as part of your offering you are going to have to get a macbook anyway.
The only downfall is if your still doing any blackberry development you can't do it on a mac though you could always circumvent that by using a VM.
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#36I've recently switched from a MBP to a System76 laptop, after about 5 years of running MacOS X, and I couldn't be much happier. The new MBPs are extremely harsh to type on between the sharp edge and the keyboard. I ultimately had to buy a Kinesis just to use it because the MBP destroyed my fingers. Most people don't have that problem, but it's nice to be able to actually use my laptop as a portable device again.
I also really don't like the direction Apple is taking MacOS. Lion chugs resources and does odd things like disable my second monitor when apps go into fullscreen mode. I don't really care much for the direction of the Mac app store, too.
LinuxMint has been great. It's the first time I've really run a Linux desktop since about 2003. What I miss is the polished apps. E.g., Adium is much better than Pidgin and Postbox or Sparrow are much better than Thunderbird. But, overall, I've been pleasantly surprised. Plus, I have 16 GB RAM now (could've gone up to 32 GB) and the OS consumes a lot less of RAM in general.
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#37> I'm ok using Linux too, but I'd rather spend more time developing and less time messing with driver issues and a crappier user experience like I tend to in Linux. Issues 5-6 years ago. No longer a problem.
This really depends on what combination of Linux distro and laptop you use.
If you install a user friendly distro like Ubuntu 12.04 yes, everything or almost everything works as expected.
Try to install CentOS on a shiny new laptop and let me know if everything works without messing with a lot of configuration files.
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#38> I'm ok using Linux too, but I'd rather spend more time developing and less time messing with driver issues and a crappier user experience like I tend to in Linux. Issues 5-6 years ago. No longer a problem.
Ever tried editing some multimedia? From editing some video to doing some MIDI/audio project? Nearly impossibru (sic) without much much fiddling and inferior to the Mac/Win situation. Certain kinds of development also demand those tasks frequently (from game to multimedia, to web, to mobile development).
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#39Well, if you want to be trouble free and use your machine for coding I a think Mac is a good choice. But I would wait for 1-2 months to see what the new Macs will offer.
You really need to consider what kind of work are you going to do with your new machine. If for e.g. you are interested in GPU computing then, at least for now, a Mac computer is not a good choice.
If you are interested in having the best SSD and RAM on your laptop you can buy your Mac with the default configuration and simply buy more RAM and a SSD from Crucial, for example. From a economical point of view is cheaper to buy a 512 GB SSD from Crucial than to buy your Mac with a 512 GB SSD, same goes for RAM.
Re: Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?
#40> I'm ok using Linux too, but I'd rather spend more time developing and less time messing with driver issues and a crappier user experience like I tend to in Linux. Issues 5-6 years ago. No longer a problem.
Ever tried editing some multimedia? From editing some video to doing some MIDI/audio project? Nearly impossibru (sic) without much much fiddling and inferior to the Mac/Win situation. Certain kinds of development also demand those tasks frequently (from game to multimedia, to web, to mobile development).
You could be right here, but he will be developing code on his pc, so for majority of us who don't deal with audio/video this is a non-issue. Still, for simple non-professional video editing http://www.openshotvideo.com/ - should be more than enough. I have no idea about audio, but http://ardour.org/ looks good.
Also when we are at professional tools, things like Autodesk Flare, Flame etc. all run EXCLUSIVELY on linux - so thats not true that you are only left with mac or windows for "real work". Although I admit that most cheap tools will not often have no native versions for linux.
http://lmms.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php - LMMS is also worth noting - mean those tools might not fit your needs but it unfair to make impression there will be problems with general multimedia tools.