Ask HN: MacBook Pro still preferred laptop for non-MS development?

I've been using a 15" MBP for a little over a year. I added an aftermarket OCZ Vertex 3 SSD since it was faster and cheaper than what was available from Apple at the time (not sure if they've expanded their options) and some after-market RAM for price reasons. I've found it to be the best machine for my use. I've got Mac software (I do a lot of front-end graphics design work), and Windows when I want it (via Parallels) and enough of a Linux/Unix feel for my purposes with terminal-based stuff.

If I had to replace it, I'd get another MBP ... new ones are due out soon .... likely before June, so wait if you can if that's what you decide to buy.

>I started a lengthy reply before realizing you're just going to continue to pick sentence by sentence, ignore the spirit of the discussion

Huh? Was there some overall spirit I missed, besides a general frustration with Apple's direction overall and the latest OS X?

To that frustration one cannot reply anything, because it's vague and subjective. But one can reply to its constituents, or "pick sentence by sentence".

I take a little offense to the accusation, because technical arguments are responded to "sentence by sentence" (i.e measurable issue by measurable issue), not with generic wand having. What could have I said about the overall theme of "Apple's direction"? One doesn't even know what it means until it is broken down into specific actions and problems.

>I'm confused as to what you're trying to win though.

How about nothing? I read some statement that Lion is resource hungry and slow, and I responded to the contrary. It's a technical question, not a competition. I also tried to make heads or tails of what this dissatisfaction with Apple's direction could entail --it seemed to revolve around this Lion is slow thing too.

>* The benchmarks you provide are useless because they're synthentic. No one runs one task at a time (well, unless you use the new fullscreen mode :-P). None of the benchmarks have anything to with the task of programming, which is what the original topic was about.*

I wouldn't call those benchmarks useless. How one app runs should be indicative of how many of them run, on successive versions of the OS. Except if Apple changed the Lion's scheduler so that despite one task at a time running the same or faster, when running many tasks the performance get worse. Well, with Darwin's code being available, I guess we can check this also. In any case, anecdotal evidence with no numbers is worse than a synthetic benchmark.

As for the "task of programing", when you program you normally run "one task at a time". Mainly XCode, or Vim/TextMate. And then, after you wrote some stuff, a compiler or interpreter. Other apps running, like a terminal, are of negligible impact. Isn't programming, 99% of the time, one of the LESS resource hungry operations?

I'm a programmer too --the heaviest thing I use is a VM, in which I test my code. Seems to go along just fine with 4GB (1GB allocated to the Centos VM).

>I'd imagine if you stay under the upper bound on load, the performance is roughly on par. But, I can make an 8 GB MBP start swapping like crazy in about 5 minutes.

Alright, can you share the process? That would be easy to reproduce, or not, on SL.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. I'm still trying to decide if I'm just being trolled. But no, when I program, I have a lot more going on. I have Postgres, Cassandra, and redis doing some work, another JVM instance running RubyMine or IDEA, possibly another JVM instance for the test runner, and maybe a VM. Nor do I shut down every other app on the system, so my email, chat clients, and browser windows are all open in the background. Usually a browser is open and available on the second screen so I can verify the results of my work (Web product) or reference API documentation. That workload in no way is represented by a Photoshop rendering test where that's the only task being run.

In any event, I no longer own a Mac. It would be an assault on the scientific process for me to provide steps for an experiment from memory and possibly use imprecise language or miss a step. Moreover, I fail to see what it would even gain in this case, since neither of us could do anything about the results. FWIW, I did switch to Linux natively on my MBP before outright replacing it and found I hardly ever swapped, so I exhausted my options to rule out bad hardware. I'm quite certain it was the OS, but even if it wasn't and I'm just a fool, at least I'm a happy fool with my switch and that's good enough for me.

I have not heard mention of a couple of things that are why I will always stay with Mac after starting from an XT PC all the way through Windows 7 on a Dell.

To me, one of the most amazing features of the MBP is the track pad. I never connect a mouse to my PC, and I do Visio and something called Netformx DesignXpert, which require very precise positioning. If you get a MBP or the TrackPad accessory for any other Mac, and you force yourself to learn it for a few days (like a Blackberry user going to iPhone), I believe you too will be sold. Even if I spend 80% of my day in a VM Windows 7 instance, the built-in MBP track pad is better than any mouse or trackpad I have ever used.

Secondly, I believe people are full of it when they say you spend a premium on a MBP. HP had a PC laptop similar in construction of a MBP (solid metal casing, not sure if aluminum), and it cost more than the MBP. If you compare Apples to Apples HW-wise from the enclosure, to the screen, to the keyboard touch, to the trackpad rather than just the GHz rating on the CPU, I believe you will find that the MBP price is very competitive for what you are getting.

If you just want the fastest thing you can get and you do not care if it is made from cheap plastic and is fragile as all get out, and has poor screen resolution, you probably do not want to bother with Apple.

Thanks, I've actually used Linux from ... 1999, hopefully I'm still sane even if I need to use CentOS for RedHat compatibility on one of my shiny new laptops.