ISO new development laptop

fragicide

I need some recommendations on a new development laptop. It's been a while since I've used a laptop, but find myself wanting one for doing coding on the move. I have a budget of about $1,000 USD and am looking for ideas.

I'd ideally like to stay away from Lenovo, Acer, and Toshiba, and I'm not beyond forking out some extra cash for a Macbook Pro. However, I'd like to stay within my budget.

Basically, I'm looking for something that has the following:

8GB DDR3 RAM
Intel i7 CPU (No U models...)
13" - 15" display
128GB Internal SSD

I've looked at the Dell XPS and ASUS Zenbooks but they just aren't doing it for me. If anyone can suggest something that I may be missing, I would be grateful 🙂

BlackSheep

fragicide Why do you need a i7 ? If it's just for coding or compilin' some stuff... on a laptop you don't need a i7, go for a i5. You didn't spoke about the kind of battery / autonomy you want : 3 cells ? 6 cells ?

What OS will you use on it ? Some recent laptop will do very badly on GNU / Linux.

fragicide

BlackSheep I'd rather have the i7 simply for the hyperthreading should I decide to dabble in heavy graphics work again.

As for the OS, I'll most likely be running Ubuntu. Windows is great and all, but I do much better work on the command line 😛

Battery life is trivial. I'm always mobile, but also near a power source.

luceos

fragicide and noise or heat are those factors to consider?

Kulga

fragicide Instead of a i5 over a i7, look for a dedicated graphics card if you plan to to do graphics work.
I5 -> I7 is like +200.

You're using the terminal, you could very easily get by on a $300 laptop. I mean really, if you need to do heavy work, buy a VPS or a desktop computer and render everything on it or use parallel to have things rendered in many different locations at once. I mean in the terminal, if you're doing stuff here, there, it doesn't really matter. You know that!
Overall, I suggest going for about $400-500 for a i5, buying two 8gb of ram (it's always worth it to buy more ram for linux. I have 9.3gb cached right now 🙂), a dedicated graphics card (any cheap one possible - that will speed up graphics work much more)

Oh yeah, use terminator 😉

fragicide

luceos Heat, possibly. I do sometimes use a laptop on... gasp ... my lap

Noise, not at all a problem.

luceos

I had so many setups (on laptops) for development, I can't even list them all, including:

sshfs mounts making remote server folders mounted on the local machine
sftp synchronization
vagrant/dropbox virtualization of a full machine
local webserver

I bought a gaming laptop recently, moved to that for development due to the heavy memory usage of my vagrant at some point. But now? I went back to my samsung ultrabook. Nothing beats a local webserver, ssd, silence and speed.. It's an i5 I think.

So in the end, it all comes down to taste, but buying a more expensive, heavier laptop just because you might fiddle with graphics is - in my opinion - not smart.

fragicide

luceos that's a fair point. I am looking for something lightweight. No gaming, just strictly development.

BlackSheep

fragicide What about the Asus Zenbook UX303LN ? https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX303LN/specifications/

fragicide

BlackSheep Hmm... that looks a bit out of my budget, but definitely something I can consider if nothing else.

Thanks!

luceos

I have one of these from a few years ago, they are no longer sold in my country sadly: http://www.samsung.com/us/series-9-laptop/

accalia

it's not for everyone but I use my Chromebook Pikel quite heavily for development. It's a capable machine in its own right and using crouton combined with a full sized SD card it becomes a surprising development powerhouse.

The i5 model matches your required ram specs, but misses on the storage (easily fixed thanks to the SD card slot, which by the by is not only full size but full depth. none of this cheapout half depth the macbooks are famous for)

It's also available in i7 (the model i have) with 16GB of ram.

It comes with its own charger that will give it tons of juice, but the device is also perfectly happy to charge off of 5v 2.1A do you can get a USB C cable and charge it off of anything (it just takes a bit longer)

luceos

Pixel is not available in my country.. But it's a good alternative I agree.

accalia

luceos Pixel is not available in my country.

Country based availability of technology is a terrible :wtf:.

I've yet to see a good reason for excluding potential customers based on country of origin.

fragicide

After going over things and finances, I've decided to just splurge and get a Macbook Pro. The resale value alone down the road is a big selling point.

Also, since OSX is Unix-based, I really see no problems using the terminal and command line.

Thanks for all your help folks!