Ask HN: What's the best laptop for development now?

Re:Ask HN: What's the best laptop for development now? by richardknop on Thursday June 15, 2017 @06:38AM (#14559192)

I'd still hesitantly say Macbook Pro. This might change if the next iteration won't come with 32GB RAM option. Especially if you are working on large platforms with many services and need to recreate local development environment by running dozens of containers. Plus you need to have your IDE open, several Chrome tabs with documentation, Slack, mail app. It's getting difficult with 16GB memory, often using around 10GB with idle system.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the best laptop for development now? by twoquestions on Thursday June 15, 2017 @08:09AM (#14559617)

All this waste of memory turns my stomach. It's sad that it takes one of the most powerful personal computers made with a ton of RAM to make modern software, effectively locking out those who can't afford this.

What value is gained by such a large memory footprint for all this stuff which isn't really an innovation from capability we had in 2007?

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Re:Ask HN: What's the best laptop for development now? by richardknop on Thursday June 15, 2017 @08:53AM (#14559898)

Modern software is very complex unfortunately. Especially with proliferation of PaaS like kubernetes and container technology. You often need to have local version of entire PaaS running to be able to effectively debug problems or test new features. Plus all different services like sql/nosql databases, key value stores, message queues, web servers etc.

Of course, some people will say why are you using IDE? I hear this often from hardcore vim users. "Just use vim". But that realistically doesn't save much memory and Chrome is another memory hog. And what if you do some mobile work and need to open Android Studio or XCode, another several GBs of memory needed just for that.

Also don't forget about the whole suite of collaboration tools used at work which we didn't really have before like Slack, Dropbox, JIRA, Google Docs, Github, JIRA. You will have all of these opened either in browser or as standalone apps to be more productive.

People with powerful computers will be more effective. You can do almost everything on older less advanced computer but you will be less productive than somebody with newest tech.

I remember in 2011 working for a company in London where every developer workstation had 64GB RAM. That was 7 years ago so I am surprised 16GB is considered as too much in 2017.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the best laptop for development now? by freehunter on Thursday June 15, 2017 @09:24PM (#14565929)

It's often a choice. Plenty of people develop great software on less hardware. Your life gets easier the more RAM you have, but you don't absolutely need it unless you're doing something specialized where your toolkit is larger than normal.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the best laptop for development now? by Slaul on Thursday June 15, 2017 @08:27AM (#14559730)

It's just different tools for the same job. I could build a shed with a hammer, nails, and a handsaw but with a little extra money I could go get more specialized tools that may make me more effective.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the best laptop for development now? by good_vibes on Thursday June 15, 2017 @12:38PM (#14561950)

what ways can you optimize RAM usage?

I have a 2016 MPB with 8gb that works well but still lags sometimes. I suspect having Chrome with multiple tabs is a problem but I don't think Safari would be any better. Or would it?

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Re:Ask HN: What's the best laptop for development now? by freehunter on Thursday June 15, 2017 @09:16PM (#14565896)

Safari is far better on RAM but it's only an option if it supports the features you need. Unfortunately a couple of tools I use don't work well with Safari, so I had to switch to Chrome. Never saw OSX's "you've run out of memory" message before then.

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