Dell XPS 13 Review

Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by ekianjo on Friday February 20, 2015 @12:03AM (#9079026)

I'm curious, but why do you need more than 8Gb for ? I can think of a few potential uses of more RAM (large video files edition, R on very, very big data sets) but 8Gb seems reasonable for most tasks. Are you really in a situation where you need 16Gb every single day ?

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by dagw on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:21AM (#9079652)

Are you really in a situation where you need 16Gb every single day?

Maybe not every single day, but easily 3 days a week. Personally I could never consider owning a primary work machine with less than 32 GB of RAM, as that is just about enough (with some swap) to do something reasonable with a moderately sized data set in reasonable time, without having to try to get too clever. That being said, I currently have an MBA with 4 GB of RAM as a secondary computer to complement my workstation at work, and that's fine for most of my day to day programming tasks.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by josteink on Friday February 20, 2015 @06:39AM (#9079996)

> Personally I could never consider owning a primary work machine with less than 32 GB of RAM, as that is just about enough (with some swap) to do something reasonable with a moderately sized data set in reasonable time

Suffice to say, you probably don't represent the average developer, or power-user. I can write code just fine without having to resort to 32GB data-sets. I think most other developers can too.

Not saying I don't acknowledge that some people may have such a need, but I don't see this is a big enough issue for enough people, to think it warrants making the already expensive developer edition even more expensive.

If you need 3-digit Gigabytes of RAM, have you considered just remoting into a server which has all the juice you need instead? In the age of the cloud, why on earth do you need all that power in your laptop? That just seems awfully backwards.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by masklinn on Friday February 20, 2015 @07:01AM (#9080051)

32GB might be somewhat excessive for mainstream developer laptops, but 16GB is not. A pair of VMs (for various MSIE versions, isolated dev environments, ...), an emulator or two (Android, iOS, …), 2-3 browsers open (with many tabs in at least one of them) and an IDE and you've blown way above 8GB working set without working on any big dataset.

I'm currently on an 8GB machine and regularly have to pare down my working set to avoid swapping.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by dagw on Friday February 20, 2015 @06:56AM (#9080033)

I don't see this is a big enough issue for enough people, to think it warrants making the already expensive developer edition even more expensive.

Sure, I agree. And I'm sure I'd be happy with this machine as secondary coding machine. But I do dream of one day getting a single laptop that covers all my needs.

have you considered just remoting into a server which has all the juice you need instead?

I do the few times I need 100+ GB of RAM, and to be honest it's a bit of a faff. Getting your tool chain set up, copying huge data sets back and forth, working out how to install proprietary software and the licensing there of. I'm unbelievably ecstatic that the option exists when I need it, but I'm equally glad every time I don't have to deal with it. Most of time my data sets aren't that big and all my work fits comfortably in 64 GB of RAM.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by deong on Friday February 20, 2015 @07:33AM (#9080133)

Yeah, I also work quite a lot with large data sets, but what I want from a laptop is for it to be really great at doing everything else. I'll ssh to a machine that cost more than my car when heavy lifting is required.

I had to sit on my hands to keep from giving Dell my credit card number reading that review.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by splix on Friday February 20, 2015 @01:52AM (#9079300)

An Java app, IntelliJ IDEA, few Docker VMs, 2 browsers (and you know how much memory Chrome eats?), few not so complex tools for development (like SourceTree, Dash, etc) - and 14Gb are used. Just checked. And I didn't run anything serious yet.

Had 8gb before, machine was swapping too much, become unresponsive, etc.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by SwellJoe on Friday February 20, 2015 @05:18AM (#9079802)

I run into the 8GB limit on my laptop pretty regularly. Mostly due to VMs for testing and building for other systems. But I also recently found that running Android Studio, plus the emulator, plus my usual stuff pretty much shuts my machine down. I had to use a VT to kill my mail client, the VMs, and some other processes, in order to get the mouse and keyboard responding in X again. Java memory usage is kinda crazy.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by tburns on Friday February 20, 2015 @11:48AM (#9081245)

This is my use case for having 16GB on my laptop as well. Being able to simulate the network architecture of our infrastructure with a bunch of little 512MB-1GB VMs is a nice thing to be able to do.

If I'm not doing development with a cluster of VMs though, I rarely go over 8GB.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by IanOzsvald on Friday February 20, 2015 @06:13AM (#9079946)

I use a Dell E6420, as a data scientist I kept breaking the default 8GB so upgraded to 16GB which is almost always fine. I won't go >8GB most days but when I do, I need it (else I lose hours trying to partition data and think about ways to subselect). 16GB for data science seems a sensible minimum for the folk I know. I'm on Linux Mint 17 (Ubuntu 14.04) + Python.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by gambiting on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:49AM (#9079717)

I work in games industry(as a programmer) and my machine has 64GB of ram. I hit swap pretty much every day, and our IT is currently in process of upgrading all machines to 128GB. In my own time I develop games in Unity and I used to run out of ram on an 8GB machine - upgrade to 16GB was an absolute necessity. I would not even consider buying a laptop with 8GB nowadays.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by freehunter on Friday February 20, 2015 @09:34AM (#9080542)

I have 16GB in my work laptop, and I find myself wishing for more constantly. I support a Linux application that wants 24 GB of RAM for itself. I'm also client-facing, so I have a Windows VM in order to run Microsoft Office. 16GB of RAM is plenty to run RHEL and Windows, but not quite enough to run RHEL, Windows, and a VM of the software I support.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by MetaCosm on Friday February 20, 2015 @11:02AM (#9080935)

Indeed I am, my "minimum useful" amount is 16GB -- my desktops are 128GB, and my current "monster laptop" is 64GB. The in-flight state on the software I work on can get well over 8GB with our test dataset.

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Re:Dell XPS 13 Review by ako on Friday February 20, 2015 @01:28AM (#9079239)

I have 8gb and get warnings quite often that I'm running out of memory: windows 7, ubuntu vm with oracle or Postgres, IntelliJ, Firefox, chrome, office, R. Both R and the virtual machine take 2gb+, IntelliJ 1gb+...

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