Dell XPS 13 Review

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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