Author: Ted Roche
Posted: 2015-05-18 at 06:32:30
TL;DR: What are your criteria and recommendations for a development laptop?
I'm in the market for a replacement development latop, and would
welcome your thoughts on what your criteria are for a machine.
I'm in the market for a new machine and haven't found the perfect one
yet. Nearly all of my machines were Dell or IBM/Lenovo Business-Class
machines, Latitudes or Thinkpads, occasionally an engineering
workstation. I'm hoping to locate a refurb for a lot less than top
dollar, what with increasing power and lowering prices. If you have,
I'd like to hear what you picked and why. Here are my criteria, some
essential, some nice-to-have. I'd be curious what yours are.
15.6" screen -- 14's too small for old eyes and 17" too big to lug around
1920x1080 resolution: lots of real estate to arrange windows,
typically I'm working on the lap, no external display. Also the rare
DVD movie. No need for 3-D as I'm not a gamer, and I'd prefer plain
old simple 2-D snappy graphics (Intel 4x00-5x00) to nVidia or other
non-FOSS solution.
Keyboard: good key travel and spacing. I type for a living, 80 wpm,
lots of code, debugging, and email and documentation and even the
occasional book. Not religious about it, but Pointer Stick is pretty
awesome, and older ThinkPad trackpad/real button combos are incredibly
easy to use. Lenovo made a major screw-up in cost-reducing the
ThinkPads by messing with the touchpad and removing the extra
buttons/LEDS - volume, caps lock light, status lights, etc, and the
main reason I'm shopping around instead of adding the eighth ThinkPad
to the shop.
Rugged, rugged, rugged: I make money by using a machine that works.
All of the time. For years. We have an office of old thinkpads stacked
away, for "just in case" and nearly all of them still work. The
machine I'm on, a T60, is 8 years old and still a great machine.
Re-installing an OS and all the apps and preferences and keys and
repositories is a waste of time and always happens when the client
needs something right now. This is the cost justification for spending
$$$.
RAM: so cheap these days its doesn't make sense not to have 16 Gb.
Could live with 8.
HDD: not all that important, as nearly everything we run is mirrored
on the LAN and backed-up to the internet.
DVD: sometimes you just gotta burn a disk. I'd prefer it internal,
even though it will be used 10 times in the course of ownership,
since the "Rugged" requirement above means I'm going to get a tough
case with room to spare anyway. Nice to have. Not essential, since
externals have gotten reasonable and interconnection feasible.
OS: my clients use Windows and I have no choice but to provide some
level of support. The primary OS will be Linux, since that's what all
the web sites I run will be in, but there will have to a Windows
alternative OS, either as a VM (preferred) or to boot into. Since I've
already got two OSes in the mix, I really think this disqualifies
Apple as a contender, but I'm open to argument. Ditto for Chromebook,
although I'm tempted to stretch for the Chromebook Pixel.
Use case: I think things up and I type them down. I spend half my life
in a web browser, the other half writing code in a bash terminal,
either local or remote. My local machine typically runs Apache,
PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and I've got subsets of test data for various
client projects. All code is in Git. For support, I'm ssh'ing and/or
RDP'ing into remote machines. A staging machine is elsewhere on the
LAN where I might support large datasets. Typically little processing
on the main machine. So, I guess the truth is that the machine is just
a repository for ssh keys, hard-to-install fonts, and vim
configurations :)
Contestants: typical machines I'm considering include:
Lenovo Thinkpad T540p: 4th gen i5, 500 Gb HDD keyboard, trackpad are
problemmatic. Refurb, $660, plus I'd add $100 worth of memory. The 550
has a better trackpad, but only available new, at at $400 additional
premium.
Dell Latitude E5540: 4th Gen i5, 16 Gb RAM, $890 at Dell Outlet
System 76 gazelle: i5, 16Gb, 500 HDD, $1033 - Ubuntu pre-installed,
would need to get Win7 license, likely ActionPack or OEM. Or $1082
with their discounted i7.
So, congrats on making it to the end of my rant. Tell me what you look
for in a development machine, what I might have missed, and what you
recommend.
--
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
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