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I need to buy laptop
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Programming
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Buy the cheapest MacBook model you can find with an M-series chip and as much RAM as you can stomach the cost for.
I'd say 8gb is barrrrre minimum for doing app development. You'll want 16gb.
Listen, I'm the last person you'd expect to recommend a Mac. I am an Android guy. No other Apple products in my place.
...but I've owned every top end model from pretty much every relevant PC manufacturer just trying to find something as reliable, hassle free, and well built as my work Mac and it just doesn't exist.
The MacBooks are just in a whole other class. The battery life, the standby time, the speed of those M1/2 chips, runs cool and quiet.
I'm neutral on MacOS. It tends to stay out of my way. I don't use any of the Apple apps. It is usually stable as hell. My work MBP currently has an up time of 68 days without a reboot, and the only reason it rebooted last time was for security patches.
Build quality is unmatched, screen is great, trackpad is still a generation ahead of anything else, keyboard is great.
I accept my fate, Fediverse. Roast away
Nothing wrong with recommending a Mac. I'm not a Mac guy myself but I am pretty productive with one.
I’m not here to “roast” but M chips aren’t fully supported for everything a software engineer could be compiling/running. At the current moment, they’re not quite as well-supported in every single way possible like an x86 chip would be for dev environments (even though we all really want them to be).
I second the Mac recommendation. I use Linux on my desktop, but use Mac for laptop, after 6 years of using MBP (I still use my mid-2015 15" MBP for mobile development and day to day work), I can vouch for their quality (but skip the 2017, 2018, butterfly keyboard + touchbar crap, our company have buttload of those broken). Their M1/M2 battery life is just out of this world.
If OP worry about spending big and having buyers remorse, I recommend MBP.
I have an x86 MacBook.
How well do the M-series MacBooks work if you want to run Windows or Linux in a VM?
From what I’ve read: not well.
I do a substantial amount of software development inside a Linux VM on an M2 Pro. Runs fine. The guest OS is AArch64 too.
I use Lima for this.
I should have been a bit more specific: How well do the M-Series run an x86 guest OS?
I've heard not well too. But don't personally know anyone who has experience with this.
This thread, Windows 11 for Arm runs unbelievably fast, seems to say that Windows ARM (not x86) runs well and it emulates x86. One person says well, one person says garbage.
Back to OP's question - I have a two MacBooks and one HP Windows laptop. I much prefer the MacBook hardware, but am 50/50 on the virtue of the OSs. Windows having WSL2 is a big benefit. That said, I'd probably buy another MacBook as they do seem to last a long time, I'm writing this on a 2018 MacBook, and like the Apple integration.
The stack overflow survey showed 33% of devs are using MacOS. You won't (or shouldn't) be roasted for recommending a mac.
Same. I haven't used a Mac seriously since my 2004ish G5 power mac.. I've been on Linux pretty much exclusively for 20 years. My current job gave me a new apple silicon Macbook though and it's almost unbelievable how good of a machine that is. I think 90% of that comes down to the chip but still... The software is still mostly just fine but the chip is in a class of its own.