[grandalf]

If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users.

Most people want their laptop to be reasonably fast, get solid battery life, and have a nice display and ergonomics. Also important is power saving technology (sleep, hibernate, etc.) and storage size/speed.

Most commodity laptops that are competing in the raw specs wars have major deficiencies in one or more of the above areas.

If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that shows you ads on the desktop.

If you are a Linux user you take on the task of making sure your bleeding edge hardware works with linux. This is no small task and in many cases it's over a year after release that linux support for new technology becomes anything approaching reliable.

A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.

I suppose if you are a gamer there is a case to be made for running Windows on bleeding edge hardware, but such gamers are a very small percentage of laptop users.

[trurl]

> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users.

Yeah, I think they call those people developers.

> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.

Except MacBooks max out at 8GB of memory. At this point 16GB doesn't cut it anymore for my development, so MacBook Pros and iMacs are out too. I have entertained the idea of getting a Mac Pro, except they are even more woefully out of date at this point.

[paulrpotts]

I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that a developer needs some kind of massive AV workhorse with 32 GB of RAM.

Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor?

How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your laptop, including databases?

I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a big clear screen and a port to connect another big, clear screen when I'm at my desk. Since my work products are largely text files, I don't even need a large hard drive. A fast CPU helps build large codebases but since I have incremental compilation in my C/C++ toolchain, it's not like these days I spend a large part of my time compiling.

Genuinely curious -- what kind of a developer needs more than 16 GB of RAM to make a machine viable for development?

I have a Mac Pro with four hard drives and a big screen too, but I use that for audio and video production where it is helpful.

[trurl]

I am building a next generation database product. With debugging symbols enabled, the running database can easily take up 8GB in some of our unit tests. Then there is a web services layer written in Java above that. And then there is my IDE. And a web browser that leaks abysmally on Google Apps. And a bloated chat application for communicating with all my remote colleagues. At that point the OS starts spending a lot of time trying to compress pages.

I have also experimented with doing building and testing on a remote server, but the overhead of having to synchronize local changes to the remote server, rebuild, etc. tends to overwhelm the cost of debugging and iterating on individual tests.

[paulrpotts]

Ah, thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.

For what I do, which these days is mostly embedded programming, I've gotten used to the fact that even a wimpy laptop's CPU and RAM far outstrip what I had on my desktop a few years ago. I was just looking at some e-mails I sent in 1993 where I was talking about building a compressed trie structure for a database to go on CD-ROM, on a Pentium machine, and how it kept running overnight and crashing. These days it could easily fit in RAM without hitting VM and I'm not sure it would even make the fans speed up. (Hmmm, I think I might have the old data set and source; I should give it a try!)

Once in a while I have to do something horrific, like build an embedded Linux kernel with customizations on a VM... and that is punishing, so I do try to run that on a desktop box with some Xeons...

[trurl]

Oh, I definitely recognize the absurdity of the amounts of memory modern software consumes. Twenty years ago I used Linux with 256MB RAM and had pretty much the same sorts of applications running.

[gambiting]

I'm a C++ developer working in games dev, my machine has 64GB of ram and that's absolutely definitely not enough. I've got a 12-threaded Xeon and just compiling the whole project would take nearly 2 hours on a single PC, distributed it takes 20 minutes(and uses most of RAM). If I need to run my own game servers I'm running from swap constantly(the usage hovers around 90-110GB just for the server + client), we had SSDs installed specifically because of that - but I think IT is already putting together PCs just for programmers with 192 or 256GB of ram. But even working in Unity on a small project, 16GB is bare minimum.

[taylodl]

Depends on how much of the operational environment you need to run on your machine and how you're partitioning that environment. It's not unreasonable to have 3 VMs running - data tier, web tier and client tier. That's just normal app development and you can easily chew through 16 GB.

If you get into the realm of developing big data analytics solutions, machine learning algorithms or VR applications, well, 32 GB is the practical starting point and 64 GB is sounding less insane. At this point though you'll start to be inhibited by Apple's relatively anemic GPU horsepower as well as the lack of RAM.

Like anything it all depends on what you're doing.

[manicdee]

I work with a set of database, API and front end services for which I have a collection of VMs, each based in the same vagrant/puppet specs as the production hosts.

Spinning up a dev environment requires two Linux VMs and a Windows VM for the web service. Then the Visual Studio for C# development kills everything.

I would prefer to spend a bit of extra money for 32GB of RAM rather than a Windows laptop for the VS development.

[kristianp]

I guess Apple doesn't care about developers like you with above-average requirements.

They have no incentive to provide more RAM when the average IOS mobile dev only needs an existing MBP or Air. As long as every new mobile app developer is still buying a macbook, why should they bother? Maybe when people start showing up to conferences with non-apple laptops they'll start to think about upgrading!

[taylodl]

Technically the Retina iMac w/27" display now support 32GB of memory, but it's not cheap.

[trurl]

Thanks, somehow I had missed that when looking at the tech specs.

[WayneBro]

> If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that shows you ads on the desktop.

I've had more problems with hardware not working on OS X than Windows.

I've never had a problem with malware in 20 years of using Windows. The only virus I ever got was the NY Boot Virus and that came on a floppy disk.

People on HN keep talking about how "Windows is adware"...I don't see it. At all! I have been running Windows 10 on my entertainment machines since it has been released and on my workstations for the past 6 months. What exactly are you talking about?

> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well.

My Surface Pro (first version) and my Dell Venue Pro 8 both just work and extremely well. My desktop workstation just works too and it's extremely fast compared to my Mid-2012 Mac Pro that I paid twice as much for. (Although even running Windows on my Mac Pro is faster than OS X.) Also, my Surface Pro battery is lasting longer than my Early 2008 Macbook Pro battery did (although at least I could replace the latter) and my Surface Pro never shocked me in the winter time like my MBP (which froze a few times after such an occurrence).

I've also had plenty of PC laptops that have outlasted, outperformed and "just worked" better than my Mac laptops. So, your viewpoint sounds way off to me and I am suspicious as to whether you've actually used Windows for any length of time.

[bryanlarsen]

Logically, you're right.

However, when people spend a lot of money, they want to feel that they're getting a good deal, and they want to feel that they it will be useful for long enough to get their "money's worth".

It's these two mostly psychological factors that are coming into play here.

[wwweston]

> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users.

This argument works reasonably well for the "MacBook" side of the equation, but it doesn't fare so finely on the "Pro" side.