Ask HN: What laptop to buy?

[seanalex]

What does everyone use as their primary development laptop?

I'm in the market looking for a new laptop that would be smaller than 15" and is geared towards development above anything else. Lightweight and fast is the key.

My IDE of choice right now is Visual Studio 2012 and I don't plan on doing any gaming on it. Anywhere <= $1000 is ideal with SSD/1920x1080 (at least). No DVD drive.

Any suggestions?

[jfb]

Right now, because I'm spending a lot of time flying across the continent, my dev laptop is a maxed out 11" MBA. It's a little light on RAM (only 8GB) and the screen, while a decent PPI, is too small. But I plug it into a Thunderbolt display and bam, it's plenty enough for day to day work.

Of course, it was a lot more than $1000.

[seanalex]

A macbook air sounds great, but I am concerned with the screen-size as well. I would definitely need more than 11" as I wouldn't be using an LCD monitor 95% of the time.

It definitely seems like the macbook air is the go-to lightweight development machine these days.

[benologist]

The 13.3" is 1440x900 which gives you a little bit extra screen space. Asus Zenbook and Sony's VAIO ultrabook both look really nice, also in the 13.3" range.

I work primarily from my 13.3" screen in a wide variety of IDEs, you get used to it.

[jfb]

I love mine, but once I get settled I'm going to switch to a desktop. That said, I don't know how well the Haswell MBAs work in Windows; I would assume that it'd be fine, but check with someone who actually knows?

[T_T]

macbook air 11 inch.

[seanalex]

Yeah, I've considered a macbook air. It's definitely in my top choices. It's been so long since I've looked at laptops, but surely there are cheaper options with similar hardware right?

[jfb]

Keep in mind that with these custom designed laptops, price is determined by volume, and by logistics, and Apple sells a lot more of these class of machines, and has by far the best logistics -- you're not going to be able to get much cheaper than Apple in the same class of machine any longer.

[seanalex]

Very good point. I guess the days of same-hardware laptops being 50% less in price are gone. I would love to just jump in and get the 13.3 macbook air, but $1200 for the 128GB SSD and 8 GB ram is just a bit above my budget.

[jfb]

Yeah, the "Apple soaks you for 50%" meme is largely invalid these days. FULL DISCLOSURE: I work for Apple.

[27182818284]

Why would you choose a MacBook Air if your IDE of choice is Visual Studio? There are PC laptops that are also sexy, though I do think Apple's are the sexiest. Look into some of the thinner Lenovo products.

[seanalex]

Yeah I guess it might not be the best if I would have to run a VM on it.