Laptop Reccomendations
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@scottalanmiller said:
@s.hackleman said:
Let me get this helmet on, and a fire suit... Ok..
I have been really happy with my Macbook Pro...
Go ahead, let me have it.
I have one. Don't like it. Here are some of my concerns...
- It is slow. REALLY slow. Slower than several year old, 20% the cost HP laptops that I have.
- It's heavy. Way too heavy for a lot of travel.
- It's fragile. Bump anything and it dents. You have to seriously baby this thing.
- It overheats way too easily.
- The magnetic power cord can't hold itself in and if you don't set it up to be held in, it's own weight practically unplugs it.
- For an large laptop it lacks a lot of plugs that you would find handy to have.
- Crashes more than any other OS I've used since and including Windows XP. It seems to be equivalent to Windows 2000 in that regards.
- Battery life is really poor.
- Price
I have none of those issues with my MacBook Pro Late 2011 model. Well none except price.
- Battery life is great
- Crashes less than my Windows 8.1 machine
- Power cable works perfectly as designed dot hold itself in
- I recently had an overheating issue and they replaced the fan. Prior to that, it has never overheated
- I have dropped this thing a lot. Nothing is broken. Minor dents on the bottom, no more than I would expect on any laptop with a metal case
- The MBP is not designed to be light weight. That is what the MacBook and MacBook Air are designed more towards.
- Applications open when I launch them. Nothing feels slow. It was slow when I had Parallels runnings Windows also, but resource monitoring showed that to be HDD. Changed to an SSD and no more issues there.
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@JaredBusch said:
- Battery life is great
Mine is a 2015 model. How much battery life are you getting? I get 2.5 hours tops. My 2012 HP that I got for $900 goes like eight hours.
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at 4 years old, I get 4-5 hours
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@JaredBusch said:
- I have dropped this thing a lot. Nothing is broken. Minor dents on the bottom, no more than I would expect on any laptop with a metal case
Yes, it's not Apple's metal case design, it is that it is a metal case that is the issue. This has taught me to get plastic from here on in. More durable, cheaper and lighter. Win/win/win.
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@JaredBusch said:
at 4 years old, I get 4-5 hours
Wow, that has really changed. I know an office full of people on the same model as me and sub three hours is standard.
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Is the MBP designed for portability or as a mobile workstation? That makes a huge difference on battery life.
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Why are people buying MBPs? Most people don't need MBPs for performance, a MBA (Got one
) works wonders for most tasks. -
I use a MBP because I run a full Windows development session at times.
When purchased, I was also supposed to start learning Apple's language for iOS development, but that changed do to client changes. -
@Dashrender said:
Is the MBP designed for portability or as a mobile workstation? That makes a huge difference on battery life.
It's a mobile workstation. The Air is the super portable one. But it feels much less portable to me than some of its competitors that I have used. All laptops have portability as some portion of their functionality. Otherwise, it would be a desktop
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The display of an MBA might be to small for a full time task driver.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Why are people buying MBPs? Most people don't need MBPs for performance, a MBA (Got one
) works wonders for most tasks.Full development environment needs to be able to be fired up. It's huge. An Air won't even run it
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For the non programmer. What is a development environment?
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Nearly always I would prefer an MBA and I'm going to push for one at my next refresh. I need the big screen, though, so that is an issue. Trying to figure out how to deal with that when mobile.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
For the non programmer. What is a development environment?
Everything needed to do programming. In some cases, that's just notepad. But in this case, I need a full environment including running web servers, load balancers, several databases, copies of live data, tons of applications, etc. It uses a ton of memory and CPU power.
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Again, not a programmer but...
What's wrong with using those resources remotely so that the laptop becomes just an interface to do the work? A more reliable desktop/server with far better performance so that programming goes quicker surely is the way to go?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Nearly always I would prefer an MBA and I'm going to push for one at my next refresh. I need the big screen, though, so that is an issue. Trying to figure out how to deal with that when mobile.
This is what I figured. But if you need a mobile workstation, plugging in shouldn't really be a problem for you, at most a minor inconvenience. Though I can see the argument about not wanting to have to own/carry two devices around for difference uses. We just aren't there yet.... Unless you are saying your $900 HP is there and gives you everything you want, power and long battery life.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Again, not a programmer but...
What's wrong with using those resources remotely so that the laptop becomes just an interface to do the work? A more reliable desktop/server with far better performance so that programming goes quicker surely is the way to go?
That's how I would design it. For reasons, we don't handle it that way.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@s.hackleman said:
Let me get this helmet on, and a fire suit... Ok..
I have been really happy with my Macbook Pro...
Go ahead, let me have it.
I have one. Don't like it. Here are some of my concerns...
- It is slow. REALLY slow. Slower than several year old, 20% the cost HP laptops that I have.
- It's heavy. Way too heavy for a lot of travel.
- It's fragile. Bump anything and it dents. You have to seriously baby this thing.
- It overheats way too easily.
- The magnetic power cord can't hold itself in and if you don't set it up to be held in, it's own weight practically unplugs it.
- For an large laptop it lacks a lot of plugs that you would find handy to have.
- Crashes more than any other OS I've used since and including Windows XP. It seems to be equivalent to Windows 2000 in that regards.
- Battery life is really poor.
- Price
I can honestly say other than price, I haven't had any of those issues, and I have switched teams. I get at least 4-5 hours battery life. I have a Windows 7 Ult. VM with 2 processors, and a Ubuntu 14 VM with 1 running full time, and I haven't had to wait on processor or disc on my end once. Other than large software builds. More plugs would be nice, but it hasn't been a issue yet. I would suggest a Mac running VM fusion as a great development system. Sorry to hear you have been so unhappy with yours.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Nearly always I would prefer an MBA and I'm going to push for one at my next refresh. I need the big screen, though, so that is an issue. Trying to figure out how to deal with that when mobile.
This is what I figured. But if you need a mobile workstation, plugging in shouldn't really be a problem for you, at most a minor inconvenience. Though I can see the argument about not wanting to have to own/carry two devices around for difference uses. We just aren't there yet.... Unless you are saying your $900 HP is there and gives you everything you want, power and long battery life.
Yup, the HP covered what I needed but isn't what we use where I work now. The only thing it lacked (and it is three years old) was enough memory capacity.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
Again, not a programmer but...
What's wrong with using those resources remotely so that the laptop becomes just an interface to do the work? A more reliable desktop/server with far better performance so that programming goes quicker surely is the way to go?
That's how I would design it. For reasons, we don't handle it that way.
- 13 hour plane flights.
- No access to the internet for other reasons
- the remote site has no internet access
- no/less lag when typing quickly.
