Laptop Reccomendations
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If you like Acer, I've got an Acer V3 17.3" Laptop. (16g RAM, Nvidia umm... something or another w/4GB RAM). It works really nicely or playing games. Skyrim runs on Max settings without batting an eye.
I'm not sure about the CUDA stuff, but it does really nicely when ripping my DVDs to MP4 or ISO. It was about $1,300 with a square trade warranty and all.
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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.
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@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
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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.
