4 ms·

> 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 devel

by trurl 10y ago

> 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 I have entertained the idea of getting a Mac Pro, except they are even more woefully out of date at this point.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
taylodl 10y ago
Technically the Retina iMac w/27" display now support 32GB of memory, but it's not cheap.
- trurl 10y ago
  Thanks, somehow I had missed that when looking at the tech specs.
paulrpotts 10y ago
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.
- taylodl 10y ago
  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.
- trurl 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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...

by trurl 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

taylodl 10y ago

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

trurl 10y ago
Thanks, somehow I had missed that when looking at the tech specs.

paulrpotts 10y ago

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.

taylodl 10y ago
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.
trurl 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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...