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Here on HN real work is not something an i5 can handle And if an i5 can handle your workload, then the A13 won't make a difference either in price or performan

Here on HN real work is not something an i5 can handle And if an i5 can handle your workload, then the A13 won't make a difference either in price or performance (because you already don't care about performance) it only matters to Apple's profits So no, an i5 is not enough for doing real work in technology Any developer here on HN would tell you that with 1k you can find much better deals for the money If your job is not technology related you can do it with a 5 years old laptop of any brand We buy new machines because we always need more power, to do everything else that is not real work I own a 3 years old 12 inches Chinese laptop with an i3 that runs Ubuntu and is just perfect You might be amused, but you wouldn't accept it as a work laptop if your company gave you one I'm sure you wouldn't

messe 6y ago
> If your job is not technology related you can do it with a 5 years old laptop of any brand That really depends on what technology you're working with. In general, if you're not working with a bloated JS project or a multi-million line C++ codebase, a computer from the last decade will do just fine as long as it has 8-16 GB of RAM. I mean these days the difference between an i5 and i7 is almost non-existent to me as when possible I disable hyperthreading out of an abundance of precaution. There's a lot of "real work" in tech that can be handled on an i5. Most embedded programming work could easily be done on an i5 from a decade ago. > We buy new machines because we always need more power We need more power because people keep developing bloated software for newer machines. --- Can you define to me what real work is? Without simply saying "it's work that needs more than an i5 to handle", that is.
- chinesempire 6y ago
  > computer from the last decade will do just fine as long as it has 8-16 GB of RAM. That was my point as well, if you aren't working on anything that requires power you don't need a "working machine" But if you do, the A13 is not a solution > We need more power because people keep developing I'm not the one putting hundreds of ML/AI models in production But I do enjoy having a system that makes it possible to test an entire stack on a single machine, something that just a few years ago required multiple VMs and complex setups Even if you're developing puzzle games for low level Android phones an i5 is not enough You can not believe it, but it's the truth > Can you define to me what real work is? Of course I can, even though you can't define what it is that can be done with a baseline i5 that qualifies as "real work" A typical dev will do some, all, or more than these things - open up an editor, with multiple files open, with integrated language server, linter/formatter, background error checker - open up an ide, jetbrains, Android studio, Xcode, on a middle sized project, with a few tens dependencies and start working on it - launch a maven/gradle compile - launch a docker build - launch a docker-compose up with a main application and 2 or 3 services (DB, redis, API backend) - launch the training on any of the ml/ai framework available. Of course you'll launch it on a very limited subset, it's gonna be slow anyway - process gigabytes (not even in the tens of gigabytes) of data - on my i3 even apt upgrade is slow. That's why I use it as a media player and not as work machine.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    > Even if you're developing puzzle games for low level Android phones an i5 is not enough $ sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5287U CPU @ 2.90GHz Works just fine for Android development.
    - messe 6y ago
      Hey, do you mind me asking what mac you're using? (Or hackintosh?)
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015).
        messe 6y ago
        Nice, that's a good model. I have a lot of coworkers with the same setup and dreading the upgrade (mostly because of the touchbar).
        saagarjha 6y ago
        Yup, I bought that one within says of the October 2016 because the new ones were outrageously expensive compared to what I was used to and I was not willing to give up inverted-T ;)
    - chinesempire 6y ago
      It really does not There are tools that work and tools for professionals, tools work, professional tools are for people that do it as a daily job and their job depends on them
      - nocman 6y ago
        Your opinion of "what works" is not universally shared by everyone. You don't know the details of saagarjha's work developing on Android (unless, perhaps, you actually know them in real life, which seems unlikely given the way you responded), and neither do I. saagarjha is the one best able to determine what works for them. If your point is that that having more resources avaiable to you can make you more productive, that's fine. It's always nice to have as beefy of a machine as possible. However, not everyone has that luxury. Businesses have budgets, and most developers I know don't get to set their own budget for equipment. Sometimes you are lucky, and the money is there, and your management is willing to spend it. Sometimes that is not the case. Regardless, my primary development machine right now is a 5-year-old laptop, and I get plenty of development work done with it. The way you worded this latest response makes it sound as if you are saying that I am not a professional, and my tools are just "toys", because I don't work on an 8 core machine with 64GB of RAM. I don't know if that is your intention, but if it is it is both inaccurate and insulting.

messe 6y ago

> If your job is not technology related you can do it with a 5 years old laptop of any brand That really depends on what technology you're working with. In general, if you're not working with a bloated JS project or a multi-million line C++ codebase, a computer from the last decade will do just fine as long as it has 8-16 GB of RAM. I mean these days the difference between an i5 and i7 is almost non-existent to me as when possible I disable hyperthreading out of an abundance of precaution. There's a lot of "real work" in tech that can be handled on an i5. Most embedded programming work could easily be done on an i5 from a decade ago. > We buy new machines because we always need more power We need more power because people keep developing bloated software for newer machines. --- Can you define to me what real work is? Without simply saying "it's work that needs more than an i5 to handle", that is.

chinesempire 6y ago
> computer from the last decade will do just fine as long as it has 8-16 GB of RAM. That was my point as well, if you aren't working on anything that requires power you don't need a "working machine" But if you do, the A13 is not a solution > We need more power because people keep developing I'm not the one putting hundreds of ML/AI models in production But I do enjoy having a system that makes it possible to test an entire stack on a single machine, something that just a few years ago required multiple VMs and complex setups Even if you're developing puzzle games for low level Android phones an i5 is not enough You can not believe it, but it's the truth > Can you define to me what real work is? Of course I can, even though you can't define what it is that can be done with a baseline i5 that qualifies as "real work" A typical dev will do some, all, or more than these things - open up an editor, with multiple files open, with integrated language server, linter/formatter, background error checker - open up an ide, jetbrains, Android studio, Xcode, on a middle sized project, with a few tens dependencies and start working on it - launch a maven/gradle compile - launch a docker build - launch a docker-compose up with a main application and 2 or 3 services (DB, redis, API backend) - launch the training on any of the ml/ai framework available. Of course you'll launch it on a very limited subset, it's gonna be slow anyway - process gigabytes (not even in the tens of gigabytes) of data - on my i3 even apt upgrade is slow. That's why I use it as a media player and not as work machine.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > Even if you're developing puzzle games for low level Android phones an i5 is not enough $ sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5287U CPU @ 2.90GHz Works just fine for Android development.
  - messe 6y ago
    Hey, do you mind me asking what mac you're using? (Or hackintosh?)
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015).
      - messe 6y ago
        Nice, that's a good model. I have a lot of coworkers with the same setup and dreading the upgrade (mostly because of the touchbar).
        saagarjha 6y ago
        Yup, I bought that one within says of the October 2016 because the new ones were outrageously expensive compared to what I was used to and I was not willing to give up inverted-T ;)
  - chinesempire 6y ago
    It really does not There are tools that work and tools for professionals, tools work, professional tools are for people that do it as a daily job and their job depends on them
    - nocman 6y ago
      Your opinion of "what works" is not universally shared by everyone. You don't know the details of saagarjha's work developing on Android (unless, perhaps, you actually know them in real life, which seems unlikely given the way you responded), and neither do I. saagarjha is the one best able to determine what works for them. If your point is that that having more resources avaiable to you can make you more productive, that's fine. It's always nice to have as beefy of a machine as possible. However, not everyone has that luxury. Businesses have budgets, and most developers I know don't get to set their own budget for equipment. Sometimes you are lucky, and the money is there, and your management is willing to spend it. Sometimes that is not the case. Regardless, my primary development machine right now is a 5-year-old laptop, and I get plenty of development work done with it. The way you worded this latest response makes it sound as if you are saying that I am not a professional, and my tools are just "toys", because I don't work on an 8 core machine with 64GB of RAM. I don't know if that is your intention, but if it is it is both inaccurate and insulting.