9 ms·

I would never buy an Apple device but damn the 128GB memory option is tempting. I am still looking for a decent (business) laptop that has 64Gb but the options

I would never buy an Apple device but damn the 128GB memory option is tempting. I am still looking for a decent (business) laptop that has 64Gb but the options I found until now are limited... Lenovo P-series offers 64GB max and the max I could get on Dell is 32GB. (If someone has alternatives: please enlighten me)

lostlogin 3y ago
Weird. There are Dell laptops with 64gb memory on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS-Business-Laptop-Processor/dp/B09PFFDJLL https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS-Business-Laptop-Processor/dp...
- baz00 3y ago
  Yeah have a 64Gb dell here (precision 7670)
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> If someone has alternatives If you want notebooks with 128 GB memory, you want to look at the highest-end workstations. Dell Precision 7680 and 7780 (comes with new CAMM memory form factor) HP ZBook Fury 16 G10 Both of these have options for up to 128 GB (ECC) memory.
- pb7 3y ago
  Good lord are those things designed like shit.
  - delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
    Could you elaborate on what you think is 'shit'? Do they look bad, are they functionally worse, or worse on performance/thermals/etc?
    - pb7 3y ago
      Yes, they look bad. They look like products that were designed by passionless bean counter MBA types that create products off a spec sheet with zero regard for the end user. It’s a 1.2” thick lump of plastic (somehow heavier than an all metal 16” MacBook Pro) that will creak and bend when you pick it up reminding you how little care was given to it. http://imgur.com/a/T2ZVZ8R http://imgur.com/a/T2ZVZ8R Horrific.
      - delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
        > 1.2" thick lump of plastic I don't know what that measurement means. Neither the Precision nor the ZBook are plastic; they have metal chassis. That's how magnesium, aluminium, and titanium look like without anodising them with fancy colours like Apple does. These notebooks are also thicker and heavier than usual because they have to dissipate something like 250 W of heat. Good on Apple for designing such power-efficient SoCs; many high-end Windows notebooks have to make do with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA cards that will perform better than that MacBook Pro, but unfortunately also draw about twice as much power. Finally, these are business workstations, not fashion statements. People—or rather, companies—buy them to get work done on them, not show them off in Starbucks. They are meant to be serviced easily and quickly, and come with up to 5 years of next-business-day onsite support with 24/7 telephone service. Both the ZBook and the Precisions have 4 DDR5 slots, 3-4 NVMe SSD slots and a WWAN NVMe slot, a replaceable (though possibly not upgradeable) GPU card, an easily-replaceable display assembly and battery, and a productive keyboard with a keypad, and a reasonably large and accurate trackpad with buttons. They have Ethernet ports, USB-A ports, and can support up to five high-resolution displays. These workstation product lines have also come with service manuals for the past two decades. Apple released service manuals for its own products this year, after significant regulatory and consumer pressure. The MacBook has its advantages, and I fully understand why someone might buy one. But your argument is in extremely bad faith—it 'looks ugly', but you haven't seen it in person. Having actually used these machines for 5+ years, I can tell you they are pretty damn solid. I daresay these don't even look that different to Framework's notebooks, which are the apple (pun not intended) of HN readers' eyes.
        3y ago
- microflash 3y ago
  Dell Precision 7780 is a terrible machine. It's heavy, gets extremely hot and is just not good to hold. You might find some use for it if you intend to work it in cold desktop-like setting.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
> I would never buy an Apple device Why not?
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  “Apple bad” probably.
- lopis 3y ago
  Because despite being currently at the forefront of technology, Apple has shown time and time again to be anti-user.
- repelsteeltje 3y ago
  Good question. I would like to hear OPs answer. Personally I've been tempted by the hardware, but I don't care for Apple's software bundle (MacOS, iTunes, etc.). With the M-series they have show indifference/reluctance/hostility to work with other vendors and the open source community. Asahi Linux has made major progress, but despite support from Apple. Another (minor) frustration is the keyboard layout. I'm user to having backspace, delete, insert. Finally, Apple's offerings are a bit heavier that the ~1kg ultrabook I like to work with. [Summary] I wouldn't say I would never buy Apple, but so far they haven't presented products appealing to me. And at the root that is caused by their approach to stewarding their "ecosystem".
  - ivolimmen 3y ago
    I am a linux fanboy. I have worked on an Apple macbook before and I did not like it. Apple is too expensive for what they offer (my opinion).
- Xiol32 3y ago
  No OP, but UK keyboard layout on Apple devices sucks, seperately from overriding decades of muscle memory reaching for cmd instead of ctrl. Could never get used to UI/workflow. No native window snapping (back in the day at least). Workarounds required for a lot of my tooling, no native containers, until recently no native VM solution (believe UTM solves this). Brew. As a disclaimer I do think Linux with Gnome provides the absolute best developer experience so you can take all my opinions with that in hand.
frant-hartm 3y ago
Lenovo has been offering 128 GB since P52, that is for around 6 years. The current model with 128 GB RAM is P16 Gen 2. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/thinkpad-p16-gen-2-(16-inch-intel)/len101t0069 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...
- znpy 3y ago
  128GB models have been around for quite a while... Essentially any laptop with four DDR4 ram slots should be able to take 128GB ram.
  - frant-hartm 3y ago
    AFAIK 64GB SO-DIMM DDR4 modules are not available, so you need a laptop with 4 ram slots, that's just a few laptops in the workstation / gaming series of a few vendors.
vaylian 3y ago
Framework (https://frame.work https://frame.work) offers up to 2x32GB RAM support.
viraptor 3y ago
That's probably a threshold where I'd start looking at a well integrated solution for remoting into a decent server. Do you actually need/want to use 128GB locally? Not disputing that if you do have a requirement, but have you considered a smaller machine and spending the rest on a non-mobile decent setup? The battery and weight are really affected once you go into the mobile workstation territory.
sparkling 3y ago
Honest question: What tasks are you doing that require 128GB RAM?
- guessmyname 3y ago
  > What tasks are you doing that require 128GB RAM? You’re thinking about it the wrong way. The more RAM you have, the faster + smoother your experience using an application will be, and this will be much more noticeable if you usually run multiple applications at the same time, like virtually everyone in the world do. This is especially true now that we have options to run local-only AI models. The next couple of years will be interesting.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    While I do agree that 8GB is a little dated, even the 8GB MacBook Air from 2020 runs most applications smoother than modern Windows machine with twice as much RAM. Apple have the smoothness part figured out, without the need for more memory (for the average consumer at least). Your point about local AI is pretty interesting. It does seem highly likely that computers with limited memory could "age" faster than they have done in the past ten years, with the advent of more AI workloads.
    - ZiiS 3y ago
      A 8GB Air can exist without a 8GB Pro.
  - chx 3y ago
    > The more RAM you have, the faster + smoother your experience using an application will be, This is the mentality that MSI targets with the $1300 AORUS Z790 Xtreme X motherboard. More is clearly better, right? Nope. Not at all. In this case, there is an amount of RAM an app will consume and you have that much, the rest will not do much. Even buffering/caching only can consume so much. It's very hard to fill even 64GB in a laptop but 128GB is near impossible.
- zmmmmm 3y ago
WiSaGaN 3y ago
ThinkPad P1 gen 6 offers 96GB max. [1] I usually buy the minimum version of memory and SSD, and then upgrade myself. [1] https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P1_Gen_6/ThinkPad_P1_Gen_6_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P...

lostlogin 3y ago

Weird. There are Dell laptops with 64gb memory on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS-Business-Laptop-Processor/dp/B09PFFDJLL https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS-Business-Laptop-Processor/dp...

baz00 3y ago
Yeah have a 64Gb dell here (precision 7670)

delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

> If someone has alternatives If you want notebooks with 128 GB memory, you want to look at the highest-end workstations. Dell Precision 7680 and 7780 (comes with new CAMM memory form factor) HP ZBook Fury 16 G10 Both of these have options for up to 128 GB (ECC) memory.

pb7 3y ago
Good lord are those things designed like shit.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on what you think is 'shit'? Do they look bad, are they functionally worse, or worse on performance/thermals/etc?
  - pb7 3y ago
    Yes, they look bad. They look like products that were designed by passionless bean counter MBA types that create products off a spec sheet with zero regard for the end user. It’s a 1.2” thick lump of plastic (somehow heavier than an all metal 16” MacBook Pro) that will creak and bend when you pick it up reminding you how little care was given to it. http://imgur.com/a/T2ZVZ8R http://imgur.com/a/T2ZVZ8R Horrific.
    - delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
      > 1.2" thick lump of plastic I don't know what that measurement means. Neither the Precision nor the ZBook are plastic; they have metal chassis. That's how magnesium, aluminium, and titanium look like without anodising them with fancy colours like Apple does. These notebooks are also thicker and heavier than usual because they have to dissipate something like 250 W of heat. Good on Apple for designing such power-efficient SoCs; many high-end Windows notebooks have to make do with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA cards that will perform better than that MacBook Pro, but unfortunately also draw about twice as much power. Finally, these are business workstations, not fashion statements. People—or rather, companies—buy them to get work done on them, not show them off in Starbucks. They are meant to be serviced easily and quickly, and come with up to 5 years of next-business-day onsite support with 24/7 telephone service. Both the ZBook and the Precisions have 4 DDR5 slots, 3-4 NVMe SSD slots and a WWAN NVMe slot, a replaceable (though possibly not upgradeable) GPU card, an easily-replaceable display assembly and battery, and a productive keyboard with a keypad, and a reasonably large and accurate trackpad with buttons. They have Ethernet ports, USB-A ports, and can support up to five high-resolution displays. These workstation product lines have also come with service manuals for the past two decades. Apple released service manuals for its own products this year, after significant regulatory and consumer pressure. The MacBook has its advantages, and I fully understand why someone might buy one. But your argument is in extremely bad faith—it 'looks ugly', but you haven't seen it in person. Having actually used these machines for 5+ years, I can tell you they are pretty damn solid. I daresay these don't even look that different to Framework's notebooks, which are the apple (pun not intended) of HN readers' eyes.
      - 3y ago
microflash 3y ago
Dell Precision 7780 is a terrible machine. It's heavy, gets extremely hot and is just not good to hold. You might find some use for it if you intend to work it in cold desktop-like setting.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

> I would never buy an Apple device Why not?

throwaway2990 3y ago
“Apple bad” probably.
lopis 3y ago
Because despite being currently at the forefront of technology, Apple has shown time and time again to be anti-user.
repelsteeltje 3y ago
Good question. I would like to hear OPs answer. Personally I've been tempted by the hardware, but I don't care for Apple's software bundle (MacOS, iTunes, etc.). With the M-series they have show indifference/reluctance/hostility to work with other vendors and the open source community. Asahi Linux has made major progress, but despite support from Apple. Another (minor) frustration is the keyboard layout. I'm user to having backspace, delete, insert. Finally, Apple's offerings are a bit heavier that the ~1kg ultrabook I like to work with. [Summary] I wouldn't say I would never buy Apple, but so far they haven't presented products appealing to me. And at the root that is caused by their approach to stewarding their "ecosystem".
- ivolimmen 3y ago
  I am a linux fanboy. I have worked on an Apple macbook before and I did not like it. Apple is too expensive for what they offer (my opinion).
Xiol32 3y ago
No OP, but UK keyboard layout on Apple devices sucks, seperately from overriding decades of muscle memory reaching for cmd instead of ctrl. Could never get used to UI/workflow. No native window snapping (back in the day at least). Workarounds required for a lot of my tooling, no native containers, until recently no native VM solution (believe UTM solves this). Brew. As a disclaimer I do think Linux with Gnome provides the absolute best developer experience so you can take all my opinions with that in hand.

frant-hartm 3y ago

Lenovo has been offering 128 GB since P52, that is for around 6 years. The current model with 128 GB RAM is P16 Gen 2. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/thinkpad-p16-gen-2-(16-inch-intel)/len101t0069 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...

znpy 3y ago
128GB models have been around for quite a while... Essentially any laptop with four DDR4 ram slots should be able to take 128GB ram.
- frant-hartm 3y ago
  AFAIK 64GB SO-DIMM DDR4 modules are not available, so you need a laptop with 4 ram slots, that's just a few laptops in the workstation / gaming series of a few vendors.

vaylian 3y ago

Framework (https://frame.work https://frame.work) offers up to 2x32GB RAM support.

viraptor 3y ago

That's probably a threshold where I'd start looking at a well integrated solution for remoting into a decent server. Do you actually need/want to use 128GB locally? Not disputing that if you do have a requirement, but have you considered a smaller machine and spending the rest on a non-mobile decent setup? The battery and weight are really affected once you go into the mobile workstation territory.

sparkling 3y ago

Honest question: What tasks are you doing that require 128GB RAM?

guessmyname 3y ago
> What tasks are you doing that require 128GB RAM? You’re thinking about it the wrong way. The more RAM you have, the faster + smoother your experience using an application will be, and this will be much more noticeable if you usually run multiple applications at the same time, like virtually everyone in the world do. This is especially true now that we have options to run local-only AI models. The next couple of years will be interesting.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  While I do agree that 8GB is a little dated, even the 8GB MacBook Air from 2020 runs most applications smoother than modern Windows machine with twice as much RAM. Apple have the smoothness part figured out, without the need for more memory (for the average consumer at least). Your point about local AI is pretty interesting. It does seem highly likely that computers with limited memory could "age" faster than they have done in the past ten years, with the advent of more AI workloads.
  - ZiiS 3y ago
    A 8GB Air can exist without a 8GB Pro.
- chx 3y ago
  > The more RAM you have, the faster + smoother your experience using an application will be, This is the mentality that MSI targets with the $1300 AORUS Z790 Xtreme X motherboard. More is clearly better, right? Nope. Not at all. In this case, there is an amount of RAM an app will consume and you have that much, the rest will not do much. Even buffering/caching only can consume so much. It's very hard to fill even 64GB in a laptop but 128GB is near impossible.
zmmmmm 3y ago

WiSaGaN 3y ago

ThinkPad P1 gen 6 offers 96GB max. [1] I usually buy the minimum version of memory and SSD, and then upgrade myself. [1] https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P1_Gen_6/ThinkPad_P1_Gen_6_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P...