Buying a new laptop for Programming.

Media999

Hi folks

This is kind of a once in a couple of year event if not more. Just started a Degree course in Software Development and have the funds for a new laptop. Have about 1100 now but can save more if needed. Have a dual core Dell laptop now that does the job but i want something a lot more powerful that will last 4 years in College.

Now the question is do i really need a Macbook pro or would a i7 samsung Chronos do. Ive always been a PC person but is a Mac better for programming?
Fully understand that you can code on pretty much anything also.

Should i get a Macbook pro or i7 Samsung

Thanks in Advance

BrokenArrows

Depends on the languages you plan on using.

For instance you can't develop .net applications on a mac but you would be fine with java.

PrzemoF

Get something with i7. I bought this: http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?15487-Linux-Laptop-Genesis-IV (except it's HD4000 not HD3000)

Multithread compilation is _fast_. I have Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz and it behaves effectively like 8 core. (4 core/8 threads)

Media999

If i was going for Laptop it would be either

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/Samsung_550P5C_1192061.html i5 with 450m graphics

or

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/Samsung_CHRONOS_700z_1217865.html i7 with 440m graphics

What ya reckon?

Kavrocks

If you are going to be using the laptop for college unless you will be driving everyday and will have an easy place to leave your laptop when you don't need it instead of having to lug it around I would recommend you get a Macbook Air on an Intel Ultrabook.

For programming you don't need an i7, you will need an i5 though. 1.7 Ghz i5 would be more than ok with 4GB RAM. An SSD isn't necessary an ordinary HDD will do but if you have an external Hard Drive why not go for the SSD for the slightly extra speed.

When I started college I bought the Macbook Air because there weren't any Intel Ultrabooks out at that time. You may be better off going with an Intel over a Mac now.

Do your own research before you buy and make sure you get you money's worth for what you need and not for specs somebody on here tells you you need.

conor.hogan.2

BrokenArrows wrote: »

For instance you can't develop .net applications on a mac but you would be fine with java.

Yes you can. You can dual boot or you can run a virtual machine.

BrokenArrows

well ya i suppose but if you are gona get a MAC and run a windows VM why not just get a windows based laptop.

Kavrocks

BrokenArrows wrote: »

well ya i suppose but if you are gona get a MAC and run a windows VM why not just get a windows based laptop.

Several reasons.

OS X is built on unix, most linux shell commands can be used on it.
Some programs are OS X only or the OS X version is better.
OS X is needed to build iPhone and iPad apps.
Depending on the specs and what you need a Mac can work out cheaper.

I could give more but they are probably a lot more personal.

robbiezero

No way would I spend more than 500 quid on a laptop for college. Just get a decent Windows laptop with 4 or more GB or RAM, i3 or i5 processor. You will probably be doing most of your programming on Eclipse anyway so platform doesnt matter hugely.

Not sure what course you are doing, but cant really see why you would need a hugely powerful machine for college projects unless doing some really heavy client side processing, is this likely?

Media999

I have a grand to spend as part of a Redundancy package. If i dont spend it i lose it so no hassle about spending as little as possible. I just have to add to it if i want something more expensive.

Take a look at this spec from PCspecialist. 1050 Euro

Chassis & Display
Optimus Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-3610QM (2.30GHz) 6MB

Memory (RAM)
16GB SAMSUNG 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (2 x 8GB)

Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660M - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11

Memory - Hard Disk
128GB KINGSTON V200 SSD, SATA 6 Gb (300MB/R, 190MB/W) (Special Offer)

DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)

Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)

Insurance
1 Month Free Laptop Insurance inc. Accidental Damage & Theft
Delivery

2 - 3 DAY DELIVERY TO REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (£19)

Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 8 to 10 working days



Price: £846.00 including VAT and delivery.

httpete

17 inch screen is very handy for development. I dont know why people who use their laptops for programming go for 15 inch screens unless they are carrying it around non-stop.

BostonB

It really comes down to how much you'll be carrying it around. You wouldn't want to be carrying a 17" all day. Only from A to B.

belcampprisoner

What programming are you doing most will be Linux or windows

Media999

Ill be carrying it to college everyday so a 17 is a bit much.

Came across this site

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk

Some really good custom laptops for cheap. 1200 for i7 660m and SSD

druidhill

I'd have to agree with robbiezero, but seeing as you must buy one or lose out, I'd probably go for the best MAC within your budget. You seem to have a fair idea of what hardware to go with (and definitely pick an SSD drive).

BostonB

If I was going to haul it around college I'd get a 13 or 14 laptop with an extended battery, then get a big screen to plug it into when you get home.

Sparks

If I was getting a laptop for programming in college, I wouldn't spend much on it at all. College programming exercises do not need an Air or an i7. Or fancy graphics. You need something that's light enough to carry everywhere, tough enough to get kicked and still work, common enough that spare parts are cheap and easy to find, and a keyboard that you can type on easily.

Don't bother worrying about battery life. You won't use this to take notes in lectures -- look, I'm a gadget freak, but I still haven't found anything that can match paper and pen (specifically the Cornell Notetaking System - if you learn one thing about taking notes, learn that) for taking notes at lectures/talks/seminars. Nothing else is that fast, that easy to use, that able to mix graphics and text, and to get that all-important first draft for data capture. Not to mention that you can't get IM'd in the middle of a train of thought using paper and pen...

I mean, go back and put your notes into vimwiki later, hells yes, it'll act as review and it'll cement the notes in your head which is the object of the game anyways; but don't depend for your notes on something that has a finite battery life, which won't always let you do what you want instantly, and which some lecturers won't tolerate anyway.

If it were me, I'd probably go second-hand and get dull, boring and solid and at least two steps back from the cutting edge. I'd go to ebay, adverts.ie, gumtree or somewhere specialised, like this crowd (I just bought an IBM X61 laptop off them as a replacement laptop for herself indoors; for €225 including VAT and delivery, I would have jumped at this thing in college).

If you've got €1100 in the budget already and can save nearly €900 of that, do it; believe me you'll find uses for it over the next year that you can't predict now.

BostonB

Long battery life is useful far beyond lectures. ( i wasn't evening thinking of lectures tbh) Students move around a bit and its handy to travel light when you do so. Even in a flat it can be handy not to be tied to a power outlet. Ditto train, in a net cafe, working with others.

Sparks

BostonB wrote: »

Even in a flat it can be handy not to be tied to a power outlet.

It can be handy, yeah, but that's for a college machine it shouldn't be a priority. It's a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.

Ditto train, in a net cafe, working with others.

To be honest, in four years of a computer engineering undergrad degree, I never came across a case of needing my own laptop in one of those situations. The train every day was for reading or sleeping; the cafe was the escape from work, not the workplace; and most computer programming courses have a word for working with others on exercises - we called it cheating

BostonB

Sparks wrote: »

It can be handy, yeah, but that's for a college machine it shouldn't be a priority. It's a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.To be honest, in four years of a computer engineering undergrad degree, I never came across a case of needing my own laptop in one of those situations. The train every day was for reading or sleeping; the cafe was the escape from work, not the workplace;

Neither did I but that was then and this is now. The students I know get their work done in all sorts of places I wouldn't have thought of to use their time more efficiently. Its a consideration is all. If you don't need to move a laptop around, you might wonder do you need a laptop at all.

Anyway its just a thought. Even on my old 17" laptop replacement its handy to have an extended battery so you can work for a couple of hours off the mains.

Sparks wrote: »

and most computer programming courses have a word for working with others on exercises - we called it cheating

Do they not have group projects? That might explain if graduates struggle working with others in the work place. Any course I did we had labs, and group projects where we needed a laptop or two.

Anima

An SSD is nice to have for compiling.

Also RAM, get lots of it. Eclipse is terrible for ram usage and you're bound to be using it if you're learning Java.

Sparks

Anima wrote: »

An SSD is nice to have for compiling.

An SSD is nice to have regardless. It's definitely not need to have, and honestly, even if money was no object, I wouldn't put one in a laptop I was planning to haul around college and which might wind up nicked at some point (BTW, there's a point - be sure you sync any data you need off that laptop continually in case it's nicked, which will always happen at the worst possible moment). Dropbox should be find, but there are other options; the important point is that if some scumbag walks off with your laptop that you're not stuck without two or three months of work...

BTW, speaking from experience, by the time you get to the point where you're doing so much compiling that an SSD would make a truly significant difference that you would be happy to pay for, you're:
(a) far past the point of any college project up to and including your final year project;
(b) far more worried about things other than the compilation time, like the robustness of your build tools, the componentisation (not a word, but you know what I mean) of your source code, and how strong your vi/emacs/gdb skills are (because eclipse and a dozen or so MLOC of code do not make a good mix - in fact, the larger the code base, the less happy some of our modern tools seem to be, but that's a whole topic in and of itself...).

Honestly, a few of the recommendations above seem to be a bit more focussed on having the shiniest toy in the lecture hall, and not so much focussed on the job the toy is meant to be doing...

Also RAM, get lots of it.

Hells yes, but that's a truism. You never, ever have enough RAM.

BostonB

For me a SSD has other advantages like its more robust for something thats thrown in a bag. It also saves battery life.

That said I would get a cheap used laptop for using at college as its likely to get abused and/or stolen.

VINCWM

There is seriously not much difference in the weight of a 15" or a 17" Macbook Pro and you can't convince me that the extra 2" you have to carry is going to kill you... For what you are using it for, I'd go with the 17" MBP

Sparks

BostonB wrote: »

For me a SSD has other advantages like its more robust for something thats thrown in a bag. It also saves battery life.

Those would be nice factors too; but on the other hand, my little S205 netbook that I carry with me everywhere has survived car trips, falls, belts and kicks, and a six-month-old; that's with a normal laptop HDD (they've gotten better at building those yokes to be tough). I've no doubt an SSD would be tougher, given their construction; I just don't know if the difference in toughness is worth it (I mean, if I get hit by a bus carrying my netbook, I won't be overly concerned if the HDD fails, not to the point where I'd pay more for an SSD that will survive, at any rate).

The battery life might be a factor though; but wasn't there a report a while ago saying that the SSDs had a nasty failure mode of running for a year or so and then failing all at once without the warnings you'd get from a HDD?

I mean, don't get me wrong; I'd love to have a machine with a raid10 array of SSDs; I'd just want it at home on a desktop machine with a lot of oomph and lots of screens, not on a machine that might get nicked or dropped down a bus stairwell In a few years when SSDs are as cheap as HDDs, I'll switch over fairly sharpish...

BostonB

An Macbook would be thief magnet no?

Sparks

BostonB wrote: »

something thats thrown in a bag.

Incidentally, that reminds me - don't skimp on the bag.
Blowing a few hundred quid on a laptop and putting it in a €10 laptop bag from tesco is a seriously bad idea. Go buy something like a Crumpler that will protect the laptop better, and make sure the laptop fits the bag. It'll be a bit more expensive, but it's worth it.

BostonB

The point about a SSD is it has other advantages than just speed.

A hard drive failure shouldn't be that big a deal considering all the ways to backup these days. Should be doing that regardless if you have a SSD or not.

That said i wouldnt spend that much on a laptop for college unless money is no object.

Sparks

BostonB wrote: »

A hard drive failure shouldn't be that big a deal considering all the ways to backup these days. Should be doing that regardless if you have a SSD or not.

True; in fact, I'd be far more worried about theft than hardware failure.

Trojan

For a college machine, I would prioritise in this order:

important: cheap
important: light
nice to have: fast (SSD/CPU)
nice to have: lots of RAM
unnecessary: lasts 4 years*
unnecessary: big screen (17")
unnecessary: sexy (MBA etc).


* Anything can happen in 4 years - you might change course, take a break to travel, get a job, etc.

If you really, really need to spend €1k+ I'd look at Thinkpad range. Actually, I'd look at them anyway.

Sparks

Trojan wrote: »

If you really, really need to spend €1k+ I'd look at Thinkpad range.

Wait a day or so; I just bought a second-hand Thinkpad X61 for just over €225; I'll post up as to whether it was a pup or not.