Hey guys! I am currently learning Web Dev and thinking buying a new pc. Do you have any suggestions?
ps: A friend offered to sell his MacBook pro 2017 16gb 500gb ssd
Hello!
That’s a good one for a beginning web developer.
You can never have enough RAM and willl need a big SSD.
Once you start projects with a local node developer server, you will see why.
Still about €1.000 in my neck of woods for the Mac.
If you don’t want to spend that much at the beginning and less powerful graphics
are enough, look into HP Elitebooks. You’ll get a good used 17/18 one with similar specs for a third of the mac. It’s what I’m working with and they never let me down.
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To be honest, there are no hard requirements for web development beyond having a “decent” machine you find comfortable to use. Obviously a more powerful one means its faster and more responsive, but you don’t need a fast and responsive machine to learn web development.
FreeCodeCamp specifically, and many online resources could be ran on a phone or a low end Chromebook or tablet.
More expansive, or professional setups might require more tooling, and thus having a beefier machine may become important. But for learning this isn’t important.
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Thank you for reply!
Thank you for answering!
Any computer that works well will work well for web development. Your first concern should be your budget. Research the reliability of models you are considering rather than their specs. Another big concern is your personal preferences. Do you need something lightweight to carry around all day or would you prefer a larger screen and keyboard? If it will be on your lap, good fans are the way you want to go instead of a thin design. And so on.
Depending on how cheaply your friend is offering to give you their old laptop for, I would recommend seeing if you could get something newer for the same price. Laptops, especially certain brands/styles of laptops of victims of planned obsolescence and you may soon be unable to install important OS updates. If it was me, I’d usually rather get a low-end new computer than one that was high-end six years ago.
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This won’t be a problem for OP if they use Linux.
The computers you are describing are consumer ones that generally age bad.
You can’t even open and costumize some of them nowadays.
I prefer business lines like HP Elitebooks they tend be made of better
materials and are sturdy. I had an HP business desktop that ran for 12 years without any major problems.
My experience is: a few year old business model > cheap consumer model in the long run.
Just don’t buy ones with too much wear and tear.
Using a lightweight Linux distro can dramatically extend the life of your computer for sure, but usually when someone isn’t confident about computer models I tend to assume that jumping into Linux is beyond the scope of what they are trying to accomplish right now.
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