My laptop is starting to sound like a tumble dryer these days so I’m thinking about purchasing a new one soon. I’ve never had coding in mind when buying a laptop so I’m interested to hear of what you guys use or what you would recommend.
I picked up a cheap Lenovo in Argos last year for €300. My main problem with it is that it has a HDD. Its running a Pentium quad-core @2.16GHz, 8GB Memory and 1TB HDD storage. Sure, it’ll never compete with a hard-core dev machine with an SSD and a 4390-X, but it works great for me. Last year I was messing around with a bit of game development, and it was capable of running Unity, VS Ultimate and PhotoShop at the same time without too much difficulty. I’d reccommend it anyway.
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So was I! Being a student, there was no way I could fork out massive money for a high end laptop. Although I do still like to tease myself looking at some of MSI’s offerings…
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Macbook Pro 13". I decided to treat myself (three months ago and I still feel skint, and I got it on a deal…Sigh). I do design work as well as the coding, so that helped justify things.
Plus I’m going to be living in a van soon, so the extended battery life helps!
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haha sometimes u gotta sacrifice I guess. “Mac book Pro” keeps popping into head actually - taunting me!
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In March of ‘16, I bought a refurbished (open box return) 15’ Macbook pro 2015 refresh edition. Simply by buying a Macbook that had been returned after a week of use, i was able to save about 30% off the price. If you are looking/wanting a Macbook but the price makes your stomach turn, you could check out apple’s refurbished store, not all of them are refurbished, some are just returned and get marked down and sold at a steep discount.
I was able to get the specs i wanted (fastest processor, 16g ram, 512 flash storage), there were no physical defects and I have had zero issues.
If you cant afford a brand new one, but want to use osx/macbook’s, i would definitely check it out at the apple store.
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MBP. I notice almost everyone in web development uses macOS because of how little you have to configure. I love ubuntu but I find myself messing around too much with it. My desktop runs Kali linux just for some fun when I need it. But when I start work I want to just open up my laptop and start working, not tinker around in my OS.
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If you are budget conscious and have basic computer building skills you can get a “broken” Thinkpad on eBay dirt cheap.
Often you just need to change the CMOS battery and add a drive and OS you are up and running for less than $150.
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This is an anti-recommendation – Toshiba. I’m using a lower-end Toshiba and it frequently (1 to 5 times a day) just freezes. I dual boot, but it doesn’t matter what OS I’m using – although it appears to be unfond of linux and freezes or reboots, with a little greater frequency (I’ve actually stopped booting to linux because this machine is so unstable).
But wait…there is more. A couple of months ago the ‘s’ key wasn’t responding, so I popped off the key to clean under it (there was nothing under the key to clean). Then the ‘b’ key stopped responding, followed by a few other keys. I have resorted to using a usb keyboard until I can get another computer.
So to answer the question, I’m using a Toshiba, but I don’t recommend anyone else doing the same.
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MacBook Air 8 ram, 256ssd - bought it a month ago and love it. Always worked with Win and the difference in UX is tremendous
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You don’t really need a high-end laptop for Web development, any cheap laptop running Linux should do, and if you need to, you can dual-boot Linux with Windows for added versatility (I’ve never owned a Mac, so I don’t know how easily they dual-boot). I’m not sure an SSD is all that necessary either when their capacities are still relatively limited.
I’m not a fan of anything that Apple makes, especially when nearly all of the stuff they make is considerably more expensive than comparable Android or Windows hardware. I couldn’t believe how much the MacBook Pro cost the last time I checked, which was last year, when a similarly-spec’d Windows laptop could easily cost less than half the price.
Unless you’re also into stuff like graphic design and audio production where a ton of high-profile software is available for only the Mac platform, I don’t understand why anyone would pay the high price for a MacBook Pro. Of course I’m probably a bit biased here, as I grew up on Microsoft (MS-DOS and Windows) and later UNIX/Linux. 
Btw, to answer the question my current laptop is an off-brand (AVADirect) running Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux. It’s currently 5 years old (got it in 2011) but still runs fine and works great with everything I do (programming, photo editing, digital music production, light gaming).
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I was on a pretty tight budget a few months ago and bought a T430 thinkpad for about $250. I’m running Ubuntu and it’s been great for everything I need! The only problem is that it has basically no battery life so I need to be near a plug almost always
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For me, I kind of splurged. I bought a Dell Precision 7510 running Windows 10 Pro. At work, everything is Microsoft. The CPU power, storage and battery life (6+ hours) are great, but it came at a high price tag $$. For open source programming, I use VirualBox to run an Ubuntu VM. I use VMs for anything that I don’t want messing up my laptop OS.
For most web development for PHP, Ruby, Python or Node, an average laptop will do. If you want to run VMs, more memory or a longer battery life, it will cost a little for the upgrades.
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I believe a Macbook Pro could be a good investment, even it is refurbished or used.
It has excellent hardware built quality, plus it can run whatever OS you want 
Lower end (read cheaper) MSI Apache 15" screen. Bought it to replace my 10 year old laptop that had an intel centrino without HAXM extensions. This newer (1yr now) laptop has an obvious theme of the lowest of the top end components. The reason I bough it was for the quadcore i-7, the 16gb ddr4 ram and 256gb ssd was nice also.
I don’t run anything that even taxes it, android studio with an open emulator runs smooth even when the WAMP is running. It came with windows 10 (my last o.s. Was vista), boots in 11 seconds.
Don’t see a need for a VM since I bought a raspberry pi 3 running Linux for some practice with that command line. Runs headless with putty and I set up FTP so I can code on my windows machine and send the files to the LAMP server like I would with a remote site. Even got ruby and rails running on the pi.
I’m a professional developer and have been for about 2 years with about 1.5 years of intensive self teaching/training before that.
Here’s my laptops:
HP Envy 4th-Gen Laptop with Intel i7 and 8GB ram.
Also, a Sony Vaio with i3 and 4gb ram.
If anybody feels that their laptop is too old or too slow to develop on, there are two tricks that are almost 100% guaranteed to improve your system considerably:
- Buy and install an SSD. You can switch out an HDD with an SSD with very little knowledge or experience with PC hardware - just google it!
- Use Ubuntu MATE as your primary operating system.
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I bought my first MBP in June from the Apple refurb store. It’s the 2015 MBP 15" 16GB 500G SD. As expensive as it was, I have no buyers remorse at all. It was up for 155 days from when I turned it on before I finally rebooted it. It never crashes. It just works. It runs everything I need for React/NodeJS development. I’ve done all the backend API projects and React projects with it.
Prior to this, I had an 8 year old Dell XPS 1530m that had Fedora installed. It had become too slow. And, as is my experience with Linux, there was always one thing or another. For example, after a Fedora upgrade I found that if I closed the lid, 75% of the time X would crash when I resumed. I discovered it was an NVidia driver issue and found a way to install an older driver. Wasted time. I have countless other examples and these days I have no time for it.
And I say this as a GNU/Linux user for nearly 20 years.
The Mac just works.
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The best investment I’ve made so far in learning to code is a brand new $100 Toshiba Chromebook I got off someone from Craigslist. It runs Linux via Crouton (https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton). It required a bit of monkeying around to get everything set up to run Node.JS, but it was worth the effort. It weighs about 2 lbs, has a SD card to boost memory past the 16 GB SSD, and is fast enough for anything I’ve thrown at it so far (front end development). Since it’s so light and cheap, I carry it around with me everywhere, practice coding on the train during my commute, and wouldn’t cry too hard if it was accidentally thrown under the wheels of the train. And the battery lasts through more than 12 hours of actual use. I can’t recommend one of these more highly, even if you do opt to invest in a MBP or something else more respectable.
I do not recommend getting a HP. I have had two and both lost their internet connection. I currently have a HP Pavilion Touchsmart which had to have the motherboard replaced because the Realtek WiFi stopped working. Now less than 8 months later, I have the same issue. HP did not guarantee their prior work. They would not repair it again, unless I purchased an extended warranty totaling $218. I had to buy an external device to connect to the internet. I had ACER laptop which had no problems. I would go with ACER or ASUS both have been excellent for me.