The Ideal Dev's Laptop

[Sleepingforest]

There's been quite a few efforts at making the ideal laptop for a developer. One example would be the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition: it's got Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it, plus an extensive amount of code and careful parts selection to make it work perfectly right out of the box.

But it does have a small amount of flaws: home, end, pgup, and pgdn have been relegated to fn-activated keys, and the screen is 1920x1080, which is undesirable compared to a 16:10 ratio. The RAM is soldered in (8GB provided) and there no options for more. And the screen is glossy, or has an extremely thin AG film (it's just barely not a mirror, which is good or bad, depending on who you ask).

So what is ideal for a developer's laptop? I'd ask for a 4:3 screen (2560x2048 anyone?), dedicated function keys, plus a removeable battery and user-upgradeable RAM. A 14-15" form factor would be ideal.

 

[Ayah]

I'm not a dev, but I have similar desires. Needs decent compute capabilities, mucho ram (I'd probably want 32GB for current generation), discrete video card would be nice (don't need fantastic, just opencl and cuda testbed) and at least 7 hours of 100% load (possibly with some kind of slice-type battery).

 

[tuxberg]

So what is ideal for a developer's laptop? I'd ask for a 4:3 screen (2560x2048 anyone?), dedicated function keys, plus a removeable battery and user-upgradeable RAM. A 14-15" form factor would be ideal.

Depends on what you mean by developer. If by that you mean spastic hipster who wants an expensive toy to run his web dev, then you should pop right on down to the apple store and pick up your Macbook Retina with extra smug.

OTOH, if you actually need hardware that performs at the price-point you bought it at: HP Elitebook 8 series, they're not light and pretty (unless you curl some significant lbs. and like brushed metal), but they're tried and true workhorse laptops with fantastic professional support packages that no business should be without.

Lenovo W530 would be my second choice, although the keyboard has been severely nerfed and the lack of a numpad will infuriate a true power-user.