Non-scientific poll: Laptops and Desktops

October 28, 2003 | View Comments (23) | Category: Our Thoughts

Summary: What are the best lightweight laptops and other hardware questions for developers.

I am in the market for a laptop. I need something small where I can log into my ssh server and do development while I am away from the office. My major requirement is that it is small and light. I am not looking to do the graphic heavy stuff or play games. I have a system at home for that. Anyone have suggestions? I am interested to hear from anyone who has an Apple laptop. I used to have a Dell laptop, which was too heavy and big for my taste. I know they have smaller ones now, but those come without an internal CD/DVD drive. I do not want to carry around extra drives.

While we are discussing computers I think it would be cool if people would post the specs of their "main" development machine. My specs:

Those are the only things I am interested in. I would love to get a dual-proc, but I think that is more to satisfy my geek lust more than anything. When it comes to web development I find I could work on almost any machine when not doing graphics stuff. My only major thing that is hard to do without is dual-monitors. If you are a developer and you do not have at least two monitors you are most certainly missing out on a productivity boost. Is there any equipment you find essential for developing or programming?

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Comments

#1

I use a crappy 866mhz Dell at home right now, and a crappy 2.4ghz Compaq at work. *Hopefully* in the next month I will be using an amazing 15" Powerbook at home and work. Hooray!

The Powerbooks really are incredible machines, I have spent a little time with a friend's, and it just doesn't compare to anything on the PC. Especially now with Panther. He has a 12" Powerbook, which is tiny, but still powerful enough to do just about anything. The 12" screen is small, but it fully supports dual monitor, so you can hook it up to a 19" CRT or another monitor when you are at a desk. This way you still have dual monitor, and when you are taking it on the road and actually need it to be portable, it is tiny enough to fit just about anywhere.

I don't do much "programming" but you of course have all of the Unix text editors and stuff available all the time, plus all of the ones available for the Mac. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, everything is available. And there are some nice specialized editors like this one for CSS: http://www.macrabbit.com/cssedit/

Derek (http://www.twotallsocks.com/)

#2

PowerBook - Any size or flavor. I'm typing from a 15" G4 I bought about a year ago and this is the best machine I've owned -- ever.

Keith (http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/)

#3

Primary development machine:
AMD Athlon 2000+
512 MB PC2100 RAM
80 GB HD
One crappy monitor not worth mentioning.

I'm also looking for a laptop. And like you, I require it to be small and lightweight. I also need long battery life and built-in wireless so I can go to the coffee shop or bookstore and secure shell to my server. Other than that, all I really need is a decent web browser.

I've decided to get an Apple iBook. I have multiple posts on my blog regarding how I came to this decision. Check them out at http://www.clotman.com

Louis (http://www.clotman.com)

#4

I'm with Keith. My 1 year old G4 Titanium Powerbook is the best machine I've ever owned. It is my desktop replacement. It's great having unix under the hood. I often develop disconnected from the network then rsync all my changes to the remote server.

Being new to the market, make sure you look at that G4 iBook. It might fit your needs. However, the 12" G4 Powerbook does have some benefits that make the price difference worthwhile to some folks.

Greg Vaughn (http://gigavolt.net/blog)

#5

I agree on the consensus on a mac OSX laptop... Powerbook is probably preferable. Or an ibook, now that they're G4, they should be fast enough with a good amount of memory. And I think they look better, too. Plus they have better airport reception.

I don't do much dev work on my ibook because it's a bit slow and I'm just not on the road enough to need to. I can fight fires from it, if need be, though.

My primary development machines... home vs work...
home:
self-built box with
amd athlon XP Barton 2500+
Soyo Dragon Ultra 400 MoBo
512 megs of corsair 333 DDRAM
WD 7200 HD with 8M cache
Matrox Millenium G450 card with only one 21 inch Diamondtron monitor attached and room for a second one.
Win2K Pro

Work:
Dell Precision 330 workstation
Pentium 4 ... 1.8 G proc, I think. Might be more...
512M Rambus
15000 RPM SCSI (damn is that fast!)
Matrox Millenium G550 card, dual 17 inch monitors (both flat screen CRTs)
Win2K Pro

My laptop's an ibook, the first model of the 'snow' ibooks, G3 proc, 500 MHz, with either 192 or 320M of ram, can't remember which. OSX Jaguar. Airport wifi.

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#6

Main Development Machine:
Pentium IV 2.8GHz
1GB DDR400 RAM
80GB Western Digital hard drive
Windows XP Professional

Server:
Pentium III 550MHz
384MB RAM
60GB IBM hard drive
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise

Laptop:
Pentium 133MHz
40MB RAM
1.2GB hard drive
Windows 95

Guess which is going to be replaced next! :-)

Basil Crow (http://basilcrow.com/)

#7

The 12 inch powerbook reigns supreme in my book.

I've been at apple stores every other week or so for a few months now playing with them, and every time I go in I come out loving it more. A few of my friends own them, and I think they're the best.

Expensive, but an awesome machine.

--mike

jackal (http://dayofthe.com)

#8

Some nice machines on here so far. I forgot to mention my server at home.

PIII 1.0ghz
512mb RAM
30GB drive
Redhat 9.0

It seems like Macs are the way to go, unless none of the Windows laptop people are speaking up. The major debate seems to be between iBook or PowerBook...hmmm

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#9

If you go with an iBook realize that they only support Video Mirroring, so you'd see the same thing on a larger monitor as the smaller one. Whereas with a Powerbook you get dual monitor support. There may be some hack to do dual on the iBooks, I know there was for the older models. But not the new ones that I know of yet.

Also you are limited to 640mb ram, 1024 resolution, no Superdrive, no firewire 800 (not on the 12" PB either), etc. But they are really affordable, so it depends on what you need it for. :)

Derek (http://www.twotallsocks.com/)

#10

Yeah, there is that. Also on the ibook your bus speed is lower and the cache is severely limited, which slows things down a lot. The 12 inch powerbook isn't exactly a 'real' powerbook, it's more like a pumped up ibook in a powerbook shell. And its hard to do dev work on a 12 inch screen anyway... if you go for the 15, you have a lot more room to play. The 17 is just a beast. One of our consultants (who I learned today is the person who did all the back end work on monster.com that made it able ot handle more than 2000 jobs at once) has one, he was using it today. The thing is just tremendous.

I don't know how often you have to do presentations with digital projectors, but both ibook and powerbook handle those quite nicely.

JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#11

and Paul, if you go for a windows laptop, make sure you get one that has a windows key... it seems like a lot of them don't have that, and if you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, that kills a goodly number of them.

I think the reason you're not hearing much about windows laptops is that mac laptops are priced comparably and are pretty damned cool to boot.

JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#12

This kid in my class has the 17" PB and to me it just seems useless. I definitely would not call that thing portable. I have never had the urge to own a Lapzilla. So it seems I am narrowed down to the 12" and 15" and the 12" ibook. 14" iBook is not an option because 1024x768 on a 14" screen is ridiculous. Can all of these drive resolutions of 1600x1200 if I chose to hook my 21" up to them?

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#13

I'm not sure about the external resolutions on the iBooks. I haven't seen a spec sheet for them yet. The 12" can go to 1600 x 1200, but I don't know about the 15". It can go that high or higher though.

Derek (http://www.twotallsocks.com/)

#14

Ah, actually now all of the powerbooks support 2048 by 1536 on the external monitor. Nice!

http://www.apple.com/powerbook/specs.html

Under "Video and Graphics support"

I don't see any info about it on the iBooks yet though.

Derek (http://www.twotallsocks.com/)

#15

Nice, thanks Derek.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#16

1600x1200 is pretty hard on the eyes with the 12 inch, its a matter of preference I guess.

jackal (http://dayofthe.com)

#17

ibook can do spanning via a hack
http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html

Should also work to change resolutions for external monitor; not sure on powerbooks.

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#18

The actual powerbook screen does not go to those resolutions, they are stuck on their native resolution, or a scaled down version. The higher resolutions are only for an external monitor, should you choose to use one. So you wouldn't have 1600 x 1200 on a 12" screen, just on the screen that you hook up to the PB if you want.

Derek (http://www.twotallsocks.com/)

#19

I got the 12" PB. The 15" was very tempting, but I didn't need a desktop replacement type system. More of one that I could take with me. Thanks everyone for the suggestions, they were very helpful.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#20

Cool! is that your first OSX machine?

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#21

Congrats! You'll love it. My friend's 12" is great. Did you get an Airport Extreme card? If so, driving around and using http://www.macstumbler.com/ to find wireless networks is fun. We found a dozen just driving down the interstate...

Derek (http://www.twotallsocks.com/)

#22

Yep, it is my first Mac ever. I don't think Sam would appreciate me driving down the interstate looking for networks, seeing how his site is due in 2 days :)

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#23

i can think of nothing better than a 12" ibook. honestly i don't believe that ~$1000 is bad for a nice laptop. i guess you could find some crap at compaq or something for lik $800, but based on first-hand experience, i'd advice against that.

oh and it kinda helps with development that os x is *nix =]

vlad (http://vlad.neosurge.net/)

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