Which one? I tried a chromebook as my first go at this not too long ago. Not good imo. First of all, they're very underpowered. 4 GB RAM, 32 GB storage, and a Core i5 if you're lucky or if you're willing to go up to the $5-700 range.

I got one with all those specs for programming, installed Ubuntu, and had endless issues. That's pretty much the story with all my attempts to use Linux. **** Linux.

Price used to be my main beef with Macs. I don't actually think they're overpriced now. My specs are 15", quad core i7, 16 GB RAM, SSD, nice metal body, and pretty much anything is $1500-$2k. Last I looked my top 2 options are basically the XPS 15 for $2k or a MBP for $2k, except with the Mac I get much better battery, much better touchscreen, and I get to be free of Windows.

And ok, so maybe I can lower the specs and get away with a Windows machine for $1000-$1200? Meh, it's a purchase that should last 6-8 years ideally.

I don't see what the dev issues you were having are. Maybe for C/C++ stuff. But Python, Java, and Unity (which are all I do), should be 100% good.

LOL $2000 for a laptop, that is just crazy town. I go through about one laptop every 4 of 5 years and I rarely pay more than $800.

Regarding python and java, yeah, it's OK, as long as you don't need anything off the beaten path. Plenty of python libraries have to be compiled or rely on some library that has to be compiled or installed. I literally have constant problems with this. But yes, my main beef is with C++, for which it's compiler is just awful.

Well I don't want a desktop, I do most of my computing on the couch, so this is my main guy. Seems like you use more as a side thing. The main point though, is that IMO Mac's aren't necessarily OVERpriced, they just don't have lower price models really.

I've never heard of any of the problems you mentioned. I feel like just grab Anaconda and rock numpy/scikit at my heart's content, no? Hell most people say it's better for Android development than even Windows machines.

I'm definitely undecided though. I tried to make a point of saying "MBP is CURRENT frontrunner" vs "I'm getting one!!!". I've tried to convince myself a few times to bite on a new Win 10 machine, but it hasn't happened. I'd be very interested to hear you present me a couple good cases for a good, highish power, 15" laptop for around $1-1.2k...

http://www.wired.com/2016/04/hp-chromebook-13/

think it just came out this month or late last month

if it is for your main machine, then yeah, a chromebook likely isn't the best option for you

I switched my Windows 8 Sony laptop to Ubuntu, and it runs magnitudes faster now.

This version 16 of Ubuntu is working much better than when I tried to install RedHat Linux many years ago.

Agreed.

Another good example is ASICs made for Bitcoin Mining. In that arena CPU <<< GPU <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ASIC.

Wow, those specs are horrible. Why wouldn't you buy a Lenovo or something?

Ubuntu is to Linux as Samsung Note is to Android.

Yes exactly.

Regarding Lenovo, I tried to do a ton of research over the past few months, but if you think I've overlooked a good option please make a specific case for one... I'm all ears!

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops...s/x1-carbon-4/

I've had 3 (one stolen, one in backback, one for the house), bought wife one, and bought a half dozen or so for employees that wanted windows instead of mac.

Super light and thin, great battery life, charges super fast (30 minutes for full charge), and never had one issue with any of them. The one that I carry in my backpack is around 6 years old, has been to South America twice, probably done around 100,000 miles in the car, several hundred demos and has not ever had a single issue. Got it with the Att chip built in so internet everywhere.

For my one around the house and my wife's I bought 2 year old ones off ebay for around $400. No issues in the last year with either one. I can't tell the difference in regular use between my i7 and i5 models.

Saw never been unhappy with my mac. If the price tag doesnt bother you dont let old men yelling at clouds affect your decision

Unless you're going to be doing Mac or iOS dev or need some specific piece of software that isn't available on Linux, I don't see how Mac is better than Linux for software development. I ran into a lot of the same problems that Rusty did, and I'm hardly a power user, just use the occasional Ruby gem or Python library, and if it had to be compiled from source, what a pain. Linux Mint is a million times simpler in comparison.

ugh. Getting bit by the dangerouslySetInnerHtml React issue in my chatroom style app. Basically I need to regex parse user input for certain words and then wrap them in a span with a class so they can have different styling. It works and blocks script tags but every other tag (with style attributes) gets through and renders to the page. I don't suppose anyone has ever tackled this? yeah.

What part of it doesn't make sense? I have yet to find any software that runs well on Macs that wasn't actually developed by Apple. That is what I was trying to say. Chrome especially has been really buggy for me on Macs.

I was complaining about some problem in AWS at work the other day and my (pretty young...) coworker pointed and laughed and said "old man yells at cloud"

The Simpsons give so much and ask so little

That's ****ing great. I'm going to use that at some point.

Just wanna say thanks so much for the opinions and feedback guys. Good to revisit this thought process since it's actually getting close to the time when I can make this decision (I wanna wait for WWDC to actually make my decision).

Yea that looks like a great computer, but it definitely fits in the curve I have in my mind of specs vs price. It's less specs for less money at the base model. I can upgrade it to what I would get with a MBP, but then it would cost $1500-$1600. I was making a very similar decision between a $1500 Windows machine and a $2000 MBP recently - the other good Windows option being http://www.asus.com/us/Notebooks/ASU...k-Pro-UX501VW/. I convinced myself that the extra $500 was worth it for such a big/long term purchase since I'd definitely be getting the best battery, likely much better touchpad, and probably a good amount of other intangibles like smoother OS experience. Especially when my current laptop (2012 Lenovo W520) is nearly unusable pretty much because of the battery and touchpad, while my girlfriend's MBP from 2010 or 2011 (although slow to boot up after she spilled coffee on it) runs smooth and beautiful with a battery that still lasts forever and a touchpad that makes me wet.

Now, maybe the question should be, SHOULD my required specs be lower? SHOULD I get a dual core i5 and 8 GB RAM and pay $1000-$1200? Maybe. Maybe it wouldn't last me as long then, since software and computing needs will always be growing. $1200 for 4 years is pretty comparable to $2000 for 6-8 years. Those numbers are kinda arbitrary, but still, I think the concept is valid.

Very cool. This is what just about everyone with a Mac says. Good to hear. 2 of my coworkers have MBPs and (obv) do the same scientific-oriented work I'm interested in. There's non-overlapping parts of the venn diagram of course, but that's also good to hear.

I sort of got to the point in this decision where I don't think any OS is better than any other OS for software development, unless MAYBE you're talking about C++ (but even then most people said it doesn't matter, Rusty's the first I've heard to complain about that). But certainly no difference for Python and Java (or a self-contained thing like Unity, or MATLAB if I can swing a student version of that for free... ).

So yea I agree, Mac is not better than Linux for software dev. Nor is it better than Windows (proooobably not gonna be releasing any iOS apps).

I don't really see a big case for Linux tbh. It doesn't save me any money - even if I find a computer that ships with it, which is super rare, the premium on Windows is still only $100, but IME guaranteed headaches and bugs all over the place. And that's my best case scenario, if all the software I want to use supports Linux.

I think so because while software does grow, I don't think 8GB will be an issue 4-5 years from now.

To put things into perspective my desktop (main computer) has 16GB and I'm running Windows on it. Now, I do run a full time graphical xubuntu VM which is where I spend 99.9% of my time which I allocate 6GB to and I run a ton of stuff without issues.

8GB will be plenty of room for a base OS, a ton of apps, browser tabs, etc..

I do a lot of screencasts with multiple audio programs running in the background, multiple VMs, browsers, programming related tools and so on. All of that stuff fits into 8GB.

I only went for 16GB because at the time it was like $30 more through a sale, plus I knew I would be throwing up clusters of servers through VMs for ops related testing / experiments.

I'm 100% sure you can find a beast mode laptop with an i5 and SSD -- probably even 16GB too if you wanted for around $800 to 1k. Then if you don't want Windows, just put Linux on it.

Also on the topic of development, with Docker providing native solutions for all major platforms I think your OS is no longer a long term concern.

I've been using it for over a year now with Linux and it's awesome. My workstation doesn't even have Ruby or a single gem installed but I get a native development experience as if everything were installed locally.

I can spin up a fully isolated dev stack in literally 2 seconds that includes a rails app, postgres, redis and all of that fun stuff.

Native solutions for OSX and Windows are on the way. I think the OSX version was just released publicly the other day. It was in private beta for a while. In either case, you can still run it today on OSX and Windows.

Of course unix/linux command line tools are really good too, but I guess with Windows 10 you'll be able to run those with whatever wonky solution MS is coming up with to run a bash shell natively and for OSX you should have a similar experience to Linux for the most part.

Shoe Lace great posts! Thanks a ton.

You definitely make a good case for the 8 GB RAM. TBH your anecdote doesn't really argue for the futureproofness of 8 GB, just that it works for you today. Although I'd bet that I'll be fine for a while with 8 GB. My current computer is 8 GB RAM but with an i7-2760QM; neither of those are limiting, although I have nothing to compare it to.

Hypothetically, if my current hobby project really gets moving and I want to end up training neural networks... what's the most limiting factor there you think, CPU or RAM?

My other big use case is game programming, sometimes with Unity. Doesn't seem super resource intensive though since I only do 2D.

I've been piecing together my own machines since the late 1990s. Based on the last 15 years of data, I would be confident in saying that 8GB will be fine 4 years from now for general programming. My definition of fine is, you won't feel like your system is preventing you from having a very good experience.

I don't know about machine learning. I know Google has been doing research to improve GPU performance for them[0]. I would guess CPU, GPU and memory would have some relevance but if you're only doing very occasional high work loads you may want to consider spinning up cloud instances for bursts of time.

I'm sure Google would be happy to give you $500 in free credits where you'd have access to hundreds of gigs of RAM and 32+ cores of CPU power for short periods of time.

For day to day ML I'd Google around and see what others are saying. My gut tells me for a hobby project you'd probably be fine with an i5/8gb.

I can't imagine the Unity dev platform would require more than an i5/8gb set up to have an excellent development experience but that's just speculation since I haven't used it.

I have ran heavy duty editors (RubyMine / Android Studio) inside of the graphical VM with 6GB and both of them run flawlessly. That's while also running a lot of other stuff too.

[0] http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/05/...earning-chips/

Hmm very cool. All sounds nice.

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a laptop in this cheaper realm now? The X1 Carbon for $1200 rec seems pretty good. The big con though is it's 14". Not necessarily a deal breaker I think, but I'd definitely be more comfortable with 15".

I was also looking at the ASUS ZenBook UX501VW a while ago, but this pretty much only comes in a $1500 version and the Dell XPS 15, which I'd also have to spend $1500 to get a full SSD. $1500 could be a deal breaker... at that point I figure I could just spend $2000 on the new MBP which I'm speculating to have a skylake quad core i7 with 16 GB RAM.

Well, I didn't have to have a iTunes account to set up an account on any of my Macs but it took some googling and finding some fairly non-obvious links to be able to create a Windows account that wasn't tied to a MS account.

Docker is unstable and tempermental on osx, to say the least.