I'm in the market for a new laptop. I have done my research, but I would like to hear from the MyBB Community.
I will be carrying it in my backpack all day in school, so it should be lightweight and have great battery life. Since I will be using it exclusively for school and programming, an SSD and 8GB RAM will work just fine.
What would you buy? What's the hottest piece of hardware out there right now?
Lenovo recently has been heading down hill IMO. The Dell Lattitudes are pretty great, or a HP Elitebook.
Or, go Macbook Pro. They shiny and stuff. And the interface is great (IMHO). Currently running a 960GB Samsung Evo Pro SSD in my optibay, with a 1TB HDD in the main bay, and 16GB of 1600Mhz DDR3
I have a budget between $1000-2000. I'm looking at high end laptops only. At the moment, I am seriously considering the 13" Macbook Pro.
I have looked at Lenovo, Dell, HP and Asus. Frankly, nothing matches the 13" Macbook Pro. The ASUS Zenbook UX301LA comes close though.
I'm waiting for September 9th to see if Apple will unexpectedly release a new Macbook or something.
(2014-09-06, 10:24 PM)Tom K. Wrote: [ -> ]And the interface is great (IMHO).
Are you talking about Mac OS? I might put Ubuntu on it.
The Macbooks are okay (Personally, not a fan - but they're popular for a reason), they do have good build quality and the battery life for them is supposed to be pretty good. Personally I've been pretty fond of Dell laptops, because you mentioned putting Ubuntu on it, they do have an XPS that ships with Ubuntu:
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd
There is also System76 that sell only Ubuntu-based laptops:
https://system76.com/laptops/
Things to consider if you plan on installing Linux.
I suggest you to go with Dell if you plan on installing Ubuntu or any other Linux Distro directly in the HDD.
Also try to get a laptop with nvidia GPU. The driver support for nvidia is better in Linux. I'm saying this as someone who supports AMD all the way and current running AMD CPU/GPU in my machine.
And stay away from bumblebee, i.e. the laptops in which you can use the in-build GPU in the Intel CPU and also has a dedicated GPU. Because bumblebee driver support in Linux is poor.
If you are going to contribute to open source Linux projects using C/C++ then a Linux distro is the best choice as the OS.
Go ahead with Macbook. I use Mac along with Ubuntu using dual boot. Our college stuff is usually VB, C++& Autocad. Macbook just serves the purpose.
I was in the same boat as you at the beginning of this year and I was deciding between a 13" MacBook Pro or a few ultrabooks but in the end, I went the MacBook as they had the superior battery life and better specs/storage for the price than the other high-end ultrabooks I was looking at. (pricing may be different since I'm in Australia - land of ridiculous tech prices)