Is A Mac The Best Laptop For Software Engineers

Want to know how many structural grad students here have macs? It is a pain in the ass to get software to work. Even running windows in parallel can create problems for some software (OpenSees was causing problems for my colleague with a mac) The Lenovo thinkpad is popular among students and industry here. HP makes some good ones too.

Sometimes new developers ask me, “So, what’s the best laptop for a programmer?” It’s an important question. As a “software crafts(wo)?man”, your computer isn’t just your tool belt - it’s your pickup truck, miter saw, lathe, awl, bulldozer - all rolled into one. You need a reliable and performant machine that empowers you while staying out of your way as much as possible. It’s an important question, but the answer no doubt reminds you of a certain brand of adult diaper - It depends.

Assess your real needs At this point I usually push back for more information to make sure they aren’t missing an optimal solution by prematurely limiting their options: Are you sure you want a laptop? The question is a little like, “What is the best light-duty pickup truck for pulling a mobile home?” Just like the best truck for pulling a mobile home is not a pickup truck, the best machine for a software developer is not a laptop at all - it’s a desktop workstation.

Have you considered a *desktop* workstation? If you never leave the office, don’t get a laptop - get a stationary monster truck hunk of a desktop workstation. With laptops you’re currently limited to a maximum of four cores due to battery and heat dissipation concerns.

With a desktop you can start thinking about high frequency light-dimming CPUs with six cores or more, or even this! And without chassis space as an limiter, you can explore various RAID configurations for extracting additional performance or fault-tolerance from those grease lightning SSDs. Assuming you really do want a laptop, what is the best laptop for a software engineer?

Again, consider your circumstances. How often are you really coding on the road? If you only travel occasionally and live in an area with decent internet, you could get a something like a budget and remote into your stationary supercomputer. This is a doubly good idea if your travel takes you through high crime areas. What type of software are you writing? Small apps and web widgets don’t require much horsepower to develop, so your options open up significantly.

You might be tempted to spring for the swanky. It’s a solid and super portable dual core laptop, but make sure that a 13.3” screen with near 4K resolution is big enough for you. My advice would be to look into other less expensive offerings from Dell, HP, and Lenovo and compare them to the “” below, minus the “quad-core” requirement. If you’re writing enterprise level behemoths, spring for the best mobile workstation you can find (or better yet, convince the company to buy it for you!). In the enterprise, you could be working on a silly toy app one day, and a monstrous million line monolith the next.

The is an excellent mobile workstation, and you can often find them used on eBay. High-end gaming laptops are another choice, but the graphics cards are overkill for most programming projects, and their styling tends to look a little too juvenile for certain programming pedigrees. Mobile Workstation Checklist Let’s assume that you travel enough to make a portable workstation worthwhile. What should you look for?

Ue4 language. It's called, and the effort continues to this day. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. • • • The Wine Project The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac too.

This checklist should get you started. • Good keyboard • Standard keyboard layout; no weird key placement,. • Backlit keyboard, for those manic mornings and long lonely nights.

Fast and easy to type on (i.e. ** not **the ridiculous Microsoft Touch Cover 2 keyboard). • Intel Processor • Sorry AMD, but it’s a bummer when you’re battling a nasty bug and everyone else on the team tells you, “Works on my machine.” • Quad core processor is a must (But certainly don’t limit yourself to a quad-core if laptops come out with higher core counts). • For a software engineer, the more cores, the better.