Laptop for programming

[Ardalan]

Hi,

I want to buy a laptop for programming and I searched in bestbuy and Amazon but I am very confused because there are a ton of options but I got mix feedback from all manufacturers. Can someone help me to find one because I want to use this laptop for programming for the next 7 to 10 years. Also, I don’t want to buy MacBook because I never used one and matlab doesn’t work on it. 

 

I would be thankful if anyone can help me.

 

P.S I am currently using a surface laptop 1st gen ( core i7 and 16 GB of ram) and I am not happy with it gets hot very fast and it’s wifi connection is bad.

[emosun]

Well it may seem confusing due to "programing" being possible on 99.9% of laptops. What you are actually programming may help narrow it down but you can do a lot a programming on pretty much anything

[Ardalan]

4 minutes ago, emosun said:

Well it may seem confusing due to "programing" being possible on 99.9% of laptops. What you are actually programming may help narrow it down but you can do a lot a programming on pretty much anything

I am an undergraduate student, so I am not sure what will be my specific application but if I want to exactly say what apps and IDE I use are these:

pycharm

python

java

C++

matlab

[Kopaka]

Requirements can depend a lot of the specific project you work on, in some cases you need a lot of stuff open, some cases not so much. But in general I'd go for a fast processor from last generation or two (Ryzen 5000, 6000, Intel 12000). Amount of cores maybe not so important unless you often compile in which case it can speed things up, but 8 seems like a sweet spot atm if you want it to last a while. Biggest bottleneck for me however has been memory, getting 32gb can be expensive, so I'd suggest at least making sure memory can be upgraded if it has less than that. GPU of course don't matter unless you want to game on the side or do some specific stuff that can utilize it. Storage at least 500gb, since certain things can take up a lot of space. Battery, screen etc. depends if you use that or mostly dock it.

[Ardalan]

40 minutes ago, Kopaka said:

Requirements can depend a lot of the specific project you work on, in some cases you need a lot of stuff open, some cases not so much. But in general I'd go for a fast processor from last generation or two (Ryzen 5000, 6000, Intel 12000). Amount of cores maybe not so important unless you often compile in which case it can speed things up, but 8 seems like a sweet spot atm if you want it to last a while. Biggest bottleneck for me however has been memory, getting 32gb can be expensive, so I'd suggest at least making sure memory can be upgraded if it has less than that. GPU of course don't matter unless you want to game on the side or do some specific stuff that can utilize it. Storage at least 500gb, since certain things can take up a lot of space. Battery, screen etc. depends if you use that or mostly dock it.

Hi thank you for your advice. The problem is that the last gen intel processor is like very weak compared to its 12 gen but the problem is that I am not sure when intel 12 gen and Ryzen 6000 CPU will come out for laptops. Also, from what brand should I buy?

[-rascal-]

1 hour ago, Ardalan said:

I am an undergraduate student, so I am not sure what will be my specific application but if I want to exactly say what apps and IDE I use are these:

pycharm

python

java

C++

matlab

 

Literally what I use for work.... minus the Java and C++ and replace it with FPGA / firmware stuff.

PyCharm / Python / MATLAB are my dailies.

 

You don't need a super powerhouse laptop / desktop to do that stuff, especially for undergraduate studies.

For the longest time, my work gave me a desktop with a i5-6500 and 32GB of RAM, and that was fine.

The RAM was bumped up to 32GB (from 8GB -> 16GB -> 32GB) because of the large data files I'm working with in MATLAB.

 

I was recently stripped of the Desktop and given a DELL 5520, with a Intel i7-1185G7 and 32GB of RAM.

Apparently that is our company's latest standard "developer" laptop configuration.

[Ardalan]

2 minutes ago, -rascal- said:

 

Literally what I use for work.... minus the Java and C++ and replace it with FPGA / firmware stuff.

PyCharm / Python / MATLAB are my dailies.

 

You don't need a super powerhouse laptop / desktop to do that stuff, especially for undergraduate studies.

For the longest time, my work gave me a desktop with a i5-6500 and 32GB of RAM, and that was fine.

The RAM was bumped up to 32GB (from 8GB -> 16GB -> 32GB) because of the large data files I'm working with in MATLAB.

 

I was recently stripped of the Desktop and given a DELL 5520, with a Intel i7-1185G7 and 32GB of RAM.

Apparently that is our company's latest standard "developer" laptop configuration.

Hi,

Thank you for all your help and kind attention. I will not go after the desktops because I need a device that I can move around, and the reason that I was looking for a good system was because I want to buy a device that I can trust and use for the next 7 years. I have a surface laptop Corei7 7660U with 16 GB of ram and 512GB SSD, but I am not happy with it because of several reasons. First the internet connection on it is very bad and I talked with the Microsoft support and they did a fresh install of windows, but it did not fix the issue and they said we can give you a new one but you have to pay 500 dollars and give us your laptop first and wait for two weeks which is not possible since I am a student and I am using my laptop daily. Also, this is the second time that surface laptop faced with issue and I had to do all of these things. The second reason is that it runs MATLAB and PyCharm very slowly, and when it runs it (performance mode or balance mode or better performance) it is like a vacuum cleaner the sound and the heat it produces.

 

All of these resulted in the fact to buy a new laptop, and i am not sure which company is better in terms of service and longevity. 

[Ultraforce]

2 hours ago, Ardalan said:

Hi,

Thank you for all your help and kind attention. I will not go after the desktops because I need a device that I can move around, and the reason that I was looking for a good system was because I want to buy a device that I can trust and use for the next 7 years. I have a surface laptop Corei7 7660U with 16 GB of ram and 512GB SSD, but I am not happy with it because of several reasons. First the internet connection on it is very bad and I talked with the Microsoft support and they did a fresh install of windows, but it did not fix the issue and they said we can give you a new one but you have to pay 500 dollars and give us your laptop first and wait for two weeks which is not possible since I am a student and I am using my laptop daily. Also, this is the second time that surface laptop faced with issue and I had to do all of these things. The second reason is that it runs MATLAB and PyCharm very slowly, and when it runs it (performance mode or balance mode or better performance) it is like a vacuum cleaner the sound and the heat it produces.

 

All of these resulted in the fact to buy a new laptop, and i am not sure which company is better in terms of service and longevity. 

I will note MATLAB runs pretty slow on laptops at least in my experience. A big part of why I got a desktop was the XPS 13 I had gotten when I started engineering uni in 2016 was slow on that. With the second being that if you have any hardware description language courses those programs would run really slow with the 2016 XPS 13 with 16 GB of RAM and all that so some programming related programs are at least in my opinion better suited for desktops.

[cmndr]

99% of laptops will work for programming. It doesn't take much power to printf('hello world!')
|
If you occasionally run into something SLOW you can rent space and run your code in the cloud. A good chunk of people in industry (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.) are essentially SSHing into cloud tops and using relatively low powered laptops anyway.

If you're doing things like solid works, simulations, or data analysis on a large scale, then you might need more horse power.

 

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Laptops and Pre-Build Systems

[Ardalan]

12 hours ago, Sakuriru said:

In university most of your projects will be platform neutral but some of them are going to require linux, some are going to require windows, and some are going to require mac os. Take from that what you will, but a macbook can run all 3. Also matlab definitely works on mac os. I'm not sure why you've heard otherwise.

 

Though it should really be your own preference.

It works with macOS but not with Apple silicon. Also, I never worked with Mac in my entire life ( I am not joking). Plus how can I run windows and Linux on Macs with Apple silicon. Yes virtually machine is an option but the performance was not really great last time I tried it.