I'd like to get into Programming and i don't know what laptop i should go for

[SuperTuna]

Hi,I'm 23 Years old and I'd like to get into programming , I'm starting with CS50 course , and soon I'll figure out what field I'll go to , I travel alot and i need a laptop to run videos and code with it and something that would probably last a lil while rn i have a budget going from 500 up to 1000$ price are different in my country but i can ask a friend of mine to get it from the usa he should visit me in december I need a couple of recommended devices and why did you choose it over others thank you alot

[Zando_]

Base M1 MacBook Air ($999) + an external drive for your important files (a 1TB Crucial X8 is only $60 USD). My younger brother works at the same company as me doing website backend stuff, and also does a bunch of hobby coding and himself at home, all off a base M1 Air. Great battery life, they're extremely fast, and Macs are popular enough with the programming crowd that you shouldn't run into much that won't work on macOS. Best trackpad that exists on any laptop, and a very good keyboard as they've moved away from the silly butterfly keys one. I do general IT management things on mine, and a buttload of Excel sheets for reports every month, haven't had any issues with it. You'd need to be doing something that loads up the GPU to run into issues with the base spec machines (as the 8GB RAM is shared between the CPU cores and GPU cores). 

[SuperTuna]

11 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

Base M1 MacBook Air ($999) + an external drive for your important files (a 1TB Crucial X8 is only $60 USD). My younger brother works at the same company as me doing website backend stuff, and also does a bunch of hobby coding and himself at home, all off a base M1 Air. Great battery life, they're extremely fast, and Macs are popular enough with the programming crowd that you shouldn't run into much that won't work on macOS. Best trackpad that exists on any laptop, and a very good keyboard as they've moved away from the silly butterfly keys one. I do general IT management things on mine, and a buttload of Excel sheets for reports every month, haven't had any issues with it. You'd need to be doing something that loads up the GPU to run into issues with the base spec machines (as the 8GB RAM is shared between the CPU cores and GPU cores). 

just to be accurate its this one right? 13-inch MacBook Air: Apple M1 chip with 8-core CPU and 7-core GPU, 8GB/256GB - Gold

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, SuperTuna said:

just to be accurate its this one right? 13-inch MacBook Air: Apple M1 chip with 8-core CPU and 7-core GPU, 8GB/256GB - Gold

-snip-

Yep. M1 Air with the 7-core GPU, 8GB memory, and 256GB storage. As mentioned above, be sure to grab an external SSD too if you aren't using something like Dropbox.

[CWALD]

Not a fan of Apple but you do want something that has a good keyboard and supports Linux well if you want to duel boot or just not use windows. I like ThinkPads but Dell Latitudes aren't bad either. I would also be willing to try a framework. If you have a place near you that has a bunch of laptops on display then I would go try out the keyboards, even if you buy elsewhere it will give you a frame of reference for different lineups 

[SuperTuna]

4 minutes ago, CWALD said:

Not a fan of Apple but you do want something that has a good keyboard and supports Linux well if you want to duel boot or just not use windows. I like ThinkPads but Dell Latitudes aren't bad either. I would also be willing to try a framework. If you have a place near you that has a bunch of laptops on display then I would go try out the keyboards, even if you buy elsewhere it will give you a frame of reference for different lineups 

we have a couple of stores in here with laptops that are on display but mostly gaming ones but I'm not completely sure so I'll go check them out tomorrow, I've also heard about Thinkpads people say their keyboard is comfy to type with and is a good pick for light programming however I do have abit of time to decide which i'd go for so I'll try to test both macbook and thinkpads and check other laptops as well thank you alot

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, SuperTuna said:

we have a couple of stores in here with laptops that are on display but mostly gaming ones but I'm not completely sure so I'll go check them out tomorrow, I've also heard about Thinkpads people say their keyboard is comfy to type with and is a good pick for light programming however I do have abit of time to decide which i'd go for so I'll try to test both macbook and thinkpads and check other laptops as well thank you alot

Personally, I would choose a MacBook or a ThinkPad. If you need Windows for anything, it's worth noting that M1 and Apple Silicon Macs can't really run Windows since they're not based on an x86 architecture, which is an advantage that Intel Macs have over M1, at the cost of more heat output, higher power consumption, and lower battery life. I can still crank out 8-10 hours on battery with my 2019 16" MBP depending on what I ask it to do, but it drops off pretty quickly down to 6-7 hours when I start doing more intensive things.

 

As far as comparing ThinkPads and MacBooks, I would say they're pretty equal overall. MacBooks are really robust and have the best trackpads you'll find in any laptop, but they don't have a ton of ports and you can't upgrade their hardware. ThinkPads, especially the T and P series, have more ports than the city of Seattle, you can usually upgrade a lot of hardware in them, but they're not nearly as portable and don't usually have the same kind of battery life. In terms of keyboards, I like both the ThinkPad and MacBook keyboards, but I would give the edge to Apple in that department, albeit not by a lot.

 

It's also worth noting that no ThinkPad will be as portable as an M1 MacBook Air, which may be a consideration if you'll be moving around often and taking your laptop places with you.

[Tetras]

Introductory programming courses are usually very easy to run, so the spec isn't super important.

 

$500 to $1000 can get you a very different laptop though! I'd stay away from ones with low-spec CPUs (like celerons and pentiums) and 4GB of memory (especially if they're soldered, as it severely limits your upgrades).

[YoungBlade]

What type of programming do you hope to go into? Web design, application development, game dev, low-level OS work, etc.? That will determine a lot about what kind of laptop would be ideal for you.

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

it's worth noting that M1 and Apple Silicon Macs can't really run Windows since they're not based on an x86 architecture

Apparently they can run the x86 translation layer in a Windows 11 ARM VM without chugging has hard as you would expect, but that isn't an optimal solution nor something I have tested myself. 

[SuperTuna]

2 minutes ago, Tetras said:

Introductory program

 

3 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Personally, I would choose a MacBook or a ThinkPad. If you need Windows for anything, it's worth noting that M1 and Apple Silicon Macs can't really run Windows since they're not based on an x86 architecture, which is an advantage that Intel Macs have over M1, at the cost of more heat output, higher power consumption, and lower battery life. I can still crank out 8-10 hours on battery with my 2019 16" MBP depending on what I ask it to do, but it drops off pretty quickly down to 6-7 hours when I start doing more intensive things.

 

As far as comparing ThinkPads and MacBooks, I would say they're pretty equal overall. MacBooks are really robust and have the best trackpads you'll find in any laptop, but they don't have a ton of ports and you can't upgrade their hardware. ThinkPads, especially the T and P series, have more ports than the city of Seattle, you can usually upgrade a lot of hardware in them, but they're not nearly as portable and don't usually have the same kind of battery life. In terms of keyboards, I like both the ThinkPad and MacBook keyboards, but I would give the edge to Apple in that department, albeit not by a lot.

 

It's also worth noting that no ThinkPad will be as portable as an M1 MacBook Air, which may be a consideration if you'll be moving around often and taking your laptop places with you.

I really appreciate your comment yours is more in depth and yeah rn I'm thinkiing about either macbooks or Thinkpads  I think Id go for the m1 macbook air

[SuperTuna]

4 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

What type of programming do you hope to go into? Web design, application development, game dev, low-level OS work, etc.? That will determine a lot about what kind of laptop would be ideal for you.

I haven't decided yet I'm still taking an introduction to computer science course, and rn I'm in week 4 which is all about c language and debugging for now I'm working on Visual studio code,and I haven't decided exactly what field I'll pick , I'm just gonna take courses and learn more until I find my thing

[Tetras]

1 minute ago, SuperTuna said:

I haven't decided yet I'm still taking an introduction to computer science course, and rn I'm in week 4 which is all about c language and debugging for now I'm working on Visual studio code, and I haven't decided exactly what field I'll pick , I'm just gonna take courses and learn more until I find my thing

If you decide to go into something like game development and start running blender and UE5, then you'll need a much better laptop than $500 and will likely want to sink your whole budget, but I don't know if that's realistic.

[SuperTuna]

2 minutes ago, Tetras said:

If you decide to go into something like game development and start running blender and UE5, then you'll need a much better laptop than $500 and will likely want to sink your whole budget, but I don't know if that's realistic.

I'm not quite sure yet , but I'm not interested in game development

[Crunchy Dragon]

16 minutes ago, SuperTuna said:

I haven't decided yet I'm still taking an introduction to computer science course, and rn I'm in week 4 which is all about c language and debugging for now I'm working on Visual studio code,and I haven't decided exactly what field I'll pick , I'm just gonna take courses and learn more until I find my thing

M1 MacBook Air should get you through that with no problems, and should be a decent choice for a while after that, provided you don't get super deep into artificial intelligence and machine learning either. Either way, the M1 Mac will handle AI/ML better than it will game development, so that's still an option for you as well if it catches your interest.

 

I and a lot of people I know like working in VSCode on a Mac.

[TylerD321]

Alot of the programmers I know use thinkpads, they are very nice. I also know a guy who likes to program on his 2016 mac like a weirdo.

 

If you want lots of options, HP Zbooks are pretty similar to thinkpads imo.

[YoungBlade]

36 minutes ago, SuperTuna said:

I haven't decided yet I'm still taking an introduction to computer science course, and rn I'm in week 4 which is all about c language and debugging for now I'm working on Visual studio code,and I haven't decided exactly what field I'll pick , I'm just gonna take courses and learn more until I find my thing

31 minutes ago, SuperTuna said:

I'm not quite sure yet , but I'm not interested in game development

If you're unsure, most development jobs these days are related to web services. I'd been looking for a programming job for a while, most of the openings were asking for web experience and I ended up at a company where I'm coding primarily in PHP. If you don't have a strong preference, that is probably where you'll end up.

 

It's hard to give a perfect recommendation in this price range without knowing more specifically what direction you're going to go in.

 

When it comes to basic programming, like you'll be learning at first, any modern laptop will do fine. Simple C like you'll code in an entry level class can run on computers from 20 years ago without a problem. So don't worry about what you're getting for these upcoming classes - you really can't go wrong. It's when you get to more advanced projects that you'll want a better laptop.

 

Generally, for programming, you want a fast CPU and plenty of RAM. How important RAM is depends on whether you need to build a project/compile code on your local machine. If you're working in a scripting language, like Javascript, Python, PHP, etc., then RAM isn't as important, unless what you're doing is particularly complex or brings in a lot of assets. But the nice thing about RAM is that most laptops let you upgrade it - although you'll want to check into that if you're hoping to do so in the future. A Macbook, for example, does not allow you to upgrade the RAM at all. And some Windows laptops only let you upgrade a single stick, or don't let you upgrade at all, but most let you upgrade the RAM and have two slots for it.

[rikitikitavi]

If you go with Air M1, you can use smth like UTM (free) to virtualize ARM versions of Windows and Linux distros...

 

However if you need to emulate, for example to run some specialized software that only works on WIndows x86-64, then the performance will be unbearable (at least the last time I checked).

 

Highly suggest looking into lightly used/certified ones to get more RAM.