Octopus Overlords

My son is a High School Senior who is applying to local schools for Comp Sci. He is taking his third year of high school comp sci classes and is asking for a laptop for coding. The school provides a chromebook which he can't use for coding. They use the BlueJay IDE for java which isn't compatible, I guess. It means he can code on the provided equipment in class and then has to push it to the cloud and when he gets home he downloads it and works on it on his gaming PC. A laptop would let him avoid that bouncing back and forth and let him work on it when he has downtime at school outside the comp sci class. It would also be nice if he can use it for college.

All the coders I know use Macbook Pros because that is what work gives us. I really don't want to spend that kind of money. I don't have a specific budget, like maybe around $1k and up to $15-1600 if there are meaningful benefits to the extra costs. I'll talk to him this week about his requirements more, but just looking for ideas. He knows windows. I'm guessing *nix would be better for college, but that's just a guess. I guess I can see if I can find what the schools he is applying to recommend.

Anyway, anyone have thoughts?

My work machine is an HP ZBook.

If he’s sticking with Java, I ended up getting an M2 MacBook Air and it is absolutely glorious. But not cheap. I mostly use IntelliJ on that for Java development although I’ve run VS Code on it for other projects as well.

If it’s really just for development, and modestly priced windows laptop will be just fine. My son was in the same boat and we bought a relatively inexpensive laptop for high school graduation. I think we might have refreshed that when he graduated from county and wanted something a little more substantial that could also play games.

It worked for him. But man do I love working on my MacBook Air.

Can he go with an iPad Pro w/ M1 chip plus a good BT keyboard?

Another vote for MacBook Air. Just make sure you get 16GB of RAM. All these Electron based editors like VS Code are memory hogs.

or get one with Windows installed and dump it for Linux. MacBooks are nice and all, but not necessary - Java development (like C, Javascript, python et al) is intended to work equally well on any OS. (and if you're using command line/terminal, there are _just enough_ differences in OS X from bash/sh/zsh that it can be preeeeetty annoying)

Kasey Chang wrote:Can he go with an iPad Pro w/ M1 chip plus a good BT keyboard?

The iPad is a terrible option for development (IMO), especially if Java is your jam (no JVM).

hitbyambulance wrote:or get one with Windows installed and dump it for Linux. MacBooks are nice and all, but not necessary - Java development (like C, Javascript, python et al) is intended to work equally well on any OS. (and if you're using command line/terminal, there are _just enough_ differences in OS X from bash/sh/zsh that it can be preeeeetty annoying)

The allure of the MacBook isn’t that it’s necessary to run Java - it’s that it is a substantially better laptop in general. Just not cheap.

Honestly I was surprised how cheap the MacBook Airs were vs my expectations. I have made the call yet, but I appreciate all the different options and opinions.

You *can* order Dells with Linux instead of Windows and save $50 or so.

Else, System76 has Linux laptops, and Pine64 have some really cheap ones, though they are VERY VERY generic and low-powered (and priced accordingly)

If you give me some time to confirm, I may have a spare laptop ir 2 I can sell you cheap.
Just need to dig them out and confirm they work.
I dint think theyed be more than 2 or 3 years old. I usually updated my gaming laptops pretty regularly in the before times.

Punisher wrote: ↑Wed Sep 20, 2023 10:21 pm If you give me some time to confirm, I may have a spare laptop ir 2 I can sell you cheap.
Just need to dig them out and confirm they work.
I dint think theyed be more than 2 or 3 years old. I usually updated my gaming laptops pretty regularly in the before times.

I appreciate the thought, but I think a gaming laptop would be overkill for this. Also gaming laptops tend to also be lap scorchers and fairly loud.

Punisher wrote: ↑Wed Sep 20, 2023 10:21 pm If you give me some time to confirm, I may have a spare laptop ir 2 I can sell you cheap.
Just need to dig them out and confirm they work.
I dint think theyed be more than 2 or 3 years old. I usually updated my gaming laptops pretty regularly in the before times.

i would be interested in seeing what you have, however - my newest laptop is a MacBook Air from 2012 with a battery (the original!) in dire condition. got it for free from a previous job as a 'going away present' back in 2018.

the ASUS TUF series are good machines. They are marketed as "gaming" laptops, but, I like them because they are , in fact, pretty tough. I have a couple at home. I bought them new, they look all "scratch and dent" now, and still working great. I never feel like I am going to break them when carrying around or just general handling. With my chromebook, or my thinkpad from work I always feel like I need to be supercareful. But the asus, it just feels like a solid machine. You can get them for less than a thousand USD.

They are heavy, compared to macbooks or thinkpads and such. But its nice to know you can give it to a teenager and not worry that the screen will crack the first time they put it into a backpack along with schoolbooks and headphones.


But if you aren't worried about that. HP, Dell, and Lenovo all make good little laptops. I bought a Dell for my mother, and she thinks its great. It works, she can carry it around, do her writing, watch netflix. I never have to do phone tech support for her. Just make sure you get 16GB ram ( those people who say windows can run on 8GB RAM are delusional). I am much more fond of Dell than the other brands, I bought a few of those in recent years and they all worked good, no complaints.

Oh wait, I have broken 2 of the Lenovo Thinkpads from work in the past year, so maybe not one of those. But the other brands, yes.

And if you see a laptop thats real cheap, and its from a company you never heard of, I recomend that you don't risk it. Those sorts of gambles usually don't pay out.

You could always get a refurbished laptop from Dell, Lenovo or HP since those are mostly laptops that got returned as part of a company lease trade-in (where companies lease their laptops from Dell or whatever and make you trade them back in and get a new laptop every couple of years). Many of them are crappy by today's standards, like having only 4-8 GB of RAM, but they are starting to get models with 16GB back, like this Lenovo or this Dell.

You can spend 1/2 the cost of an M2 and be just as effective for productivity.

Montag wrote: ↑Fri Sep 22, 2023 8:21 pm You can spend 1/2 the cost of an M2 and be just as effective for productivity.

this was the point i was also trying to make above. there are arguments to be made for the build quality of Apple products, but at twice the price (or more!) of another brand which has same or better specs, it isn't a great value proposition for a 'beginner dev' machine.

hitbyambulance wrote:

Montag wrote: ↑Fri Sep 22, 2023 8:21 pm You can spend 1/2 the cost of an M2 and be just as effective for productivity.

this was the point i was also trying to make above. there are arguments to be made for the build quality of Apple products, but at twice the price (or more!) of another brand which has same or better specs, it isn't a great value proposition for a 'beginner dev' machine.

I think that’s a reasonable point (I didn’t buy my son a MacBook ). I don’t know if the value prop is just build quality (that’s definitely part of it).

The MacBook Air truly is as portable as an iPad. It’s basically weightless, and the battery lasts forever (I use it constantly and only have to charge it up every few days). And when I charge it, it’s basically a phone charging cable, not a big power brick.

When it comes to “specs” that’s where I’m going to say “ehhh…not sure”. The project I’m working on is based on Java, and when I build it, it runs hundreds of unit tests. When I was building on my Alienware, those unit tests take a few minutes to run.

If I build often, that adds up. When I first moved to Mac, I was using an M1 Mac Mini. The same battery of tests that takes minutes to run on my Windows laptop, was completing in about 4 seconds on the M1.

They take 1-2 seconds on the M2. It was running so fast that I thought something was broken and it wasn’t actually executing the tests.

To be fair, my Alienware isn’t new. So I’m sure a modern mid-range laptop is probably faster than it. But I would be pretty surprised if a modern mid-range laptop is roughly 120 times faster like the M2 has been for what I’m doing.

With all that said, I still didn’t buy one for my son.

He’s working now and can buy his own if he wants!