Will a Surface Laptop be a good developer computer?

[slbailey1]

If Microsoft put Visual Studio and SQL Server Developer in the Microsoft Store, will the Surface Laptop be a good developer laptop?

If I upgrade it to Windows 10 PRO, will it be a good deliver laptop?

I am thinking about the i7/8gb/512gb ssd version.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

I think any mid level specced laptop is good enough for coding and developing programs. So a high end laptop would work quite well. Coding isn't a graphics card intensive activity, is it?

 

[Josiah23]

@Chintan Gohel

Nope, Visual Studio and many other IDEs only need a somewhat decent graphics card, sometimes/most of the time, the built in graphics on AMD and Intel's processor is good enough... unless your using Visual Studio in game development or something graphics intensive, and only then is a decent Graphics Card needed. The Surface Laptop should be just fine with what you need to do with those specs.

@slbailey1
Like what @Chintan Gohel said, any mid specced laptop will work just fine and if you get the Surface Laptop with i7/8GB/512GB then you're definitely good

 

[Photonsym]

As long as you can hook it up to a bigger screen for the extra screen real estate, I don't see why you could'nt

 

[anon(5415472)]

It'd probably be good for now, but not if you're eventually going to be developing for mixed reality/VR/AR. The recommended system requirements for mixed reality app developers is:

Intel Desktop Core i7 (6+ Core) OR AMD Ryzen 7 1700 (8 Core, 16 threads)
NVIDIA GTX 980/1060, AMD Radeon RX 480 (8GB) equivalent or greater DX12 and WDDM 2.2 capable GPU
16*GB of RAM or greater

My advice would be to get the gear that you'll eventually need for the near future, and not the minimum specs required for right now.

https://blogs.windows.com/buildinga...kits-available-pre-order/#YEI8bsRbTa5kuuPr.97

 

[kaktus1389]

Like others, I think that i5 version should be sufficient if you're not going to do any graphics card intensive development.

 

[SpaciousZebra]

I think it would be a decent one with your specs. The base model definitely won't pack enough punch for that, though. I'm sure HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. will come out with options that have more power and cost less. Not sure if you'll touch the level of style these Surface Laptops have, though!

 

[wick3dGr1n]

If development involves virtualization, you will struggle with the base model (even the 8 GB model).

 

[Chris Knopff]

The Pro version would be a better option as the Windows 10 S setup will have restrictions to the CMD/Shell/Bash availability. I doubt there would be an issue if it's programmed for the Windows Sandbox environment though, but that may be dependent on the app you're looking to develop for

 

[Ezhik]

Windows 10 S is not a developer platform, period. Gotta have 10 Pro.

As for development, unless you work on *huge* - like, millions of lines of code huge - or work with graphics, development isn't actually that resource intensive.

 

[Dreki8lier]

I agree if you dock it to a bigger screen it should be great! The specs are more than enough for developer work.

 

[Drael646464]

Windows 10 S is not a developer platform, period. Gotta have 10 Pro.

As for development, unless you work on *huge* - like, millions of lines of code huge - or work with graphics, development isn't actually that resource intensive.

Potentially you could execute on a server. There's a few apps for that that MAY work with windows s.

But you'd be sacrificing a lot, to get that quick on, boot, long battery life. You'd have to be one of those quasi prodigies that can code mostly in their head, writing enough code to pour steam from the keyboard to get any benefit out of it.

 

[Dreki8lier]

I agree if you dock it to a bigger screen it should be great! The specs are more than enough for developer work.