What is the best laptop for developers?

[OneWindows]

As a hardcore Microsoft fan, Surface Book could have been my hand down choice. But believe it or not, I have never get my hands on one of those yet. Considering that professional demand, is Surface Book (2) a good choice? Or should I go for a more powerful option like a high end XPS?

 

[HeyCori]

That depends a lot on what you're creating.

 

[abrichman]

OneWindows, I have basically the same question with my interest in what will be edge-bleeding in 2-3 years.

If you are just running up to a single VM and nothing compute intensive, I'd think you would be absolutely fine with a 7th gen i7 CPU with 16GB RAM. I run one hypervisor/guest at a time and Visual Studio or WebStorm on the guest with no issues on both a i5 2410M/8GB (VMware Workstation 12) and i5 4300U/8GB (Hyper-V) and usually node running on the host concurrently. This runs seamlessly. I don't know how much more load Eclipse/IntelliJ will eat up provided that's your ride but assume a modern CPU with 2x the power of mine and double the RAM would handle it without question.

I have been limiting my search to quad core because I run a goofy setup with two concurrent guests which I used to like to do with my beefier (quad core) work laptops. I have never been able to get my dual cores to reproduce that well. But if I did not care about that (and I probably shouldn't because it's really not necessary), I'd be all ALL over that Samsung Notebook 9 15" that Daniel reviewed recently (adding a bigger SSD on receipt). That's just MO and I am only weighing in because this has been on the front of my mind for months now and thought the data points might help.

Just one guy's opinion though so YMMV.

 

[OneWindows]

That's really helpful! Thanks, folk.