What laptops are you guys using?

I use a Lenovo Thinkpad T420 I got on eBay for $80 two years ago. I installed Ubuntu on it, and I love my laptop to the moon and back…there is seriously nothing Ive tried so far that I havnt been able to do…save for when I first started learning and did some cloud development on C9, everything Ive done has been local development.

When I got it, I was flat broke and $80 was pretty much all I could afford…I figured Id get something better when I can afford to. Its been two years, and you’d have to pry this precious thing out of my cold dead hands. I :heart: my Lenovo.

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I use old laptop HP Pavilion dv6

At home I use an MS Surface Book. I love it for so many reasons and I have my TV set up to extend my screen when needed.

At work I use an old Mac Book Pro. I am not a fan. I change the keyboard so it works like windows, and run a bunch of extensions and apps that makes the experience less tiresome. It (usually) gets the job done but I supplement with a lot of online tools where the mac lacks.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 3 that I mess around with, mostly to automate processes while I work on other stuff.

I work on three monitors but just on the laptop doesn’t bug me…I use the various desktop screens and extensions to keep things easy to find and separate when I do. One windows I also use an utility called Fences to hide and organize my work.

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A old Dell Inspiron 1564 with a broken carcass and screen =/
But thanks to linux i can still use that warrior!

Conclusion; Buy anything that you like and can afford it, and you should be fine. ;]

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Currently I’m using a Surface Pro 4 with a Brydge keyboard attachment that turns it into a traditional clam shell laptop…I’m super happy with it!

I still want a MBP because I want to experience a Unix platform and see what the hype is all about but with WSL I haven’t felt like I’m missing out on anything :smiley:

And you are also coding on god website on that computer to learn? So far my other two laptops have been able to run this website, my iPhone can but it’s difficult! Thank you so much for your advice:)

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Ive used this laptop for FCC, CS50, CodeCademy, etc online… Have also set up local environments to code in JS, Python, C, C# and whatever associated libraries and frameworks to go with it.

Mobile is indeed tricky and doesnt work with all things…but this is a regular ol computer…its not new, doesnt have a ton of power or space…but Ive yet to come close to using up the space and you dont need a powerful system to code with.

Also, I have it dual booted with Windows 7…just so I can play Sims on it lol

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At home I just have an Asus c300ma Chromebook.

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@SummerWill90
I use a MacBook-Pro (13", late 2013) and I love this machine. But for me any other Apple computer (Mac mini, iMac) with the latest OSX would also do. I like the ease of use. It costs me less energy to use it and it saves me some pain in my muscles, compared to a Windows computer.

Windows works fine, but the mouse makes more meters on it to get things done. The distances between menu’s and the most important buttons are larger than on Apple. And that’s the case in almost all apps. With sensitive muscles like mine I can feel the difference.

Apple’s menu’s are on the left, next to the buttons to open en close apps, while those same buttons on Windows are on the right.
Apple keeps things very small, like in the settings screen. No scrolling there, like in Windows. I can also do most things (except writing code) using my voice as well.

This may not sound like much of a difference between Apple and Windows, but it is to me. I don’t want to go back to using Windows for this reason.

But that’s personal.
Both Apple, Windows and Linux are fine for coding.

You need a decent computer to work on. With enough power not only to run complex code, but also to connect a large monitor to it, or even two of them. I don’t think Chromebook could do that.

And one day you’ll need that monitor, because you’ll be working on so many things at once you’ll want to have them next to each other. Others have mentioned that in the posts above.

Switching constantly between apps drives you crazy, especially if you need to check what things look like or if you need to remember and use what you just read in another app or on another webpage. And that will happen as soon as you leave the teaching environment of websites like FCC and start building a real website.

Whether that computer is a laptop or desktop is not so important as long as it gives you the possibility to connect one or more large monitors. And a laptop gives you both freedom to use it outside your house (coding in the garden :grinning:) and an second monitor while working at your desk with the laptop connected to an external monitor.

Any mid price laptop/desktop should do. Make sure to get at least 8GB ram. You’ll need that with all those apps open.

If you go for the Apple computer take into account that Apple gives you free updates on the OSX and all the new versions of it during about 6 to 8 years. After that you can still use it, but one day you might not be able to update certain apps.
There are many ten year old Apple computers out there, still working hard for their owners.

The Apple won’t loose much of its speed, only some of its battery life and it almost always works immediately. No waiting for updates to be installed before it will start, while you’re in a hurry to work on it, like on Windows. Yes, I am a fan of Apple, can’t help it.:wink:

Good luck with choosing your new computer.

And thanks for asking this question. I find the answers very useful and it made me think about my own computers. :sunglasses:

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I’m currently using Surface Pro4 i7 version. I got nothing to complain about it. If you are buying any kind of smaller screen device, you need to get a monitor. That will make your life alot easier. I have my surface pro connected to a monitor. I also have a keyboard and a mouse connected to it.

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macbook pro 13 base 2018

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Toshiba P75-A7200 with 24GB memory, 1TB SD. I’ve been using it forever and the keys and pad are wearing out, but I just replace the keytops. It’s 17 inch but does not have a touch screen. It has an i7 processor and is fairly quick but does not have a GPU, so if I need one for my ML/DL/RL courses, I first try to get buy with just the processor which I can do most of the time and then I’ll use PaperSpace or Google Collabra for a GPU or for Quantum Machine Learning, I use the quantum simulator first and then switch over to one of the three quantum computers they provide by D-wave, Rigetti, or IBM.

And I have a second monitor to the right of my laptop and separate keyboard and mouse. I almost never use it as a laptop these days, and the battery is sort of worn out.

I’m sorry I haven’t spent much time here as I should, but I have been working through the Coursera courses in Machine Learning–Andrew Ng’s five course series, and I’m a scraggler rushing to finish up Geoffrey Hinton’s outdated and no longer available course in artificial intelligence and machine learning. I’m close to completing those, and I’m also taking the EdX course from Toronto in Quantum Machine Learning that sort of blends quantum and ML. I maintain a massive backlog of Udemy courses so I can get things from a different perspective and get through some of the tougher concepts, but also for practice.

I’m sort of semi-retired but using that not so much for retirement, but to make another go at my career with skills up-to-date. So all of this time studying and practicing is good, though I have to deal with getting burned out and how to keep progress going while coming out of that burn-out state.

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I have Packard Bell, Dell and HP

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Toshiba laptop. It is about five years old. It is a great laptop and for a first purchase of a laptop without much research I did fairly well. The only issue I have is that a lot of the internal certificates are expired.

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Thank you so much :heart:

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As you can tell, opinions vary, but you likely will be fine with almost any device.

I used a Surface Pro 3 for about a year, but sold it. In the end, the shape just didn’t work for me.

HP Elite Book 820 G1 - got it about 3 years old, used it for another 4 years. Loved it. 12 in. form factor, but excellent keyboard and trackpad. Loved it more than the MacBook Pro (2013) or MacBook Air (2012) that I used prior. The Air just didn’t have enough on board storage and you can’t expand it. The Pro just didn’t play great with Visual Studio (I do a lot of windows development) - but now that’s not an issue if you do .Net Core development.

Work machines have been Lenovo and Dell laptops mostly.

I now use a new Dell Inspiron 14, 8th gen i7, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD. I hate the trackpad. Everything else is quite good. I made the mistake of testing out an Dell XPS after I already had my new laptop - the difference is the trackpad. The trackpad on the XPS reminded me of the ones on my Macs - quite good.

I also have a small form-factor desktop that I never use anymore. I love my laptops and giant, easy to look at monitors plug into them just as easy as they do a desktop machine. Same thing with really awesome keyboards and mice.

BTW, you can absolutely use a chrome book to learn - but you will be mostly limited to online resources. So using things like Codepen will be fine, but (IIRC) you won’t have access to anything locally on the machine to compile or run. So you can’t jump into a terminal window and run a Node server or something.

Hope you got some good information.

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it can work very fine though you may be limited at some instances.
i recommend you using Dropbox it will help you easily create folders and access them anywhere

I’d recommend using a Linux laptop, dell and HP have some great prices if you’re not looking to spend a lot of money.

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I have several lappys that i bought inexpensivly from pawn shops. Only one i bought new was my Nitro 5 gaming laptop. $600 2011 MacBook pro (currently using now) i5 cpu and updated to 8gb DDR3 ram with a 240 ssd. pawn shop 200 not including upgrades, a dell Inspiron with a i3 cpu also 8gb DDR3 ram with a 32gb ssd running linux mint, $50 I took out the 500gb hdd. An acer nitro 5 i5 with 8gb DDR4 also with a 500gb ssd, NEW and a small Lenovo lappy with a Celeron 1.3 cpu. $50 I use em all and have no problems doing html or coding with Visual studio 2017 and 2019. If you goto pawn shops do what I do and look at the stickers to see if the drop the price after certain dates, or look for locked Window Pcs. not bios locked just can’t get into windows. Don’t even look at locked apple computers unless your willing to shell out a lot of cash or switch out a chip on the board with a similar broken apple computer. I can’t remember what chip it was and where I read it. But its possible. :smiley: