How To Pick The Right Laptop for Programing ?
All right so today I'm going to go through my best tips and tricks for how to choose a programming laptop and my goal with this article is that at the end of the article you should have all the tools that you need to be able to evaluate programming laptops on your own.
My quick conclusion or three quick tips for what to look for in a computer so you can get even quicker information about what to look for and my three general guidelines for buying a programming laptop.
- Firstly get as much ram as possible-eight gigabyte minimum
- The second tip is to get the biggest screen that you can justify carrying around
- The third-get the best CPU you can afford
Okay so those are my three general rules of thumb for what you should look for in a programming laptop and now I'm gonna go through kind of why I recommend those things and also go more into depth into what you should look for in a programming laptop.
#1 RAM
The first one is ram and here I want to try to answer three main questions that I think most people would have and the first one is what is ram and why should I care? the second one is why it's important for programmers? and the third one is how much ram do I need?
What is ram?
Basically, ram is the reason that you're able to run several applications at once on your computer without having to reload each application when you switch between them.
You could run one program and you can open up a second program and then hang out in that program. And when you go back to the first one then you don't have to reload it again.
Essentially here the more ram that you have the more programs you can have running at once without having to reload them.
And that's something that's really important for programmers because programmers will usually be running several different applications at once.
You'll probably be running a web browser a text editor or terminal
So you usually are wanting quite a lot of ram just to be able to switch between different applications and then thirdly or fourthly if you're developing like mobile apps you'll probably be running an emulator of some kind as well and all of these different things will take up some ram.
So that's why I kind of suggest usually aiming for at least 8 gigabytes of ram that would be like the minimum I would suggest.
And yeah that's kind of my advice for ram.
#2 Size of your Laptop
The second thing is the size of your laptop and here I would say that it's a lot up to like personal preference. Basically, some people really like the small form factor of a laptop so they would go for something like a 13 inch.
But for me personally, I feel like any time I've worked on a 13-inch monitor I kind of feel a little bit claustrophobic.
So to me, the screen is really everything when it comes to programming because as I said before usually you'll be running several different programs at once and if you want to have several different windows open at once I would say that 15 inches is something that I really enjoy using myself.
Because that way you can have some sort of browser window open at one corner and then you can have like a text editor and maybe even a terminal in the bottom right corner and that's kind of my suggestion I would say that 15 inches is like about the biggest I would get.
If you get more than 15 inches then it kind of gets to the point where It's so big that it doesn't really make sense because you want it to be somewhat portable as well but it is a real struggle.
With the pros versus con of a big versus small screen like I really do enjoy the form factor of like a 14-inch or 13-inch laptop because you know you can just take that anywhere & it's usually pretty lightweight as well.
Again this is kind of a personal prefer
#3 CPU
The third thing is CPU and I would say that this is as per with ram as well like they're kind of on the same level but I would say that most computers if you buy a new one today then most of them will have pretty decent processing power but the ram is usually something that's going to help you a lot with programming since you'll be running several different applications at once.
But I would say that you should go for something like 2 gigahertz to whatever you can afford so basically two gigahertz is like the minimum and then you basically just buy the best processor that you can afford.
#4 Operating System
The fourth one here is what operating system you should choose and here I think there are mainly two ones that most people know about and that's mac os and windows.
There's also a third one that a lot of people know about which is Linux but it's not as widely used as mac os and windows and I would say that if we're doing like a hierarchy of the best versus the worst of for programmers.
I would say that Linux is like the best one that you can get and mac os is the second best one and then windows is the third one.
However, with that said you can program on either of them and it's not that big of a difference between them it's just kind of experience.