New dev rig
I had been waiting for the new Macbook Pro’s for a while now. But, the new Macbook Pros were a huge disappointment. I much prefer carrying a smaller, single laptop, rather than two, but I was already feeling quite constrained with 16GB, and Apple not improving some basic stuff like Finder and window management forced me to look into PC alternatives.
So I did my research, http://blah.winsmarts.com/2016-11-Dev_laptop_comparison.aspx and finally settled on a Lenovo P50.
So here is an update on my Lenovo P50, alongwith how much cash I blew on it.
The latest greatest Macbook pro would have cost me $4299, and it would be silly not to buy Applecare on it, given the zero repairability score. So $4599. I figured that was a pretty good budget. LOL.
My Lenovo was a 64G, i7–6850 processor, and 500GB spinning HDD.
I then added a 2TB Crucial SATA 3 SSD, and a couple of Samsung 960 Pro SSDs. Fast disks make a world of a difference especially when virtualizing or working on video. And these Samsungs are the same speed as what the latest macbook pro offers, i.e. the best money can buy as of today. I got two of these so I can split most of the disk IO between two, so technically speaking, I have a better setup than Macbook pro — disks alone. But don’t forget, I also have 64GB DDR4, vs MBPro’s 16GB DDR3.
So how fast are these disks? Pretty fast!
Disk speed REALLY REALLY matters. Windows does not show all this, but for instance on Mac you can see how much data a certain process has written to the disk. And if you do virtualization, or video rendering, RAM and fast disks are like the two wheels of a motorcycle. Fast disks will compensate for lack of RAM (so the new MBpro will probably run SharePoint fine), but why compensate when you can have both RAM and disks? Here is a real world test,
That is a 85GB VM being copied, in less than 1 minute. Smokin’! This means, I can run 4 or even 6 VMs in parallel. Yeah sometimes you do need to do that.
Anyway, I wasn’t done yet! I also had an older 4K monitor (40"), and I added two Samsung KS8500 4K 49" TVs to use as monitors. in addition to the one 4K I already had. My existing 4K runs on Display Port 1.2, and the new TVs run on HDMI2.
Now you may ask, why use a TV as a monitor? Dude — let me tell you something. These panels are amazing, and at 4K resolution, 49" size, you don’t need DPI scaling AT ALL. So what you get is a huge surface area to work with. It’s ridiculous. Now, these being TVs are bright — so you have turn the backlight down quite a bit so they don’t burn your cornea. And once you turn the backlight down, the colors become off. So I cannot recommend them for designer types. But if you are a programmer, or someone who doesn’t care too much about color accuracy, these are fantastic. Also, they run at 120Hz, so no flicker, i.e. good for your eyes.
I did have to get a plugable USB-C to dual displayport adapter, and a couple of HDMI 4k/60hz cables + two Display port 1.2 to HDMI 2 adaptors. Be very careful to read the specs, they must support 4k @ 60hz 4:4:4. I have linked to the specific products I got. It is very important that you pick the right ones or you’re gonna have a bad time!
So now my setup looks like this.
To get an idea of the size, that keyboard is a full sized Apple wired keyboard.
Some may say it’s excessive. Is it excessive? Naah! Not when you see the productivity gain you get out of these. Seriously, I don’t think a normal 9–5 job would ever get me these. I do not understand why companies hire top end programmers, house them in top end real estate, on a thousand $ chair with a 2 thousand dollar desk, only to stick them with shitty hardware connected to a citrix session over RDP. Seriously people, rethink your priorities. Give the devs a budget, and let them choose where they wish to spend it, to further their productivity. They know better.
Anyway, now here is the funny thing. I bought all of the above on good deals, black friday, sales, whatever. And my overall bill came to less than the new Macbook pro, not including dongles.
Now some may say, the new Macbook pro is lighter. Well, yeah it is! It is a full 1lb lighter. Okay including the charging brick it is 1.5 lbs lighter. I gain or loose that much weight in a day, it’s really not a big deal. But in return I get,
- 4x the disk space
- 4x the RAM
- Ability to fix and upgrade my laptop myself.
- Same battery life, same external display capability
- Less dongleitis.
This leads me to the age old question, MacOS vs Windows.
Well, after having used both for a while, I’d say, Windows still needs improvements. The fan runs randomly all the time. The search indexing never finishes, and it never gives me the results I want. Cortana is a hit or miss, whereas Siri is mostly a miss-either way, both are bad. And when windows has an update, you are like “Oh damn another restart”, and on a Mac on a rare occasion when it does need to restart, you are like “Man did it even restart” — because it restores your work space so perfectly.
So yes, Windows can and needs to improve a lot.
But, window management is far superior in windows, and I don’t have to put up with finder. Plus office works better.
Lets just say, neither world is perfect, but given that I can have much better hardware on windows now, for the same money, my decision is pretty easy. And so far I’m loving my Mac to Windows transition.
.. and with that, I’ll quit boring you with the Mac vs Windows topic here on. :-)
