Hi guys I want to buy a laptop for programming, but I couldn’t figure out what i really want .

my budget range from 600$ to 1200 .

I found these laptops in the market

(i3 - 4g ram - 256 giga ssd) for 600$

(i5 - 8g ram - 512 giga ssd) for 800$

(i7 - 16g ram - 512 giga ssd) for 1200$

and also ryzen 3 5 and 7 .

here what I want you to Know :

1- I want to use this laptop for programming only (and browser of course),

2 - I will programming for android (for now ),that’s mean i need to install android studio , IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse (maybe other).

so I’m afraid if I buy 1200$ laptop i will regret it , because don’t need that much ram or cores or ssd capacity.

and if i buy 600$ i will regret it too ,because it will be too slow or not ideal for programming,less ram -less capacity -less core

I was depressing for long time and I’m slowly back on track so i don’t know what going on ( on tech world).

and also there are laptop 2 in 1 (laptop and tablet) with pen, is it worth to buy ?.

dose the laptop now upgrade-able in terms of ram , saying this because of what going on in part replacement issue (like apple ).

so help please what should I buy.

pardon my English not my first Language, and thanks in advance.

Edit : thank you guys very much , that’s really help and very informative. 👍 😍

  • RandomDevOpsDudeEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    IDEs for this purpose (android dev) are not small little text editors that work well with limited resources. Keep that in mind. You will also need to consider things like compilation and phone emulation, which can also be resource intensive.

    I highly recommend looking for something that is built with a Linux distro by default. This will make your life easier in the long run, although it may not be a simple task up front if you are not familiar with Linux.

    I don’t actually have a Linux laptop, it is a desktop, but I use my Steam deck as a Linux laptop, and can almost do everything I want to, although steamos will require some weirdness similar to Windows. I use IntelliJ Ultimate on my steam deck and can successfully work on smaller scale Go and Kotlin projects while running IntelliJ low power mode.

    Most larger dev shops (in the JVM world) will just hand out whatever is the current top ~$3000 MacBook pro (for reasons). This leads to a lot of devs using OSx at work and Linux (at home) for personal projects. An apple computer of any type can help prepare for this inevitability, if Linux is out of the options. I personally dislike this, as I am not an Apple fan, but this is what I have experienced.

    Although I use Windows for some personal development, there are so many hoops that one has to jump through to get Windows working properly for advanced things, it almost isn’t worth it and requires heavy windows development knowledge, and is probably best to just get a MacBook (of whatever type).

    • Karsten@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Could you elaborate on your workflow with the SteamDeck? I’m quite curious on how you work with it

      • RandomDevOpsDudeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I am still fairly new to Steam deck (~6 months).

        Outside of having the dock to allow for normal USB ports for both keyboard and mouse (without converters and such), this awesome steam-deck-tricks readme/repo is majorly where I have been learning from.

        The major catch is rootfs read only and strategizing how to avoid reinstalls after steam updates. I haven’t quite gotten all the way there yet since I am using it more for tinkering (linux host on local network) for the time being.