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Dhinesh
Dhinesh

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The Laptop Paradox

Disclaimer:

  1. This post is targeted to the audience who are fresh grads/students/Rookie Devs.
  2. The configuration shared here is modest, It's not the best.

Ever wondered what is the better laptop for programming/Education, Ok is there a set of metrics for choosing a laptop!? How do we know one is superior to others!?

Let's say we have a budget of 1000USD

Moderate/Typical laptop requirements:

RAM: 8GB
MEMORY: 512 GB HDD
GRAPHICS: AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory/NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
CPU Cores: 6
Display: Retina
Battery life: 6-8 hours
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All the above requirements should fit in 80 % of your budget i.e. 800 USD, Sometimes we might need a higher-end graphics card or more CPU cores or more RAM, These are niche cases like where there might be a requirement to work on Intense video editing or running parallel ML models or running android studios. Depending on use cases we have to make a tradeoff.

If you have some vision issues like me, you would like to consider buying a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Then the budget for the laptop should be trimmed to 70 % and these peripherals should be given 15 % of your budgets.

The next one is the important part, with the leftover budget, you might need to buy some software or course to enhance your productivity. For example, If you're a programmer, to understand certain concepts(beginner/intermediate/advanced) you might need to purchase a course or tool or attend conferences. If you're well versed in a certain topic, you may consider doing a certification, If you're a pro you can help open source.

Final Thoughts:
If you're considering buying a laptop for an education/learning/programming purpose, have these above-discussed thoughts in mind, At the end of the day your laptop will never say I won't run the program, you just need to make it work that's why we have the God The Internet

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