I'm not going to critique this laptop as others have done here. Just over $1K for a laptop with an 8 core Ryzen, 16GB DDR4 and a 1TB SSD isn't outrageous.
The main takeaways I get from this are that HP is now getting on the Linux developer bandwagon, and that they chose Pop!_OS as their distro due to the success and reputation of System76. And I think these are both good things, and a sign that we'll see more of the same with laptop hardware vendors.
Looks like Apple really has the “charge outrageously and be hailed for it” license.
If HP also had that license - even a second or a third tier one - they’d have priced it $2989 and make everything not upgradable and announced “Pre-installed Linux for the first time ever in any…… HP laptop” and HN would be filled with comments like “I only have 3GB RAM in my HP laptop and it even lifts my pickup truck. Best ever $3K spent. You don’t need more RAM. If you need then you’re doing it wrong”.
Hardly comparable. You can not actually own an Apple laptop. You buy some hardware that can not be used or repaired in any way Apple does not approve of... so it is not really yours.
It also means when something inevitably does go wrong, you throw the entire thing away and get a new one. I do not consider this a reasonable or sustainable approach, particularly when out of warranty.
That’s true but if integration means that it’s very rare for anything to go wrong within the product’s lifetime that may not matter and in fact be a net win.
I’ve never had anything break on a laptop[1] I’ve owned regardless of brand since 2005.
I can’t be that atypical.
1. Apart from maybe the wifi on my XPS13 which I can just about live with by turning wifi on and off.
I consider $6000 good value for a Raptor Engineering Talos II workstation because it is US made and you actually own every part of it down to the firmware and schematics.
Good luck with secure boot or disabling the ME on their closed firmware. It gets extra fun when internal modules or the battery get a firmware update that breaks or degrades Linux support again.
I have ported Linux to previous gen macbooks employers insisted I use and it was a mess to maintain.
Also consider your warranty void, so good luck with sanely priced repairs given only Apple can get parts or make repairs in most cases.
"You can't run anything on macs that Apple doesn't want" suddenly turns into "It's a mess to maintain", which is an entirely different thing from literally not being able to run something.
>Looks like Apple really has the “charge outrageously and be hailed for it” license.
A new M1 Macbook Air starts at $999, and will put that Ryzen to shame. Not to mention infinitely better build quality and battery life. Apple has always been a great value for the price, even if that price is slightly higher than the bargain bin stuff.
Sure, but the M1 generally has a high-quality Apple screen (this laptop from HP advertises only “FHD” so - presumably 16:9 1080p and not Retina-quality 16:10…) and the Ryzen, though much less constrained than Intel still likely has a “boost clock speed” and power throttles itself when disconnected from power or due to heat. By comparison, it’s hard to call the M1 the fastest computer I’ve used - desktops are plenty fast - but it’s certainly the most consistently performing laptop chip I’ve ever used, and is entirely quiet and cool to the touch at all times.
It’s hard to compare the values of macOS and Linux because they are very different, but it’s still easy to say that an M1 has excellent uses on macOS and everyone interested in non-Apple machines is (to some degree) waiting to see what Qualcomm or Nvidia can come up with in the ARM chipset space for non-macOS laptops… I think ChromeOS laptops prove that iPad-like performance is possible, but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips.
> Sure, but the M1 generally has a high-quality Apple screen (this laptop from HP advertises only “FHD” so - presumably 16:9 1080p and not Retina-quality 16:10…)
This looks like their current generation Pro/EliteBook lines. I have one of the higher end ones (EB 845) and oh boy does the screen suck. Not just compared to my 9 yo MBP. But even on its own. Very low angles, washed out colors. It's only advertised as 72% NTSC IIRC. Cheaper models have 6-bit panels on which you can see the dithering in the window shadows. It's laughably bad. And it cost more than similarly-specced MacBook Air.
Other than that it's a usable PC, plenty fast for my needs, and the RAM and SSD are easily upgradeable. Battery life is OK-ish (I get around 6 hours).
Also, everything works under Linux and is even less of a hassle to get going than on Windows (you need an external mouse to install it).
> but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips
FWIW, ThunderX will sell you a 96 core arm64 desktop that definitely offers x64-like performance. And Ampere will sell you a 256 core arm64 2U server node that matches the performance of the fastest AMD Epyc Milan CPUs. AFAIK there is no desktop case that supports the motherboard of the latter, but there is no reason why you couldn't make one.
These things are a bit niche, since the main benefit of arm64 is the reduced power demand at a given performance level, which desktop/workstation users seldom care much about. In the data center though they are killing it, I believe Azure is using the Ampere Altra stuff for their Graviton2-competitor.
macOS is pretty close to garbage for my needs, so it varies by the person. Of course I'm looking forward to Asahi becoming more mainstream (I do need Thunderbolt support for example).
Even before the M1, you paid a small (IMO) premium for better build quality, a great trackpad and (before the butterfly) keyboard, a solid Unix with really great tailored applications, etc…
With the M1 dominance (and inflation) there’s basically no premium at this point (although there is little to no low-end options).
As long as you don't need more memory or storage, at which point you'll pay about a 4X markup for each upgrade and will need to make sure you prepay that when you buy the laptop as everything is soldered.
So Apple wins by default with their two year old M1 Macbook Air and especially when they are already discounted for as low as $949 and you get better battery life and quality compared to that overpriced snake-oil contraption HP is selling.
For that Macbook Air, it is still a good deal but I'd wait for an M2 version. As for that HP laptop, no thanks and no deal from me.
I try to humble myself there. While 32GB seems ridiculous for 2005, I've absolutely enjoyed having 64GB in 2022. Yes, apps have gotten more bloated. Yes there are many wasteful framework-built heavy apps. In many cases they are doing much more than in 2005.
I wonder if anyone is tracking the average amount of memory somewhere from 1980-forward. I'd take that value * 2 for a developer.
I’m not sure about RAM, but in a large software project that is compiled (even Java) it’s pretty easy to max out every core I have available when building.
The moment you have to work on a large code base either in Java or C++ you almost never have enough resources. 64GB RAM is fair, 32GB bare minimum to work on such codebases. Otherwise everything slows down, IntelliJ will take 2 seconds to open up etc.
If you don't work on such code bases then yes 16GB is more than enough and 8GB you can live with on your day to day life.
A equivalent MacBook Air would outdo this configuration with an equivalent configuration based on the price
People who need 32 GB of RAM are where you do mobile development for multiple phones. I don’t think the price can be judged. If the RAm is ddr5 or if the SSD is very fast or how it behaves in real world developer workflows is much more important.
Linux seems to have much worse memory management for desktop usage than other popular desktop operating systems. I have found that I really need 64GB of RAM to make Chrome run well on Linux, but I can get a similar user experience with as little as 16GB of RAM on other desktop operating systems. Firefox does much better, but Chrome seems to be the standard these days, and a computer that doesn't run Chrome well is probably defective in most people's eyes these days.
Just anecdotally, my dev workflows on Manjaro with KDE typically required ~18GB RAM (VSC, nodejs, rust, elixir, mongodb, redis, docker, db mgmt tool, browser, mail client, Slack, etc).
On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I have no idea about Windows, but I don't think anyone would argue that there's much more room on Linux to adjust and optimize for lower RAM usage than on MacOS / Win
This seems like a reasonable explanation, given that it fits my experience as well. My work Macbook Pro often is quite laggy when JAMF decides to scan everything (i.e. for several minutes after booting up and periodically throughout the day afterwards), whereas my Linux personal machines are almost always quite snappy, even with games running at fairly high performance settings through WINE at the same time as Firefox, discord, sometimes VS Code, etc.
Yeah my 2020 work MacBook is always blasting its fans because corporate IT installed some monitoring software that is scanning everything all the time. The laptop is a nuclear hazard site cuz it’s so hot all the time. I need headphones on to drown out the fan noise.
The corporate security software is so awful mine stays at an ambient temperature of around 60°c with the constant background tasks. That can't be good for the hardware.
Same! My cats greatly prefer when I'm at my desk working compared to personal time because my work laptop (a Macbook plugged into a monitor and kept shut) gets so warm and they love to sleep on it.
My early professional daily driver Linux workstations had 32-64MB of memory.
I laugh at discussions like this. Linux with a slim window manager and vim can run on just about anything and provide a productive programming environment for a codebase of virtually any size provided you can use a remote system for compiles and a slim browser like elinks to access online documentation.
That said my primary workstation runs separate VMs for every application for high security, so I appreciate my 64 cores and 256gb of memory these days.
1 GB would require some serious optimization if you want to do some work. But I have a 2 GB machine running Xubuntu without modifications and it is quite usable for some development work (It was bought as a school laptop years ago. You could not use it in school anymore because their stuff requires 4 GB nowadays, but I sometimes still use it just for fun.) I don't think switching from Xfce to sway saves you a whole GB.
Of course there were numerous ways to make a 2 GB machine starve if you wanted to or just don't think what is feasible or not and run several crazy Electron apps or worse. Some lightweight containers are not a problem, I have run those.
My first Linux machine ran on 8MB RAM. Ok, could be that some modern software would not run well on such a thing any more and a modern web browser is unthinkable.
When I studied computer science the VAX-750 had 4 MB and 15 students could compile at the same time from each their terminal. Swapping got a bit annoying under those conditions, but in the evening when a couple of them had gone home it started to run smoothly.
I remember phones from 20 years ago using something like 150 kB, admittedly they had no real operating system, just a simple task scheduler. Probably color display required a bit more already.
I'll admit, I'm delighted to see HP announce this, if only because it means System76 will (probably) get more funding for Pop_OS and that this may "legitimize" the Linux Desktop more with three major manufacturers carrying supported options.
Late but absolutely agreed. I fun an Oryx Pro and while I don’t use PopOS, all their hard work is on display constantly — their improvements there bleed over to other distros so easily (they’ve struck a great balance between releasing compatible stuff but staying sane and not exponentially increasing their support burden)
The weird thing is that HP undermines their effort a bit by they doing the consumer bloatware thing where they 'load it up with stuff for you to do your job' according to their marketing material.
Are you referring to the laptop in this announcement? If so, I can't find anything suggesting that there's anything installed by default other than Pop_OS.
I feel like a lot of developers overestimate the hardware specs that they need.
My main development machine is a simple Ryzen 3 with 8GB RAM, and I run two electron apps (VS Code and Slack) at all times.
A comment in a separate thread here mentioned virtualization. That and gaming would be two legitimate use cases, but for plain-jane development, "8gb ought to be enough for anybody" (har har)
Every 16 GB machine I've used for work in the last three years (until current 32 GB one) I'd occasionally run out of memory. Culprit? Web browsers... On Mac, Linux, and Windows. (Though occasionally other stuff needed significant memory too.)
For me the Android emulator in conjunction with a fairly large react native dev server and an ide is enough to fill 16gb. I've had to resort to closing the ide before starting the emulator, and waiting for the first build to complete or things get OOM killed. If I run the test suite whilst the emulator is open then there's a good chance something will get killed as well.
This looks like it could be a compelling choice for my next laptop but will have to pass if it's not possible to go to 32gb
This only happens if you’re the type to keep 70 tabs (or whatever) open. I run 16GB and have never, ever had a browser cause me to start heavily paging.
>This only happens if you’re the type to keep 70 tabs (or whatever) open.
not really, you can just leave a leaky or script-laden page open for awhile to see the same behavior, depending on how things are put together.
example: blue iris is a cctv package that has a webui module. That web-ui client-side browser tab will inflate to system-memory size if allowed within a few days.
Not much of a point other than there are other (probably pretty esoteric) things that one can do to a browser that'll make them fall apart even on modern hardware.
Machine learning will generally swallow as much RAM as you can throw at it, assuming you're not just using a nvidia coprocessor with its own memory (and even in that case, you have to keep it fed).
Does it really make sense to do serious ML in a laptop though? my ML/DL training rig runs pretty hot all the time, I could use it as a space heater in the winter. Even if I could have all its processing power in a notebook I definitely wouldn't want it on my lap.
>There are a lot of people using virtualized development environments, which can make it much simpler to run a production-like system locally.
When running Linux, you do not incur the VM overhead for containers (Docker) that you do on Mac or Windows. This allows for isolated production like environments, without carving out multi GB chunks of RAM. Additionally, if you are targeting Linux for production, you often don't even need to containerize, unless you need to run three different versions of node/python/ruby or something else that is just library conflicts all over the place.
> I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
My 2012 daily driver was a well spec'd HP, and it had 8GB of RAM. It did not support more - I tried and had to take the RAM back because the machine would only address 8GB. A look at Macbook specs in 2012: 4GB or 8GB models. I think the 16GB becoming the norm was a few years later.
I was replying to the whole 8GB is enough for typical development. Java is an extremely popular language to develop in and the IDEs alone eat up 2-4GB on their own.
By default a Java app will set its max heap size to 25% of RAM (Java 11 and above). While it may not use all of that, it’s likely to. So, by default, running two Java apps on Java 11 on 8GB of RAM has the likely potential of eating 4GB RAM. Then there’s the OS needs, browser needs, etc.
Clearly 8GB isn’t enough for such a developer. I’ve had this discussion countless times with people over the past two decades. It always ends the same — with people from both sides of the discussion shaking their heads.
The only claim that I feel anyone can make, given enough experience, is that RAM needs vary. So making a claim that N amount of RAM is enough for many or most will always be patently wrong in my view.
Unless your stack involves 5-10 JVM apps (with the smallest ones generally working at -Xmx512m but some expecting around 2-4 GiB), and your IDE is also a resource-hungry Java app, in which case the bare minimum is 32 GiB RAM + about 10 GiB of swap.
I’ve done that! But I also have 32GB RAM in my machine :)
I want 64 GB but I will say for my current needs, 32 GB is the sweet spot. My normal daily use is around 20GB. And it is a MacBook Pro. One day I’ll probably go back to a laptop running Linux. It is the fastest for code compilation in my experience.
Using Linux on a desktop workstation, I'm normally able to get by with half the amount of RAM that my Macbook requires for the same activity. Probably because I'm not having to run MacOS and Linux at the same time to pretend that I'm not running Linux.
But it's not just memory, I find running code on MacOS generates a lot more heat causing the CPU to spike and harder to run in the first place.
I disagree. When I have to use a system that isn't Linux which seems to be the corporate rule, the requirements go through the ceiling as it always seems to need to use Docker to prevent to be Linux anyway.
Running multiple OS' is always demanding. They could fix it by just using Linux for the dev environment in the first place since all their tools are always electron or Java based.
What’s your full tech stack and OS, and how much swap/pagefile do you have? My personal Windows machine has 8 GiB, and it’s quite easy to fill it up by just running Firefox (with far too many tabs) and WSL, let alone an IDE.
> I'm not going to critique this laptop as others have done here. Just over $1K for a laptop with an 8 core Ryzen, 16GB DDR4 and a 1TB SSD isn't outrageous.
I agree. My only beef is the keyboard:
PLUS: No numpad so trackpad is more less centered (I hate using off-centered trackpads and usually don't care much for the numpad)
MINUS: half-sized arrow keys. As a developer I tend to use those for navigation much more than hjkl, and the half-size arrows get mistyped all the time by my muscle memory.
Not a dealbreaker, though. If I use it often enough the muscle memory will adapt.
The rest of the specs are in line with my expectations for that price-point.
Yes, but it has a configurable delay to engage, so accidentially hitting the power key instead of DEL will not turn off your computer unless you changed the config and then it's really your own fault.
The main takeaways I get from this are that HP is now getting on the Linux developer bandwagon, and that they chose Pop!_OS as their distro due to the success and reputation of System76. And I think these are both good things, and a sign that we'll see more of the same with laptop hardware vendors.