My dev box these days is a 3 pound, 10" ThinkPad X60, bought off eBay for $300 and maxed out with 4gb ram and a 320gb drive. I'd prefer something bigger, but then I've been backpacking across South America these last 7 months, so space and weight are kinda precious.
Here's my experience:
Up:
- It's fast. Honest! Faster than the proper dev machine I was using just 3 years ago.
- It's crazy portable. I can write code on a bus.
- Long battery life. 8 hours writing in Word, or 3 hours at full dev mode: SQL Server up, VS.NET and ReSharper churning away nonstop while 4 copies of the client-heavy end-product are running in the background.
Down:
- You can't fit much code on the screen. Means you need to keep more stuff in your head, which slows you down a bit.
The big downside is that nobody is making fast small machines anymore. The X60, which ended production 2 years ago, is the last notebook you can buy with a non-letterbox screen and a proper fast processor. Now it's all netbooks, with their boggy processors and wide-aspect, codeproof screens.
It's a shame. If somebody made a machine on the X60 form factor with the latest hardware I'd definitely buy one.
I'm doing all my work (programming) on my trusty ThinkPad x200, which is basically a successor to X6x.
While it is somewhat larger (12" screen, 3.25lb), it's still rather mobile, and a bit bigger screen (1280x800) means I can fit most of what I need on the screen (I prefer my windows maximised, though, and my IDE of choice is vim+bash).
It's powerful enough machine, too - I usually have one (or, not so often, two or more) VM running for servers and/or different operating systems.
Here's my experience:
Up: - It's fast. Honest! Faster than the proper dev machine I was using just 3 years ago.
- It's crazy portable. I can write code on a bus.
- Long battery life. 8 hours writing in Word, or 3 hours at full dev mode: SQL Server up, VS.NET and ReSharper churning away nonstop while 4 copies of the client-heavy end-product are running in the background.
Down:
- You can't fit much code on the screen. Means you need to keep more stuff in your head, which slows you down a bit.
The big downside is that nobody is making fast small machines anymore. The X60, which ended production 2 years ago, is the last notebook you can buy with a non-letterbox screen and a proper fast processor. Now it's all netbooks, with their boggy processors and wide-aspect, codeproof screens.
It's a shame. If somebody made a machine on the X60 form factor with the latest hardware I'd definitely buy one.