My company recently gave me an Precision M4800. It's a beast to carry around, but I love it. The whole thing feels very solid. Once I updated the BIOS then Fedora 21 ran like a champ. If it didn't cost nearly $3,000 I would buy one as a personal laptop. 32GB of RAM and 2xSSD make working with a lot of VM's very easy.

That laptop sounds insane, particularly with that resolution! It does look like something from the mid 1990s unfortunately, but at least nobody will pinch it based on looks alone (more likely with Apple hardware sadly)

It's pretty awesome. I don't have the 3K resolution screen, but the 1920x1080 is still great. It is heavy though and my commute involves a lot of walking so that can be a bit annoying.

I kinda like the mid 1990's look. I think the best thing though is the more traditional keyboard. I really cannot stand the chiclet-style keyboards that have become all the rage.

I'm in a similar boat and couldn't go back to a laptop with less than 16GB of RAM. To develop a mobile app for example, sometimes I need to be running a couple of Android emulators, an iOS simulator, Vagrant and VirtualBox for a local server, a couple of IDEs, a browser and more.

Same, laptop has great potential especially if they release a Linux version. I hope the MB supports 16GB and Dell does not solder the RAM to the motherboard.

> I hope the MB supports 16GB and Dell does not solder the RAM to the motherboard.

On 13", all the RAMs are soldered on the boards.

12" ThinkPads like the X201 are not soldered on. Dunno about later models since the X201 was already part way down the lack of good engineering.

As far as I know, all x220 and later are.

I don't think anyone's making machines in this class with that much RAM. They practically have to be built with on-board RAM to get this thin and there's just not enough demand to justify the logistics of building 16GB motherboards for them.

ThinkPad X201 to the X230 had two memory slots, so there's nothing stopping a 2x8 layout. But for single slot machines, the real issue is Intel deliberately not supporting 16GB SODIMMs.

The first samsung series 9 (2011) was an ultrabook-class machine that can take 16GB worth of RAM. Though, 8GB dimm modules weren't available when it was first produced.

The MBP is a different class of machine. This thing is roughly the size of an 11 inch MBA.

There is definitely a market for a slightly heavier, slightly thicker, but easily upgradeable machine. I know of at least one physics student who can live with 16GB, but would rather have 32GB.

I would love to find a 13" form factor convertible tablet PC that's just a bit bulkier than a Macbook Air, but has something equivalent to a Wacom stylus.

(EDIT, Actually, there are plenty of situations where more RAM but not more CPU would be of tremendous benefit.)

Sure, there's a market, but the question is whether there's a large enough market to justify building it.

Either way, I'd say the high end computing market (which I'd say needing 16GB of RAM falls into, personally) is currently different from the ultra-light, ultra-portable market.

I mean, if you need 16GB, you probably need more than a low power dual core CPU anyway, and that's not realistically going to fit into the form factor of this machine today.

The weight isn't that different, though.

Current 13.3" Macbook Pro weighs 3.46 pounds. The Dell XPS 13 weighs 2.6 pounds. The MBP thus weighs 32% more (0.8 pounds) than the Dell. That's a big difference to me, and to lots of people.

Something a bit bulkier, but a lot lighter and more durable would be great.

The upcoming Lenovo LaVie Z machines will weigh 1.7 lbs but be in a bulkier (tough) Magnesium-alloy case. Not sure if they'll have enough RAM, hd-storage, or battery-life for many, although if they're that light I'd probably be happy to carry an ac-adapter around for periodic charging: http://news.lenovo.com/images/20034/Lenovo%20LaVie%20Z%20Spe...

You'll never heard about it in North America, but the most gorgeous laptop right now IMO is the Panasonic CF-MX3: http://panasonic.jp/pc/products/mx3s/

It's tragically expensive to import, though.

I want one of these, but I have no idea where to get it from: http://www.fujitsu.com/fts/products/computing/pc/notebooks/l...

I'm not sure how you can say that with a straight face. The next MBA is going to basically be a netbook, the MBP is already thin enough / light enough / small enough to qualify as an ultrabook in my view.

"BTO"[1] is a laptop brand originally from The Netherlands which allows you to configure your laptop before purchasing it. I own their "X-BOOK 13CL58"[2] model with a 13.3" IPS screen, 16 GB RAM and an i7-4700MQ processor. It works pretty well for me and the screen is beautiful. I think they also ship to other Benelux countries.

[1] http://www.bto.eu/contact

[2] http://www.bto.eu/bto-x-book-13cl58-ips.html (click on "Zelf Samenstellen" tab to see self-configuration options)

Recently bought a Dell e7440 14" machine with i7, 16GB and then added a 1TB SSD. As developer machines go, it's pretty decent. Not as much battery life as I'd like (3-4 hours) but I haven't actually run it out yet. It's small and light enough that I can take it anywhere, but big enough that I don't need external monitors to get proper work done. Only real downside is that the video is a little underpowered (HD 4000) so no gaming.

I recently ordered a HP Omen gaming laptop. 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Nvidia 860m with 4GB VRAM, 15.6in 1080p IPS screen. It was $1700 USD from Costco, but it has taken three weeks to arrive. It is a little heavier than the e7440, but I really wanted a 15in screen.

I'm using 16 gigs of ram right now, and I'm upset by the idea of only having 8 gigs, but just out of curiosity, why do you regularly run multiple VMs?

I almost never run any VMs, but occasionally one to play around with other distros. I see a lot of people talking like running multiple VMs is the norm for devs, and I'm curious what people are doing that requires it on a regular basis.

As a web developer, I use VMs to have a completely isolated and reproducible development environment for each project. Vagrant [1] is a popular tool to achieve this, so take a look if you're interested :)

[1]: https://www.vagrantup.com/

what surprises me is that they would run all of them on their laptop. If it was me, I would be strongly inclined to build a workstation in my basement for hosting all those VMs and remote connect.

Depending on what you're doing, you don't need any VMs for 8GB to feel small...

When I have a couple of Visual Studio instances running, an instance or two of WinDbg, Firefox, IE, and RDC Manager with several connections open, I can start getting low memory warnings!

remember that for a couple of VMs running smoothly you will need more than 2 cores

Sure, but it's 2core HT

I thought HT offers crippled performance compared to a real core because of sharing a lot of resources within the physical cores. Can a HT logical core really count as a physical core when hosting a VM on it ? I'd love to hear your experience, because I will be upgrading PC soon from an old AMD Phenom and am hesitant to count HT as a real benefit.

It depends, but I'm doing a lot of compilation and playback of videos, and the bottleneck is now more and more I/O and RAM than pure CPU speed.

I have this requirement. I just bought a Toshiba Z30t. Ultrabook that is self serviceable and supports 16GB. But build quality and feel - talk about your pieces of shit.

Is screen size a barrier to running VMs? I build all my customers environments in VMs and do this on the road, most run headless anyway.

For me, I absolutely need a portable to replace my PC, since I don't have an office.

What do VMs have to do with the size of the display? How are the two even remotely connected?

I think he's thinking of VMs as in Parallels or other graphical VMs

Yes, my Ux31 is my main machine. I often plug an extra screen, though.

You do not understand, do you? We do work on these machines. Using VMs, mostly headless. I have 10 to 20 VMs running on my X220 while on the road - in my case mostly build environments - and _none_ of them is taking a sinlge pixel on my display.

I'm genuinely interested in why are you running 10 to 20 VMs at once. I come from a MS environment and I don't see any use cases in my daily work where this would make sense.

Sure, let me explain.

First, not all my VMs are for the same things.

A group of 8 of them is a set of build/test environments for a piece of open source software I am the author and maintainer of. They host different combinations of Linux distributions and kernels (the software is the userspace layer for a set of kernel modules), so that whenever I commit enough changes, I can just mass-run tests, code build and package builds accross those VMs. This is just run by a central Makefile on my local machine, and is more convenient than remotely using the build environment I have on my servers when on the go, sometimes using 3G WWAN, because of better latency saving me many seconds for each test build or when having totally unreliable uplink (train and plane mostly).

Then, I generally have about 5 to 10 VMs which hold customer environments, from simple standalone servers or clusters that I am currently prototyping, to full-blown network topologies with Linux/BSD server VMs connected to GNS3-powered emulated Cisco devices. I typically have copies of those on my servers too, but again, on the go, it is more convenient to have them running locally, again to speed up development cycle.

Of course, anything that requires long-running tests goes on my servers, not on the laptop. When at home (home office actually), I typically only use the VMs on my servers, fiber internet connection making working remotely with the datacenter seemless.

The paradox is that I have more things running on my laptop than on my desktop workstation, typically ~10-12GB of RAM for the VMs on my laptop, when my workstation 32GB are barely used at all (but used to be before I could afford to buy servers and host them somewhere nice) :-)

I think the downvotes may be due to perceived boasting about your many systems, and/or to mockery of others for not working the way you do.

You should not boast about having two desktops and a laptop. Lots of people prefer a single machine setup and use very large servers or large external displays when needed. This usage pattern has got nothing to do with money constraints.

My 13.3" notebook (or my 15" notebook) happily drives two 27" displays. Plus the internal panel. Why would I have another machine?

"Real work." Come on.

I use a Dell XPS 13 (2014 edition) as my main dev machine with an i7, 512GB SSD and 8GB RAM.

It supports DisplayPort 1.2, which means I can Daisychain monitors. I plug in one DisplayPort cable and it connects to my 27" 1440p monitor and my 24" 1080p portrait monitor, giving me 3 separate displays to use.

My XPS13 stays closed 90%+ of the time. It's connected to 2x27" monitors, external keyboard, etc. I use a laptop because when I do need to travel I don't have to sync a laptop up to have everything I need, it's already there.