Go on let’s have em, what laptops are you all running and do you recommend for SP 2013 development ? The MBP a contender (surely not)!… Is anyone surviving on 16gb ?
UPDATE! Can you also add your laptop and configuration to this list : (User “Add to List”). http://list.ly/list/73V-sharepoint-2013-laptops. If someone has the same one, just vote it up.
“I honestly don’t get why you’d spend more cash to get something that isn’t that much quicker”
That bit isn’t true. I had a 32GB W530 with SSD, my Macbook pro pisses all over it. Yes I know it is counter intuitive but that’s the reality..As I say, I am not the only one to think so so either it’s not just normal fanboy talk.
The other bit that used to really annoy me was in this day and age I would still get driver issues, plugging my Lenovo into an external monitor via VGA port for demos would blue screen. On Windows 8 with all the official Lenovo drivers installed.
You just don’t get that crap with a Mac. This isn’t meant to be a Mac v Windows things, I have used both extensively but IMO currently, the Mac is the fastest SP dev kit there is unless you have a specific need to run multiple full dev SP VMs. That use case turned out to be quite rare (I thought it would be common which is what pushed me to my Lenovo in the first place). In your case, the Dell obviously makes sense. Also the memory compression in OSX Mavericks does a lot to help as well.
In the last job, I had 3 x 4GB SP2010 VMs all running at full tilt with large PS installs and it never batted an eyelid. The paging was mitigated by the faster I/O. Yes SP2013 is more memory intensive and you can easily run as 12GB dev VM on it too.
Wow … what a lot of responses!