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.
3K£ is a overstatement.
W520 Laptop: 800$
32GB Ram : 250$
2x 480GB SSD + 1x 128GB SSD = 1000$.
2250$ US for the laptop.. and you can run anything on it.
Now in Azure.
1X Server with SQL & SharePoint in a A6 VM (28GB Ram, 4 CPU) = 1584$ per month.
-200$ MSDN Credit = 1300$ per month.
And the disk is SLOWWWW. On my laptop I install SP2013 binaries in 2min45 sec with AutoSPInstaller. Same thing in the cloud = 12 minutes.
Using a 16GB MBP here too… With my SP13 environment, I’ve found that if I make sure that I don’t have unnecessary service apps running like Search crawls and the like, the VM performs well. Occasionally, SQL will become a memory pig and slow it down I regularly reboot it so it’s not that problematic. Anything I develop always rolls from my dev env to a more realistic staging env anyways so the dev env can be minimalistic.
Don’t do it! I moved from 16GB Mackbook Pro to a 32GB Lenovo W530 and regret it now. The VMs run okay with the extra memory but the day to day usage of the machine sucks compared to using a Mac. The trackpad – oh dear god the trackpad is abominable compared to a MBP. Sure I can use a mouse and an external keyboard. But where-as I loved using my MBP I tolerate the Lenovo.
Don’t get me started on it blue screening because I had the temerity to plug a projector into the on-board VGA socket…happened twice in a customer demo.
It can get a bit crowded on a 10GB VM especially if search is running but for *most* dev I find it works fine.
I’ve got a 16 GB macbook pro – it ran 2010 fine, 2013 really choked until I gave it 12GB of ram. Feels like it barely fits on here. I see MSDN azure pricing just changed and I think that might work going forward. I like the macs, but those W530’s are very tempting, and I don’t at all like what direction apple is going with the newer non-upgradeable laptops. As a side note, in Vmware Fusion, the max ram you can give a Vm using the GUI is 8GB – to get 12 I had to edit the config file manually.
I’ve been using CrashPlan for a few years now. I back up to two local external drives and CrashPlan’s cloud daily. I’ve had to rebuild my machine and my wife’s once each, and it was as painless as it could be pulling files from the backups.
I highly recommend CrashPlan. You can access the backups anytime, anywhere, and the backup looks just like your file system. Grabbing a few files is easy, much like you might do from Dropbox.
Wow … what a lot of responses!