How to Choose Best Laptop for Programming in 2019?

Posted by E.L.E.X on April 13 2019 under Tech/Cybersecurity

How to Choose Best Laptop for Programming?

RAM

It is the first most important thing that you should look. A laptop with 8GB RAM is an ideal choice but 16GB RAM would the best choice. If your budget is too low then you can go with 4GB RAM also.

Believe me, it really sucks working on a low-performance machine. Earlier I used to do android app development on a laptop with 4GB RAM. It was so annoying because everything works really slow.

So I would highly recommend a 16GB RAM laptop if you are a mobile app developer.

Best Choice: 16GB RAM

Ideal Choice: 8GB RAM

Low Budget Choice: 4GB RAM

Processor

Good processor and RAM should be your highest priority while choosing a laptop for programming. As a programmer or developer, we have to do multitasking. When I do programming or development I have to open a few IDEs along with a browser with several tabs opened. For such purpose, a good processor is required.

A laptop with an i5 processor is an ideal choice. You can go with the i7 processor if you have a huge budget and for low budget, you can go with i3 processor.

Best Choice: i7 Processor

Ideal Choice: i5 Processor

Low Budget Choice: i3 Processor

Graphics Card

Integrate graphics card is not necessary until you are not doing game development or some high graphics related work. But if you are a game developer then you must go with a laptop with an external graphics card.

Best Choice (Specially For Game Developers): External Graphic Card (2GB or 4GB)

Ideal and Low Budget Choice (For Other Developers): Integrated Graphic Card

Storage

SSD and HDD are two storage types that laptops have. SSD gives a faster performance but costlier than HDD. It's great if you can afford an SSD storage type laptop. But if you can’t then go with HDD and later on you can use some external SSD storage.

Battery Life

If you mostly work at places where the power supply is not available then you must choose a laptop with a huge battery life. Otherwise these days almost all laptops come with moderate battery backup.

Below I have shared some laptops that I believe are good for programmers in Nigeria. Even if you don’t like any of them you can consider the above points to pick the best laptop according to your usage.