Best Budget / Cheap Laptop for programmers (Coding) [MACBOOK - Cheapest place to buy online link provided]

Things to consider while buying a laptop for Programming / Coding.

Decide your laptop on the following features:

1. Keyboard is crucial.. if you can't type fast enough.. you'll lose coding competitions.. choose the best keyboard in the lot. Preferably backlit as you'll want to think of situations where you'll be coding in the night when your roommate is dozing.
2. You'll be coding away in your classroom from the first lecture till all lectures end.. Choose the battery with some serious juice.
3. Bigger the RAM.. the better. You can keep more and more source files open in your IDE. This also helps you avoid closing your tabs on your browser.
4. Lenovo has something called "Trackpoint", this boosts your productivity by at least 1.2x as you won't need to lift your hand to go access the touch pad (OK, I'm serious about this). If you're a VIM pro.. productivity boost gained by this feature is meh.. ignorable.
5. Go for anti-glare screens.. you really wouldn't want to be in a situation where the sun conspired against you, and you totally missed that bug in your code because of a glare!
6. An hour of two of gaming is integral in everyone's daily life. Choose NVIDIA and make sure the card is GPU computing enabled.. so when you stop relaxing and get back to crunching numbers massive parallelism kicks in again.
7. You'll write so much code that hard drives what normal folks use just won't cut it. Better go for 1TB or more.

If you're serious about programming then "which" shouldn't matter at all. You'll be easily able to do almost everything even with simple laptops. There was a guy in our hostel who actually used college lab computers as he did not even own a desktop.

One serious advice: Try to see if VT-x[1] is enabled on the laptop you choose to buy. There might (a very slim chance.. and only if your prof. doesn't supply you 32-bit VM) be classes where you'll need to run 64-bit VMs.


I have a made a simple comparison on the best laptops currently out there, Do give it a look before you make a decision.

Best Laptops [Budget and High end laptops] 2015 - 2016

In regards to the question in hand most of the programmers out there use a macbook, I have a review and the cheapest link to buy a macbook on my blog, But that still comes upto around 50k which I would definitely suggest if you are willing to see this as a one time investment and stretch your pocket a bit.(Link mentioned below if interested)

Apple Macbook Air MD711HN/B 11-inch Laptop (Core i5/4GB/128GB/Mac OS X, Mavericks/Intel HD Graphics 5000/without Laptop Bag)

You can spend your time researching more, But you'll end up seeing that its very rare where in a Macbook crashes which is a mighty requirement for all programmers out there.

If you are worrying about the hard disk, Don't be 128 GB would be more then enough for a programmer and if so the requirement arises you can just order an external hard disk, Most of the new ones come with USB 3.0 these days which is supported by MAC, So it would not be much of a difference on your day to day use. (Needless to say Solid state hard drives are much faster then normal HDD's)

Laptops I strongly recommend for programmers:-

TOP 5

1)
Amazon:- Apple MacBook Air MD712HN/B 11.6-Inch Laptop

Flipkart:- Apple MD712HN/B MacBook Air (Ci5/4GB/ 256 GB Flash/ Mac OS X Mavericks)

2)
Amazon:- Apple MacBook Air 13-inch Core i5 1.6GHz/4GB/128GB/Intel HD 6000

Flipkart:- Apple MD711HN/B MacBook Air (Ci5/ 4GB/ 128GB Flash/ Mac OS X Mavericks)

3)
Amazon:- Dell Inspiron 15R 5547 i7-4510U, 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 15.6
Flipkart:-  Dell Inspiron 5547 Notebook (4thGen Ci5/ 8GB/ 1TB/ Win8.1/ 2GB Graph) (5547581TB2S)

4)
Amazon:- Lenovo B5070 59-436045 15.6-inch Laptop (Core i54210U/6GB/1TB/Windows 8/ATI JET LE R5 M230 DDR3L 2GB Graphics/with Laptop Bag)

Flipkart:- Lenovo B50-70 Notebook (4th GenCi7/ 8GB/ 1TB/ Win8/ 2GB Graph) (59-434775)

5)

Amazon:- Dell Vostro 3546 (i5) 15.6-inch Laptop Grey without Laptop Bag



Other laptops i suggest.(Use the below link to avail cashback/discount)

HP 15-R032TX (Sparkling Black) without Laptop Bag

Dell 3542 15-inch Laptop with Laptop Bag

Lenovo B5070 59-436044 15.6-inch Laptop (Core i3 4030U/2GB/500GB/DOS/Integrated Intel HD Graphics/with Laptop Bag),