The laptop market has been going insane. What do I get? Is AMD now the top dog with Ryzen? Has Intel been able to counter with their latest mobile CPU Sharknado lake? Then there is MOFO Apple and their own ARM processor. WTF that's a processor for forking phones and you think ... it has what for a battery life? The benchmarks are what! You glorious bastards. I decided to try and make sense of this confusing hardware dilemma by breaking down what computer fits into a IT position. With out further ado here are my laptop picks by IT position:
Frontend developer
- Newest Macbook pro.
- Has to have to Mac logo so we don't look like punks when we speak at conferences
- Specs don't matter as long as it cost around $3000
Backend developer
- Whatever the frontend developer requested but add $500
- All the RAM, because we need to run full copies of the database to develop against
Graphic Design
- Mac Pro, max out the RAM
- Latest Nvidia GPU
- Pre install with the full master suite of the latest Adobe CS suite, even though they just use Photoshop
- Has to weight less than 1 pound and battery life last 36 hrs so they can work from the hipster coffee shop all day
- Might possible also doing side work on the company laptop but we can't be sure it all looks the same to us
Network Engineer
- IBM Thinkpad, with the red nubin' and a serial port
- Yes I said IBM Thinkpad in 2021 cause that shit doesn't die
- Still needs to run Hyperterminal and Java Webstart
DevOps
- Linux
- Docker
- Ansible
- kubctl
Helpdesk
- Dell desktop - Insperion 9000
- mechanical keyboard
- Linux in a VM, cause they were trying to go over to DevOps. Until they sat in on a meeting with them and realize that would suck.
SRE
- Same as DevOps but with better stickers
DevSecOps
- You wish you could see it
- Something black no logos
- Maybe its running Kali Linux, but when you asked they looked at you suspiciously. Then melted their hard drive.
DBA
- Dell XPS
- 128GB of RAM cause dbVisualizer eats that shit up
CTO
- Chromebook with a Mac logo on the front. They won't know the difference
- This will keep them out of trouble and they just need email anyways
Honorable mention: The Raspberry PI 4 with 8GB of RAM, because with the right cloud services all of the jobs can be done from a Pi.