Top 6 Best Laptops for Programmers
There are many great new laptops in 2025. But, what are recommended laptops for programmers? Let me continue with my previous article.
Uhm, we don't talk about handheld gaming PC or gaming laptops here. But we talk about business laptops for professional programmers. Let's define how you choose your laptop first.
- You want to provide office laptops for programmers in your company or startup. You will buy a lot of laptops and don't want to break the budget.
- You want a secondary laptop for your work. So, you don't want to spend a lot of money on it, but make sure that the laptop is capable of your work.
- You want a laptop that can serve as your sole primary driver.
I don't recommend ultimate high-end laptops here. I picked the price-performance laptops of each famous brand for programming and believe it will make you stay productive. Let's get started it.
6. Apple MacBook Air
The sexiest laptop on the planet comes from Apple. Fanless and macOS. I recommend this laptop for Apple developers with this specification.
- At least 16GB RAM.
- At least 512GB SSD.
If you can afford a MacBook Pro with M4, go for it. But I don't recommend this laptop for Back-End developers.
5. ASUS ExpertBook P5
WQXGA, Anti Glare, LPDDR5X 32GB, 1TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, durable, and more affordable than MacBook Air above.
This laptop is great. If you are a full-stack developer, you can pick this laptop. If you are not comfortable working with WSL, you can replace the OS with Linux, it is much better.
4. Acer TravelMate P6
The top tier of Acer TravelMate. It has the same specifications as the laptop above and up to DCI-P3 display. But it is rare on the market.
3. Dell XPS 13
The flagship of Dell laptops. Sexy, MacBook competitor, and Linux friendly. The cons are it only has two ports. So, you will need dongles.
2. HP EliteBook 800 & 805 series
The flagship of HP business laptops. Linux friendly and it has more ports than XPS 13.
1. Lenovo ThinkPad T14
The most durable laptop, Linux friendly, and is upgradeable. It has more ports, the best keyboard, and the legendary trackpoint.
Do you know the legendary ThinkPad T480? Yes, it comes from the ThinkPad T series.
The Lenovo ThinkPad T14 is not the flagship of Lenovo ThinkPad, but the most favorite. It is also my favorite. It is not as expensive as the X series, the flagship one, but has more power.
If you need a more affordable option, go for the E series. It is still good enough for your programming work. If you want better performance but a bit expensive, go for the P series.
Used Laptop
There is nothing wrong with buying used laptops because the new ones are not affordable. I recommend these two brands; Apple MacBook or Lenovo ThinkPad. If the Apple ecosystem is not for you, go for ThinkPad with Linux, which is the best.
AI Workload
All the laptops I recommended above are good enough to handle AI workloads. Training a simple or lightweight model with TensorFlow or PyTorch, generating a small image with Stable Diffusion, and running a small LLM (Large Language Model) such as llama3.2 or deepseek-r1:1.5b.
Getting serious about AI development? Plug an eGPU into your laptop to boost the performance. Only Windows/Linux laptops can do this. I recommend the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti with 16 GB memory size or Nvidia RTX 4070. I'm afraid you may run into the Thunderbolt 4 bottleneck if you use a GPU larger than I recommend. The only available option for macOS is cloud GPU.
Closing
Windows and macOS are not bad. But Linux is the best, especially for programmers. By using Linux, you bring the server environment into your local, so you can install the software that runs on the server natively without Docker. Remember, RAM and storage matter.
There are many good local brands that I didn't put on the list. Feel free to contact me to review the laptop.