Choosing Your Laptop For Web Development

Why a gaming laptop is what you need

If you are new to web development and have been able to get by on your crappy pc or older MacBook for learning the basics and now you want to start creating more complex applications, but you are capped by your machine’s limitations: RAM, CPU, GPU, low-quality display, then you are me a few years ago.

When I first started to get into web development, I was rocking an HP Pavilion with low-end specs and a plastic chase. It worked perfectly for my case as a beginner, but when I started getting into back-end dev and having to integrate compilation/build watchers, emulators, multiple applications and a sh*t ton of tabs opened, I knew I needed an upgrade.

I enlisted myself in a full stack web dev boot camp in which they required apple only laptops. Since I was on a really low budget, I decided to get a MacBook Pro 15inch 2012. For building more complex applications, it did an okay job. It had 4GB of ram and it constantly overheated. I know I needed to buy a laptop that was both on the cheaper side and it needed to have specs that I could never use to its full potential. My train of thought was that overkill is vastly superior to constantly watch task manager for apps that are using up too many resources.

My answer to this problem was to get a gaming laptop. Gaming laptops are created with the intent of being able to handle multiple heavy loads at once. Even lower-end gaming laptops provide specs that a software…