Mobile Java game development, without using a full-size laptop

General Discussions
#21

A common feature when you move up the size range of PC laptops. But if you’re talking about comparable, mobility-oriented laptops, you’re typically not going to find keyboards or trackpads that come anywhere near the ones Apple has in, say, the Air line. Your Lenovo is a 15" model, not mobility-oriented, decisively enterprise-facing, and priced for high-quantity movement in that market segment. When you’re selling oodles of notebooks to businesses, likely on a yearly basis, you can afford to drop the price down to $600. That’s the market at work, not the design of the notebook.

[quote]As anyone will tell you, thinkpads are (relatively) indestructible.
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I’m not worried about dropping my notebook or having it run over by a car. I’m worried about normal wear and tear from extensive use. For example, my aforementioned 2007 Macbook was a plastic model. After years of use, the hand-rest area started chipping in places. I’ll never have to worry about that with a metal Macbook Air.

[quote]I’ve got a dedicated graphics card, and a pretty decent one for a laptop at that.
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All the better to bake your lap with when you actually try to set the thing down on your legs. I get that some people want laptops that will behave more or less as mobile desktop platforms. Hey, you can play games! That’s great! But not everybody is in the market for that when looking for a laptop. I’ve already got a desktop I can play games on. It’s a big priority for me that this thing be lightweight, have long battery life, and not be a furnace. I can barely feel any warmth coming from the Macbook Air, even after I’ve spend 3 hours coding with the thing sitting on my lap (and I’m talking about in XCode, using the iOS simulator, and so on, not just typing out code in Notepad or something).

[quote]It’s definitely not small or thin, but as we’ve seen with the new iPhones, thinner is not better. And size is not much of an issue.
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Who ever said that thinner was necessarily better? This is all about one’s specific needs. I suggested a Macbook Air for the OP because his needs seemed to be a small, thin, “netbook”-like device, and he’d mentioned that he was replacing a 2009 Macbook. Having just recently gotten an Air for myself, for basically the exact same purpose, I felt I was able to attest to its usefulness in that regard. That’s all that’s going on here. Thinner isn’t always better. It’s just better for this purpose.

[quote]I have a theory that the Apple battery monitor lies. If it were to be believed then a Macbook would have nearly double my battery life. However in actual use, my laptop lasts a little bit longer (up to 30min).
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I’ve never known this to be the case. The battery monitor on my 2007 Macbook was painfully, brutally honest with me all the time. I think I could get about 4-5ish hours of casual use out of it. Knock a sizable chunk off that if anything video-related was going on. I read several reviews of the Air before I bought it. CNet did a video drain review and the battery lasted for 14 hours (this was for offline video). Another outlet got north of 12 hours out of the battery in a similar test with wi-fi enabled the entire time. While I have not actually attempted to work normally on the Macbook Air from full charge to battery depletion, my own experience (and regular monitoring of the battery status) indicates that these reviews are accurate.

[quote]You ever tried Linux? Both Linux and OSX are Unix-based and POSIX compliant, so it should be mostly familiar for dev use. But Linux is free (as in beer and freedom) and isn’t restricted to Apple devices.
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Yes, I’ve tried Linux several times. The problem with Linux is that it’s not well-supported (or even supported in the first place) by a lot of the applications that I use on a regular basis. And while I understand that mileage can, of course, vary based on the distro that you choose, I find OSX to be an exemplary operating system right out of the box, for both desktop and laptop platforms. I don’t see a real need to wrestle with Linux when I already like OSX so much.

[quote]On the shininess and aesthetics the Mac is (not surprisingly) better.
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I really don’t get this argument. Yes, Apple cares about aesthetics, but they care about it in the same way as a good architect. Form and function are interlocked concerns. I’m not sure why the anti-Apple crowd is always so quick to argue that Apple devices are just “shiny” baubles, or whatever. The reason why the designs work is because they advance the functionality, too.

Additionally, it’s not exactly like I agree with every single one of Apple’s design decisions. For example, I’ve got a PC mouse because I just can’t stand a one-button mouse on a desktop (though on the laptop, I actually prefer to use CTRL+click). I’ve also got a PC keyboard on the desktop, not because I feel like the Apple keyboard is mechanically bad, but just that it’s needlessly stripped-down for the desktop experience (and also because I do use Windows regularly, so I want a keyboard that’s going to play nice with everything). I also really hate wireless input peripherals, so that’s another reason.

[quote]My Thinkpad (from 3 years ago): $660 US.
Current Equivalent Macbook: Somewhere between $1200 US and $1500 US. Both the $1200 and $1500 models do not have a dedicated graphics card.

I don’t know what calls for the more than double price.
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Different target markets. Like I said before, your Lenovo Thinkpad is targeted at enterprise. They’ll make their nut on business contracts that allow them to push out basically guaranteed quantity year-in and year-out. Apple is shooting far more for the consumer market, with enterprise deals (in the Mac line, I mean) probably being a fairly niche thing for them, and a rather small part of their revenue. You’re making the mistake of thinking that the design/parts/etc. are the sole pricing factor when it comes to these machines.

#22

Thanks again everyone for pitching in your thoughts on this, although I still remain surprised at the expectation that a decent laptop should be able to run games. As I mentioned in my original post - this machine’s sole purpose was to be a mobile development platform, and I wasn’t looking for stellar graphics performance.

I totally get that other (PC) laptops of a similar price are probably more powerful, or perhaps more diverse when it comes to their application across the productivity / gaming territories, but I must stress that this is a device I’m just going to be typing code into on a regular basic - not something I plan on loading up Windows onto and firing up my Steam library.

I won’t wax lyrical about the pros and cons again, there are some pretty balanced arguments put forth above this post from various community members. I’m pretty pleased that a productive discussion was had here, since this seems (glazing over the posts) to be the right kind of kindling for a PC / Mac flame war. Not what I intended, naturally.

One thing I do feel like chipping in on, though, is one thing I think that Apple do very well. And that’s making choices easy for the consumer. Sure, they do come in at a (much) higher price for their hardware, but I walked into a local PC World branch recently, and looking through their ‘Laptops & Netbooks’ aisles I just felt completely lost. So many brands, so many different specifications, screen types, bolt-on-extras, included software and all that fuss. Variable build quality was also a particular point of note, along with many laptops having a kind of materials identity-crisis. Some looked futuristic, some decidedly plastic, others a horrific mish-mash of weird multi-function buttons and control surfaces. I honestly wouldn’t have wanted to spend any time trying to make a decision there.

At least with Apple, the product line is fairly simple. Macbook Airs for portability and productivity, Macbook Pros for the more serious usage scenarios, iMacs for desktop workstations and Mac Pros for industry-level applications. There’s very little granularity in each line too, making the choices much more simple.

At the end of the day, everyone has their own preference, and no one laptop will be right for everybody!

#23

Evidently someone making that choice has no idea about specs and prices or just loves apple that much. They dont start an argument because they have no points to make other than “I prefer Apple”

The logical approach is: I want to do this, this and that: what tool would be best ?

Well fine, however, you didn’t make any point “you like it better” why ?
I have Ableton and Adobe on Windows, there is plenty of writing programs, Eclipse works the same and runs better on Windows.

intangible element - now tell me this isn’t like religion ?

Gotta make something clear though: Preferring OSX over Windows is not the same debate: you can install OSX on a windows PC.
Yes Apple has software that actually works bundled in, windows doesnt. Everything Windows comes with should be ignored or removed. True. But thats no saving grace because I don’t use bundled Apple software after all because when it comes to real productivity they are not enough.
Not gonna cut a whole movie with iMovie. So bundled stuff sucks anyway, unless you got a very nice Linux distro.

If you dont intend a MAC/no MAC war, then don’t come and ask I need a good device for a good price to do X, Y, Z and then say you like Apple.
Not much options with Apple and not really a logical choice if you want to A) save money, B) have good specs for your money or C) ever open you thing

At work I put some water on my mac keyboard to clean it. It completely broke. Plus since you cannot open any mac product, tough luck.
A decent keyboard is like 10-25 bucks, and if water gets it, you open it, dry it, and move on, nothing shorts out and its easy to open and fix.

Apple doesn’t allow for things to be opened because:

Apple’s target audience are people with a lot of money and no idea about technology.

if a person is exactly that, I can’t really argue too much.

#24

Err… no :expressionless:

I also don’t like apple products, but above statement is just BS - period.

#25

Huh? I explained why I liked the Macbook Air for the OP’s desired purposes. I offered substantive reasons, and all you were able to attack me with were raw specs and pricepoint. It’s clear to anybody who’s actually read the posts in this thread that raw specs weren’t the OP’s priority.

[quote]The logical approach is: I want to do this, this and that: what tool would be best ?
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And the Macbook Air does what the OP wanted to do very well. I never said it was the only machine that could do it. I said that, having one myself for pretty much the exact same purposes, I could attest to the fact that it was a good option. The fact that the OP was replacing an old Mac notebook seemed to indicate that an Air would be a solid match, as well.

[quote]Well fine, however, you didn’t make any point “you like it better” why ?
I have Ableton and Adobe on Windows, there is plenty of writing programs, Eclipse works the same and runs better on Windows.
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I like the basic filesystem better than Windows because apps are packages that contain all of their files. This makes the OS, after extensive use without a fresh install, feel far better organized overall. You don’t constantly feel like you’ve got “loose ends” hanging around from applications you’ve uninstalled, and so on. I like having access to a true Unix command line, right out of the box. I like the overall functional design of the OS, which feels like an integrated design from top to bottom, whereas Windows feels like the same old shit with a shiny coating on top of it (I’m comparing to Windows 7, by the way, because that’s what I run on my Windows partition). I like virtual desktops (a nice inspiration from the Linux realm). I like the dock, which Windows also has its own version of now, but OSX had way before, so I’m just used to theirs now (and find it to be better integrated and more functional, to boot). I like the OS/software update process way, way more than Windows. Microsoft apparently doesn’t understand the concept of a “cumulative update,” so if you ever need to reinstall Windows 7 from a factory disc, be prepared to spend hours downloading and installing every single crucial update they’ve ever released, having to reboot your machine a dozen times, and so on. Shall I continue?

I said that it’s a slightly intangible element, because it has to do with how the form feeds into the function and your overall perception of the device. If you consider the way the whole package functions together, obviously tangibility comes into play (how the trackpad and keyboard physically feel when you interact with the OS and the software running on it), but there’s also a psychological component to it that is intangible. Everything “feels” better together, more like a coherent whole. Interacting with OSX on an Apple machine has always been a more pleasant experience, for me, than interacting with Windows on most PC laptops. Of course, there are so many different PC laptops out there that mileage is always going to vary. There isn’t a single person out there who can honestly say they’ve got the definitive take on this. Which is why I consider it a personal preference, and never argued that it was anything but.

[quote]Gotta make something clear though: Preferring OSX over Windows is not the same debate: you can install OSX on a windows PC.
Yes Apple has software that actually works bundled in, windows doesnt. Everything Windows comes with should be ignored or removed. True. But thats no saving grace because I don’t use bundled Apple software after all because when it comes to real productivity they are not enough.
Not gonna cut a whole movie with iMovie. So bundled stuff sucks anyway, unless you got a very nice Linux distro.
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If you want to install OSX on a PC, you have to use one of the available user-made “distros” in order to do it (unless you go ahead and roll your own, which is probably out of most people’s leagues, including my own). Are you honestly telling me that this is supposed to be a viable option? I get why some people would choose to do it. They’re enthusiast types who like messing around with stuff like this. But for the average user, I think safety is going to be a pretty big concern. Who knows what the makers of these “distros” have added to them? The community isn’t anywhere near as extensive as the distro community for Linux, where you can pretty much trust that a mainstream distro is not designed with to include malicious stuff. You’re acting like you can just readily install OSX on any PC. That’s not how it works. And I’d be really interested in knowing how well these user-created OSX distros work with the software update system.

[quote]If you dont intend a MAC/no MAC war, then don’t come and ask I need a good device for a good price to do X, Y, Z and then say you like Apple.
Not much options with Apple and not really a logical choice if you want to A) save money, B) have good specs for your money or C) ever open you thing
[/quote]
If you go back and read the thread, perhaps you’ll note that I’m not the person who started it. I wasn’t seeking anybody’s advice. I was giving advice to the OP.

[quote]At work I put some water on my mac keyboard to clean it. It completely broke. Plus since you cannot open any mac product, tough luck.
A decent keyboard is like 10-25 bucks, and if water gets it, you open it, dry it, and move on, nothing shorts out and its easy to open and fix.
[/quote]
Ah, now we get to the heart of the matter. You’re angry because you poured water on an electronic object and it happened to stop working.

[quote]Apple doesn’t allow for things to be opened because:

Apple’s target audience are people with a lot of money and no idea about technology.
[/quote]
Or it could be because they design with form factor and size efficiency in mind. I hope you understand that designing products to be easily upgradeable usually comes with drawbacks in terms of the product’s overall design. But if upgradeability is a big concern–for many people it is, and that’s totally valid!–you have a load of other options at your disposal. I don’t know why some people find it so utterly offensive that there’s a company which does things a bit differently, which prioritizes certain concerns over others. It’s not like the existence of Apple means that the countless other PC options can’t exist. You live in a world with a massive amount of choice, and yet you get bent out of shape about something you don’t have to buy or use in the first place. My question is: why? Why is this so important to you? It just makes no sense to me.

#26

In some ways a Mac is better than a Windows-based PC, in other ways it isn’t.

When buying a new computer, tablet, etc., some people do a cost-benefit analysis and buy the best specs they can per dollar. Others are OK buying something for a price they deem acceptable, even if it isn’t the best absolute value, because they prefer the design, usability differences, or some other quality. Is this bad? If so, why?

Do you use cost-benefit analysis to get the absolute best value out of the groceries you buy at the store?

For the car you buy?

For your new apartment or house?

For a pack of gum?

For dinner and drinks with friends?

At some point, everybody gives themselves a little wiggle room to purchase something that costs a little more, for reasons other than its absolute value. Many factors influence where this point is for a person - disposable income, personality, etc. But everybody’s willing to spend a little more money on something, just because they like it more than other choices, sometimes. And what/how much varies from person to person.

Why is this something to criticize?

#27

Yes, if you go to a store and just buy erratically you will end up spending way more than you need to. Hence why almost every super market has their own brand. It’s cheaper to make, import and sell. No matter hour much money you have, buying branded pasta at 1.99 a packet add opposed to store brand at 0.99 is just daft. Even people that eat exotic and fresh food.

Yes, for most people that is a 10 year investment. You aren’t going to go buy a porche at 55,000 at the official dealership when another dealer has it for 54,000.

Same goes for any car , if something is cheaper else where even if it is a different model /make, as long as you like it your not going to opt for the more expensive one.

It’s a house, 20 year investment for most. Your not going too spend more then you need to. Ever.

A pack of gum is quite different from a £200 weekly shop for a family of 4, a car or a house. It cost 0.99 but I can assure you of the packet next to it was the same flavour and cost 0.89, your going to pick that up instead.

Yes, your going to go somewhere every one can afford, and even if they had the money for it they certainly aren’t going to go somewhere that is more expensive for the sake of it.

Criticize no, advise yes. The world’s wealthiest never got to where they are by spending money unnecessarily.

#28

Well I do have to agree, windows is a mess. Got a little better lately.

The ONLY redeeming quality imo. The only reason we use it at work.

The dock. Great idea. I have the nexus dock for windows, awesome.
However, with no taskbar you can literally LOSE windows, sub-windows. Have a couple of apps open, then like open a new sub window, like thunderbird write new email, then click back to the main window. Even Alt-Tab in many cases does not find it. Only way to find it, is to manually minimize every other window.

Just like the uninstalled apps argument, it doesnt really affect most users that much, but yea, I do agree of course.

You talked about the trackpad. I only you mice, hwoever:
All new OSX have like a acceleration on mouse movement. This makes it behave differently than Windows/Linux mouse movement. Starting from like 10.4 not sure exactly when, Apple removed the option to adjust this.
They also have to system settings to do hibernation, which actually does work if you set it up per console.
The command buttons sucks, different muscle memory, I wanna use CTRL. Not because its objectively better, but if you grew up with Windows or Linux, this is what you have been used to. Same with the mouse.

wow thats a little paranoid, nah haven’t heard other people being concerned.
Also a hackintosh uses a stock OSX image, just with specific hardware, as far as I know, not user made.

Well at work I just got a new one, no questions asked. But the fact that it is so expensive and build specifically to break down in this case so that you have to buy a new one, could make me angry, if I cared about Apple stuff. (Which is objectively true because way cheaper keyboards dont have this problem)

@upgradeability
Well the video game consoles are like this too, but they have screws, they CAN be opened. YOu void the warranty, but it is possible. Mac stuff often doesnt even have screws.

Valid question.
This comes from hundreds of clueless people bragging about how they like mac or iphone, who all know jack about tech and whenever asked why answer with braindead stuff like “I just like it. All my friends have it. I like the way it looks”
Sheep behaviour makes me angry - not just in case of Apple. Whenever people just do as others do without thinking for themselves.

I also agree 100% Gibbo3771
When purchasing anything, price is immediately the first criteria. So yes, even when buying cheese I check which one is cheaper.

#29

This is literally the only thing I modify about OSX with third-party software (Steermouse, which lets you change all of those settings to your liking, and honestly with far greater granularity than even a stock Windows installation). You can tweak the stock settings to make it somewhat more bearable. The mouse acceleration is far better suited to laptop use, but it really does suck on the desktop, in my view.

[quote]Also a hackintosh uses a stock OSX image, just with specific hardware, as far as I know, not user made.
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It is nevertheless an involved process, not something that your average user is going to be doing. And I also understand that OSX can be touchy on PCs with certain hardware configurations, because it’s only really designed to support standard Mac specs, which are fairly limited in number and variety.

[quote]Well at work I just got a new one, no questions asked. But the fact that it is so expensive and build specifically to break down in this case so that you have to buy a new one, could make me angry, if I cared about Apple stuff. (Which is objectively true because way cheaper keyboards dont have this problem)
[/quote]
“Designed to break down” is quite the statement. If I drop my smartphone into the toilet and it stops working, does that mean it was “designed to break down”?

[quote]Mac stuff often doesnt even have screws.
[/quote]
Yes, it does. If you remove the glass on the front of an iMac (it’s held in place with magnets), you can access the insides of the machine, though this is a fairly laborious process that involves a lot of unscrewing and dismantling and will void your warranty. Looking at the bottom of my Macbook Air right now, the whole bottom side looks to be a metal panel held on by 10 screws. I imagine that if you remove those screws, you’ll have access to the insides of the machine.

Upgradability has, for a long time, been a sticking point with Apple. I think some of their earlier machines actually pioneered the concept of upgradability, with slots on notebooks where you could swap in entirely different peripherals, and so on. But at some point, they learned that, in order to make smaller, more elegant devices, upgradability was going to have to be put on the chopping block. It remains the case that, if you value the ability to upgrade your machine, you can just get a PC. Problem solved. But honestly, with all the PCs I’ve owned in my life, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I made an upgrade to one that I couldn’t also have made on my Mac (basically adding new RAM). So for me, this has never really been an issue. I’m not a huge hardware upgrader, no matter what platform I happen to be using.

[quote]Valid question.
This comes from hundreds of clueless people bragging about how they like mac or iphone, who all know jack about tech and whenever asked why answer with braindead stuff like “I just like it. All my friends have it. I like the way it looks”
Sheep behaviour makes me angry - not just in case of Apple. Whenever people just do as others do without thinking for themselves.
[/quote]
But you’re assuming that every single person who speaks positively about Apple products falls into that category. That’s the problem.

#30

Speaking of screws, I replaced the battery in my wife’s MacBook a couple of weeks ago. The battery is held in by tri-wing screws as opposed to the Phillips-head screws found elsewhere on the machine, presumably just to be a pain in the arse. Not to mention the sneaky screw that they hide under the battery label… Seriously?

I don’t think Macs are bad. They are nice, well built, albeit pricey machines. However I have a serious problem with a company that attempts to force me to send the machine back to their team of lanyard-wearing hipsters in blue t-shirts, for something so simple as a battery replacement.

#31

Funny, for a lot of these I disagree with you. You’re assuming I’m saying people buy more expensive stuff when cheaper alternatives exist willy-nilly. I’m not saying that. People usually have a price range they believe is “reasonable” when buying something, and sometimes they splurge, for any number of reasons. Sometimes they splurge on cheap stuff, other times on expensive stuff.

I agree with you that, if asked these hypotheticals, most people will respond, “Of course, why would I pay more than I have to?” In actuality, however, many people splurge on the items I mentioned above. I believe you’re arguing that people don’t purposely waste money, and try to get good deals, live within their means, etc. I don’t disagree. I’m arguing that sometimes people spend more for intangible benefits, which vary from person to person.

For gum, even “expensive” gum is relatively cheap, so people often buy one whose flavor they like better, or at a minimum, don’t calculate that pack A is 0.5 cents per ounce cheaper than pack B. This example is basically “it’s so cheap it’s worth spending an extra 20 cents to have the specific type of gum I prefer.”

For a car or house, people often spend a little more than they have to, specifically because they’re long-term investments. Yes, they haggle, and don’t purposely waste money. They do not buy a $500k house when they only need a $150k house (well, some people do, but that’s not my point :)). But you may buy a house with upgraded features - hardwood floors, higher-quality granite, a garage, etc. Such features aren’t a requirement, by any means, for anybody. But they have benefits hard to quantify financially, such as how much enjoyment you get out of them. This example is “I’m going to use X for so long, I want to be sure it has lots of features I want in it, and I really enjoy using it.”

Cars in particular. Not everyone picks out what vehicle to buy based solely on quality + long-term cost of ownership. Most pick out what criteria are important for them (# of passengers, fuel efficiency, safety features, total cost of ownership), figure out what cars are in their “acceptable” price range based on these criteria, then strike out a few possibilities based on looks alone, then head out to dealerships. Test drive several, eliminate some based on “feel,” then haggle on the price for the one they like the most. Why is this a bad way to car shop? Again, I’m not arguing buying a car $20k over what you should. I’m saying people factor in things like looks, handling and feel.

For dinner and drinks with friends, I very much disagree. With dinner, the question is rarely whether or not you can afford it. Do you always ask yourself “Restaurant A I get a larger quantity of food than Restaurant B, with roughly the same nutritional value, so therefore I’ll go to A”, or do you, at least sometimes, ask yourself, “What do I feel like tonight? We went out for Mexican last week, and I haven’t had a steak in awhile… let’s try out that new steak place!” ? Most people allow themselves a huge amount of wiggle room with dining. They have a price range they believe is “reasonable”, but nothing more than that. This example is “As long as it’s not outrageously too expensive, I like to try new places and do new things.”

Again, this is all subjective, and depends on where you are financially and other factors.

Some people will by the cheapest, most fuel-efficient car every time, rent/buy the cheapest place possible to maximize investments, and never eat out, because cooking at home is cheaper. But that’s not the case for everybody. At some point, everybody splurges.