Looking for a ~13" workstation laptop w/ m.2 & 2.5" SATA

[dave_the_nerd]

Shopping for a Linux-friendly replacement for my housemate's old-style 13" Macbook Pro.

Primary use of laptop is web surfing and amateur-level photo and video editing. (Openshot and gThumb).

So storage (current storage footprint is 400GB used on the laptop and ~1TB stored on an external HDD; I'd like to get that all in the laptop.) and CPU is important, GPU is irrelevant. Price range is... we have a house full of Apple products.

The only real requirements are being under 3.5lbs/1.6kg, 1080p screen, decent CPU, ram expansion up to 32GB (although we'll probably start with 16GB), and room for both an SSD and a large-capacity HDD - which can be upgraded or replaced if needed. Seems like most of the Ultrabooks don't have SATA bays, or the RAM is hard capped at 16GB (or even 12GB). But the "workstation" laptops are all 15"+.

Any ideas? TIA.

 

[heymrdj]

Since memory controllers have been put on the processor instead of another chip, memory limits are more often a product of consumer demand than hard coding. The Ix-6/700U processors support 32GB of ram. For example the ThinkPad 13 supports 32GB of Ram according to crucial and several internet users that have upgraded them. But Lenovo doesn’t see a point offering a 400$ memory upgrade on a 800$ laptop, it’s not a market that exists except in a tiny percentage. The cooling package in most ultra books will prevent the U series processors from ever reaching efficient use of 32GB of Ram, it will throttle on any workload that large. The smallest I can recommend that meets all your points is the ThinkPad T470. Has SSD+HDD bays, 32GB Ram capacity, amazing battery life, and weighs 3.5lbs. But I’m sure there are other systems out there that can handle 32GB Ram, it’ll just take a lot of research outside of there official specifications.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Cool, thanks!

Looks like they aren't selling them with 8xxx series CPUs yet... *hums jeopardy theme song*

edit: oh, that's the 480.

edit 2: Oh, it only supports m.2 2242 in the SSD slot.

Neat.

 

[XavierMace]

Dell Precision 5520. Yes it's a 15" and yes it's over 3.5lbs (but under 4lbs). But it's less than an inch wider than the Thinkpad 14, only 0.10" deeper, and 0.34" thinner. Much better processor options (from a performance perspective), official 32Gb RAM support, official Linux support, actual dual drive support (unlike the Lenovo ), and a better display. But cheap it is not.

$2400 with i7-7820HQ, 16Gb RAM (1 Dimm), 512Gb PCIe, 2Tb HDD, Ubuntu. If your employer is a Dell shop, you can likely get it for less than that.