Time to upgrade. Considering the following but would welcome feedback.
HP ZBook 17.
Or…
Macbook Pro 2018.
Budget is around the €4500 give or take a couple of hundred Euros. Sounds a lot but we all know we could easily spend a lot more than that!
The ZBook has really peeked my interest over the Mac at the moment. Anyone here with experience of the ZBook range? There is a 15" version offering more portability but these days I don’t travel to clients so much…
Feedback appreciated!
I have had no issues at all with my MacBook Pro. I may be wrong but I believe the ZBook does not have a way to add an extra monitor to it?
The Microsoft Surface Book has grabbed my attention and I am a die hard mac user. A lot of power and versatility:
But it depends on what you use on your laptop besides Wappler - If no mac only apps like Sketch, then get more bang for your buck in the Windows environment.
You really need to decide if you want MacOS or Windows. Yes, you can emulate Windows in OSX but you take a slight performance hit and a hit on battery life. You can also boot natively into Windows on a Mac but beware none of the power management features work in Bootcamp, so battery life will be terrible. Both are great machines.
I tend to build quite a few computers for my clients, most of them are either in printing or video editing arenas so the computers i deal with are generally far higher end like what you are looking at. Although higher end in South Africa could very well be middle range for other countries, haha.
In the last few months I have built 2 HP ZBooks both 15U G3 versions.
I honestly had high hopes for this laptop as it had a preinstalled 256GB Samsung SM951 NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD, so I really figured it was going to be very quick with a max read of 1878MB/s and max write of 1226 MB/s.
To be honest i was quite disappointed by the end result of the computer, the system seemed laggy for a 6th Gen i7-6600U with Intel HD 520, 32GB DDR4-2133 RAM, and a dedicated AMD FirePro 2GB GDDR5 GPU.
2 months later the client was so unhappy he asked me try turn it into a hackintosh, which I managed to do but the Wifi, Bluetooth 4 configuration was never going to work, and the BIOS is hardware locked so you can not just swap it out for a Broadcom alternative.
The best PC I have personally built in the last few months was an ASUS Zenbook UX330U, I honestly can not tell you what or how ASUS managed to make this PC this fast, it is honestly one of the most responsive machines i have worked with in a very long time. In your price range look at an ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX550GD with its i9 8950HK Processor 2400MHZ 16 GB DDR4 RAM, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 with 4GB GDDR5 VRAM, try get the gen3x4 SSD over the M.2 SSD as it will even be faster too.
If it were me personally i would still go Apple Mac though. 
The Macbook Pro is still up there. I won’t be rushing in to the decision. As far as I know using Thunderbolt I have the possibility of running dual 4K displays.
I do everything from video editing to web design. Also a slightly addictive hobby involving wide format printers and vinyl cutters so a lot of high resolution imagery in many circumstances. Colour is essential.
I’m quite happy in both environments. Most of my day is spent in one Adobe product or another and they all look much the same despite the OS. The only other thing I generally have open is half a dozen shells and a browser window or two.
Funnily enough I am currently using a Zenbook from Asus and love it! I would sincerely consider another one. Back in around 99 - 2003 I was a pro gamer and picked up a sponsorship deal with them. To this day my house is full of their laptops and hardware, although these days I have to buy it!
Will take in to consideration everything you have mentioned. Thank you.
Thank you all for all the great input and advice it’s really very appreciated.
If you have the money - go for Macbook Pro - it is the best web dev machine you will ever need.
And Wappler looks and works amazing on it!
Same is valid for the most web dev tools - as many of them are command line oriented and use some most command linux commands - having a native linux under the mac is really a huge advantage. All runs so quickly and smooth.
Same is also for the file system - file access on the mac 10x faster than on similar configuration on Windows 10.
And also the new dark mode in MacOS Mojave is really a candy for a web dev guy so nice dark and Wappler fits right in! Icons and fonts are so much sharper on the retina displays than they will ever be on Windows.
That say I do use Windows as my desktop PC for my daily work - but love my Macbook much more and can do all the same work.
If you use Windows for some of the Microsoft software - just throw this rubbish away - there are much better alternatives. Everybody uses Google apps these days.
Thanks George! Another incentive for the Macbook Pro for me is the re-sale value in a year, especially for one that has a high specification. It’s definitely a huge positive.
Yeah, as I say if it were me, the MacBook Pro is just the best of the bunch, In my opinion anyway.
Glad George has confirmed some suspicion on this too.
Would still love to figure out at some point how ASUS managed to make that PC so damn fast though. I thought they might have made some OS optimisations but i took a change and installed the same version of Win 10 as the ZBook i installed and it is still fast, reboot is 3 seconds flat. My 2014 MacBook Pro is 10 seconds reboot or 6 seconds from shutdown to fully booted.
Considering the age difference the Mac always just seems to hold its own very well.
Haha, I often find this sort of issue in South Africa, have to shop around, could be due to country taxes, could be due to additional shipping costs, or could be due to the import codes of such an item, or a million other things.
Looks like the UK one is the one to get though. Can you buy me one too while you at it please
Very Jealous, great Mac, I am sure you are going to have many happy hours with her.
Looks like your savings might still get you 2 of these at the same time https://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-BDM4350UC-00-43-Inch-Brilliance/dp/B01CO2QT4M/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1540636027&sr=1-1&keywords=bdm4350uc
Specs: https://www.philips.co.za/c-p/BDM4350UC_73/brilliance-4k-ultra-hd-lcd-display
Hahaha its not set in stone yet. To be honest I’m going to wait another month or two as I’m sure new modals will be announced. The last thing I want to do is spend a fortune on a product that is already dated before its delivered. As I mentioned I do not undertake so much travelling these days so I may even consider a more traditional work station. The iMac Pro is well out of my league I will say that though (I priced up the same components to build a similar spec machine and its not that much cheaper surprisingly)…
Back to that pricing difference. You’re right there are many factors. I’ve seen the same with flights booking through various countries using a VPN can save quite a lot of money, same for rental cars and reservations. Unfortunately no matter what location I selected to shop on Apple the price is still best via the U.K…
Yeah, it is a big decision to make thats for sure. Wonder what pricing differences you will see on Black Friday?
I built this for a client the other day and it came up to about half the price of what you are looking at, it has been running for 3 months and the client is over the moon happy with it.
Geekbench Score at the bottom of his build article vs MacBook Pro 2018 i9 https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/431
I had to change a few components i could not get but here is my invoice detailing the items
As a person who was heavily involved in e-Sports for many years that build report is among the best I have read. I certainly appreciate all the effort and time that must have taken! Very impressive. This goes to show that this community, Wappler, is full of exciting individuals of all calibers, with all types of hidden talents. A real broad spectrum of users with very interesting backgrounds and hobbies. Truly diverse. Yet dignified and informed. Something both the users and developers of Wappler should be incredibly proud of.
