Which laptop to choose for a student programmer? With a discrete graphics card or without?

Question

laptops

Hello. I am 17 years old and soon I will go to study as a programmer at the University of Yekaterinburg. And for learning, I need to choose a laptop for study. And sometimes simple toys to play with (Factorio, for example). I prefer C#, Javascript, HTML, PHP, CSS.
There is a budget of 45-55 thousand rubles. Purchase from an offline or online store. The choice fell on several laptops: Honor magicbook (Ryzen 5 3500U, 512 SSD, 8GB), Redmibook (I5, 512 SSD, 8GB, MX250) , Hasee (I7, GTX1650, 16GB, 512 SSD). And what to choose? Does a programmer need a gaming laptop? And what would you choose?
And yet, the Magicbook has a Type-C input for charging, the Redmibook does not. Does it matter?

Answer 1

I asked the same question a few years ago, so my answer can be considered a squeeze over the last ~3 years of using laptops. Like you, I chose a piece of hardware for programming on a budget of 50. My question is here: Is there life without a discrete video adapter?
As a result, I chose the Dell Inspiron 5368 (now it is no longer relevant, do not take it). Config: i5 6200u, 8Gb RAM. With such hardware, I did not experience great difficulties in working on both educational projects (Pascal, C ++, C #, PHP, Python) and work tasks (PHP + Vue). A discrete graphics card would really come in handy in a parallel programming course (specifically, in computing on a video card) and an OpenGL development course (in my case, the FPS was about 10 versus ~ 40-50 for other guys with mid-level laptop discretes). Nevertheless, I think that the discreet is not particularly needed for my tasks. Now I've switched to XPS 9360 (i5 8250u, 8Gb), I still get high.
I would advise you to pay attention to
1) Only the latest generations of processors (in light of the doubling of the number of cores in mobile i5 / i7 when moving to the 8th generation). I can’t say anything about Ryzen - I haven’t used it
2) SSD is just a must-have in 2019. NVMe or SATA is another question. If it's possible to put the first one, it's better, but I don't think SATA is that bad. See tests.
3) 16 RAM. I have 8 soldered on the board, always packed to capacity. I do not experience drops in performance. NVMe is quite fast and compensates for the lack of RAM by quickly loading the necessary resources from disk. If there are dies in the slot, and not soldered chips, even better.
4) Autonomy and weight. I don’t know about you at the university, but in many of us (especially in-line) classrooms there is not enough provision with sockets. Added to all this is my love to code in %random_place%. Plus, you still need to carry a laptop every day with you for couples. This criterion is very subjective, but I would not buy a 5 kg car for daily abuse of myself, honestly. As for the battery - on Inspiron 5h * normal * work was enough back to back, on XPS 7h for the eyes (in typewriter mode with one open OneNote, the numbers generally exceed 15 hours). Please note that the battery sags in capacity over time. If the laptop "from the factory" was enough tyutelka in tutelka, then in n months / years this will not happen.
5) Screen. Very subjective, the main thing is that your eyes feel comfortable and comfortable. I feel very good at 13 'FHD, for someone this diagonal is not enough. See that the backlight is not PWM at low brightness (if PWM affects you).
I won’t recommend specific models, unfortunately, but I hope the text above will help you in some way.
UPD: according to Type-C - awesomely convenient. I connected a dock to it, and through the dock - a monitor and peripherals, as a result, a whole workplace is connected at home through one cable.

Answer 2

Well, from the proposed Redmibook (if it's xiaomi) norms. Although 8GB of RAM is on the verge.
A discrete video card is not needed for programming in the above languages ​​and technologies.

Answer 3

Well, yes, for example, I chose a gaming laptop for work, but with a design for a normal laptop, without any drawings. 2Tb HDD, 1Tb SSD, 64 gigabytes of RAM, GeForce GTX 1050, the screen must be matte, keyboard backlighting is required, we are night creatures.

Answer 4

Why a laptop and not a desktop?

Answer 5

Bought Honor Magicbook. For python and web development, it's enough for the eyes.