17 hours ago, missionctrl said:

Do you want to play games on this machine as well?  If so, then obviously a PC will be better suited.

Especially as there are actual "Gaming Laptops" for Windows, while no machine deserving such a (somewhat dubious) moniker is available from apple.

Caveat here is, as said before, that these gaming laptops might have a beefy GPU besides a beefy CPU, but are not really that "portable" thanks to size, weight and power consumption, and that GPU only working at about half power off the power grid.

And of course if modern 3D games are not what your gaming revolves around, "gaming laptops" might be overkill anyway. You don't need more than an iGPU to play 2D games.

Go for a custom build. Stay away from the Alienware brand. They're g**. Go for something semi powerful but not too strong. Good luck!

I'm using an i3 on a desktop and it's fine for Unity and Blender.  I have a gtx950 card.  If you are doing indy game dev, you want to do something that will run on smartphones, so you don't need much power.   Also, if it runs on your machine, it will probably run well on the average user's machine.  The triple AAA games are in another league and you have to be in a large team for that kind of thing.

On 6/26/2017 at 0:35 AM, kheqn said:

But it would also be nice to have something lighter, since I'll be carrying to school often

Having done this for years myself, I strongly recommend that you buy something excessively light/portable for school (say, a Chromebook, or if you feel like splurging, a 12" MacBook). Then buy/build a cheap gaming desktop that you don't have to carry around.

The lightweight laptop is fine for coding or running Blender et al, and you have the desktop for playing games or running Unreal/Unity.

You really don't want to be lugging a 17" desktop-replacement to school every day. And even "light" gaming laptops (such as Alienware's 13" model) aren't really all that light.

I am using an old laptop that has the 1TB additional HDD. Is it convenient to have additional storage? Yes, but not as much as you think.

I would say the additional HDD is not worth it for an extra $100. If you want to keep large files or backup, an external HDD seems like a better choice.

15" dell xps from the prior gen 2nd hand.