Hell, my three and a half year old W530 has a quad-core i7, Nvidia GPU (Optimus), 32 GB RAM, and a pair of Samsung PRO 850 SSDs.

My one year old MBP (which is really a "2013 MBP") has half the memory and storage of the ThinkPad. In fact, pretty much the only noticeable difference between it and the "new" one is the touch strip. :/

What kind of battery life do you get on the W530 vs your 2013 MBP?

I have a rMBP, but these T460p's are excellent machines, even can come with a touchscreen. If I had to have only one laptop, and it had to be windows....

Has much work been done on truly memory-light virtual machines? It seems like a really big opportunity, even if it's really hard.

It's not that it's hard, it's just the logistics of running the virtual machines(s) and the applications they contain. You could use a minimal linux distro like Alpine or Tiny Core, but you still need to run applications on top of that if you're testing or developing.

Spinning up a basic devstack instance (for example) take a minimum of 6GB and that's before you even deploy any test vms inside that infrastructure. Another example, if you're doing config management development you may need several VMs running which in turn may have (say) large java apps with heavy memory requirements even when fairly unladen. So, I guess the answer is, it depends on what you're doing and what the memory requirements of the thing you're running on VMs is.

Hyper-V has dynamic memory, so memory resources can be reallocated as needed, and has driver hooks so that linux vms can be resized too. There's also Intel's clear containers push which virtualizes for linux but shares a lot of kernel structures between the host and the VM.

>It seems like a really big opportunity, even if it's really hard. It's not because it's a problem that is easily solvable by spending a small amount on better hardware. 16GB RAM costs $80 which is cheap if you're only going to use it for VMs.

Unikernels are one area of research, http://unikernel.org

Yeah if someone worked out how to use less memory in a VM we could use it in normal machines too ;)

The point was that even the low-end Lenovo has 32GB RAM, the topic of this subthread. If you want the latest hardware features, there's a 15" Xeon P50 model with USB-C, etc, http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/p50/

Different use cases. Any laptop that offers 32GB is going to need a more powerful chipset, which affects heat, battery life, and portability.