With Kids my most consistent free time is the hour or so before work and lunch. I can’t tote my PC around so I’m looking into getting a laptop that I can work unity on and I’ll just save my work to drop box or something similar. So that brings me full circle to the topic. Is anyone running Unity on a laptop, which one, how does it hold up?
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Iam using a macbook pro - i7 2,7Ghz - Geforce GT 650M(1024MB) - 16 Gb Ram and its my only working machine. I think with a similar Windows setup you are good to go
Lenovo, i7 and nVidia 555m optimus 8Gb as primary, with Mac desktop for iOS builds. Works well for me.
I’m actually developing Unity on a 2012 MacBook Pro (i7, 8gb ram, 512gb ssd upgrade). Works fine.
I switched from desktop to laptop for development and gaming about 9 years ago. Also been using a laptop at work for past 11 years.
Anyway, I have no issues with Unity running on the HP laptop I bought in October 2008.
It runs all of the 3D examples I tried and all of my own work with no issue. I need to get a new laptop soonish though just because 6 years I think is a long time for a laptop and I have used the heck out of it with rendering, gaming and so forth. If I can get one as good as this (only by 2014 standards) I’d be very happy.
I’ve used a Macbook Air for years. Works pretty well. The only limitation I’ve had issues with is screen size.
That’s my situation now, but I’m in the middle of switching to a gigabyte p34G. Mac is ok, but it can’t handle what I do to it. I’m getting this thing replaced for a third time in the winter so I can give it to my mom, and then I’m going to be solely on the p34G. I burned the fans out this time lol. Last time I burned up the charging port working on TDL. Macs fail when the temperature goes too high. And as a developer, I take this machine to its limits every week. It only took 3 months to make the fans malfunction!
For $1480 it has pretty similar specs but an nvidia 860m and a 1TB hard drive. Still get an i7, still get to use 16g ram, etc. It’s even smaller and lighter than the retina I have now though lol.
For a desktop replacement you could go for Sager NP9570 which has a desktop motherboard/cpu, 3 hard drive slots, 2 graphic card slots, etc. and is user upgradable.
It’s on the right: (laptop on left is 17")
They start at $2k.
wow, its not new that i’ve heard about these mac problems but i never experienced that before. how do you guys do that? 
I mostly doing low poly 3d and ui stuff/photoshop and no high poly stuff. maybe thats the secret 
personally i hate the windows os and since unity is not running on linux there is no other way for me . i wonder how unity runs on a 11" macbook air
You can run it through Wine. I’ve seen it mentioned a few times on these forums. Haven’t personally tried it though.
I use a 2008 Dell Latitude E6400. Granted I’m just starting so I haven’t done any big projects or anything but it seems to run rather well. I’ve been using it for about a year and its really surprised me on how well it runs. I bought mine on Ebay for about 200 bucks.
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If you work on a big enough project (where the unity startup & imports take 40 minutes to an hour), actually running said project can destroy your computer. It turned my charging cable yellow and then blue and then the color of wire melting through plastic
As for this one, I gave it an intentional stress test and made it run chrome + flash for 8 hours a day. You know, the 10 ‘chome helper’ processes that open up and consume all available resources for it’s internal flash to consume. And that killed it in 3 months. If I record anything with my computer that needs the mic, you can hear the fans. They sound like they’re hitting something lol. It just needs to last until my computer arrives.
oh, okay. thats heavy stuff there
i use unity just for mobile angry birds kinda games (scope wise) so max 100 low poly 3D models in the whole game so I think i will never go into these kind of troubles
I pushed a Core 2 Duo MacBook to the limits from early 2009 and it’s still working (apart from the battery). That or a Lenovo, depending on OS preference, should give you a durable laptop (it’s also possible the high-end Asus laptops are great now). But make sure you get a backlit keyboard. Once you’ve tried it you won’t go back to the darkness 
Also highly recommended: SSD and 8GB+ RAM. Integrated HD4xxx or HD5xxx is fine, as I consider laptops the lowest common denominator testbed for games. If a game runs there, anybody can run it, and anyone who still can’t isn’t worth my time
@Der_Kevin I’m tagging you in this response so you can be amused.
Orb, do you know what it means to push a Core 2 Duo macbook to its limits? It’s basically the same as when a living thing dies. You know how they inflate with gas and then explode? It’s the same deal with old mac batteries. I woke up one morning to my Core 2 Duo macbook swelling, warping, cracking etc because the battery decided to balloon up over night. If it happened any faster, there might have been a little explosion, heh.
Our laptop-low end-benchmark testing philosophies are the same though
Battery OCD helps catch that before it happens
Just wanted to say thanks to everyone, didn’t expect but one or two responses in this amount of time.
You mean you actually pay attention to your cycle count? :o
I think this happened somewhere between 300 and 400 on my previous laptop. This machine is on 76 even though it’s only a few months old. Is apple hardware going downhill?
I have a laptop that is oooold and crappy, I bought the cheapest one. I can’t play most games on it. Unity runs. You should be fine.
Admittedly, I’m on my brothers borrowed laptop now and it’s got desktop power… and a one hour battery life but thats another story.
I used to program on a 2009 HP laptop and now on a 2013 MBP bootcamped windows.
Both had NVidia gfx cards and at least 8GB RAM.