[wayneftw]

Most of the problems you listed are because you want to use a laptop to work for some reason. Ewww. Why anyone would want to optimize for working in trains, planes, automobiles, hotel rooms and meetings - I'll never understand.

I've never had any of these problems with my very inexpensive tower computer, which I upgraded to 32gb of RAM and terabytes of disk space, that was probably a third of the cost of your laptop.

[jen20]

> Why anyone would want to optimize for working in trains, planes, automobiles, hotel rooms and meetings - I'll never understand.

It shouldn't take much understanding - many people work almost exclusively in those environments. Consultants, customer engineers, 'digital nomads'.

Then there's the group of us who would rather the (frankly epic) advances in hardware went towards actual visible software performance improvements instead of more layers of waste.

[txcwpalpha]

Better yet, why not have the best of both worlds?

I know most devs are hesitant to try anything that's "always online", but remote development apps have really gotten better recently. VSCode with the Remote extension makes doing development on a VPS a breeze, and unless you have a really bad internet connection, you probably won't even notice it's remote. And then you also get the benefits of the VPS having a faster internet connection (faster package downloads, etc), most likely better specs than your laptop for only $10-15/mo, more resiliency, and better security. It also completely solves the whole "my laptop is ARM but my servers are x86" problem that keeps getting talked about.

[OkGoDoIt]

I use VS Code remote development via SSH to a $5 a month digital ocean server, and it’s so incredibly smooth and easy. You would never know it wasn’t local. I’ve been using Windows for decades so I’m very productive running windows on the desktop, but I prefer to use Linux on the server. VS Code remote over SSH is the perfect combination for me. For someone who loves macOS the situation should be exactly the same, regardless of whether they are on ARM or x86. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend giving it a try!

[Jtsummers]

> Most of the problems you listed are because you want to use a laptop to work for some reason. Ewww. Why anyone would want to optimize for working in trains, planes, automobiles, hotel rooms and meetings - I'll never understand.

Because a lot of development requires only a couple cores, maybe 8GB of RAM, and a few free GB for the database or dataset (at most, probably a few hundred free MB). If you aren't simulating large networks, doing serious number crunching (HPC-styled or ML), or into graphics heavy development, a laptop is more than enough for most work.

I want to say most, but that's an assumption on my part, but a lot of computing is about encoding business rules that could be done by passing paper around an office or larger complex and making it digital (though obviously not with the speed and reliability that's often wanted or needed). Message passing, filtering, connecting to databases, verifying data integrity, connecting multiple DBs and auto populating them, etc. None of that requires a powerful computer to develop.

Even the embedded work I've done is really just business rules for safety critical systems: If this reaches some temp, send a signal to the pilot, pilot can optionally release halon. If pilot sends "release halon", then release the halon. Nothing about that or the target platform (16MHz processor with memory measured in KB, maybe double-digit MB) required a powerful computer for development considering that the earlier versions were written on, maybe, 386s.

Just because you do things that require lots of RAM, disk space, and fast cores don't assume everyone else needs that. I used to do a lot of graphics work, and the laptop barely did the job. A full tower was what I needed (especially as I wanted to use CUDA and/or OpenCL and move a lot of numeric work associated with it to the GPU). If I were doing machine learning I'd be in that same boat. But I'm not, most of us aren't.

[nojito]

>Why anyone would want to optimize for working in trains, planes, automobiles, hotel rooms and meetings - I'll never understand.

Because being stationary isn't that great for creativity and problem solving.

Additionally, there are whole careers being made on the ability to work while on the move.

[pjmlp]

Easy, because when one does consulting for Fortune 500 across the globe, it is expected that we code whenever we are while traveling to the next customer meeting on site.

And even when not traveling, we are expected to move across the building and join other teams for collaborative work.

[ed25519FUUU]

That’s actually a good point. I’m not really sure how I’ve come to expect a laptop for development. At home I use a PC and it’s much faster in almost every way, despite being 4 years older than my laptop.

[bromonkey]

Can't take my workstation hiking or traveling.