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> 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. |