[nithayakumar]

Nish from Nimbus here.

The cost of a laptop is a factor but its a drop in the bucket relative to the cost of an engineer. A $4k machine over 2 years on an engineer that has a fully loaded cost of over $200k/yr is only 1% of the total cost - not huge.

The real win is in helping engineers do more while saving time. This has huge impacts on the dev experience, productivity and general happiness in a role where many experience burnout.

But to answer more plainly, in some cases it will replace laptops (e.g. some companies ship laptops to their contractors to keep their code and data secure. They wont have to anymore). In other cases, teams save money on laptops (through lower spec'd machines with a longer lifespan).

[zerop]

Thanks. How does it help the engineer to save time?

[nithayakumar]

For engineers, the most immediate wins here are cutting build/test times with more power, removing new project setup, and reducing environment error rate and troubleshooting.

It also gives more visibility into environments which help SRE like teams resolve issues faster.

What excites me (and many of our users) are the "micro-wins" that save time/let engineers do more. Some of these come from making workflows simpler (e.g. saving time switching context [branches/data/credentials]), improving device performance (e.g. being able to work longer unplugged), and device flexibility.