[solraph]

I think this was true ten years ago when laptops could not effectively drive two monitors, and had some serious deficiencies in the processor/ram/HDD space. I would put up with the duplicate desktop/portable system so that I had sufficient power when writing code.

These days, my work laptop happily drives a pair of QuadHD monitors, and even suffices for light gaming. I have yet to max out all the cores and ram. On top of that, I no longer have to deal with having two systems and all the data shenanigans that goes along with that.

[patrick451]

This must depend on the kind of work you're doing. For any kind of mildly serious with a compiled language, a laptop is still woefully inadequate. Its still difficult to find a laptop with 32 gb of ram, let alone 64. But working on a large c++ codebase, I routinely max out 32 gb and compilation still takes roughly 5 times as long on my high end xps compared to my workstation.

[solraph]

> This must depend on the kind of work you're doing.

Very much so, but 10 years ago most devs suffered on a laptop, now most devs would not.

Obviously if your workstation reference is a multi-socket beast then you will not be satisfied with a laptop, but most devs aren't recompiling large codebases from scratch every time.

> Its still difficult to find a laptop with 32 gb of ram, let alone 64.

I can't quickly find one with 64GB, but there's Lenovo Thinkpads with 48 GB (which is what I have), along with with 8/16T Ryzen cores. I can't speak to what it's like recompiling large C++ codebases, but I don't wait when it comes to compiling things written in golang fwiw.

[juniperplant]

There are models in the Thinkpad P line that can be maxed out at 128GB.

[adamparsons]

Yeah exactly. My fairly basic MacBook Pro back in 2014 was capable of driving 2 4K displays on the intel GPU. It was not going to win benchmarks but it never slowed me down in day-to-day work until it aged beyond its useful life.