[gumby]

This really makes me think about use cases. Personally I want my laptop to be as light and portable as possible; some of these bricks are likely heavier than my whole laptop! When I need crunch I do it on a desktop or in the cloud (or these days "...and in the cloud"). So I edit code locally but when I press c-X c, g++ runs on some other machine.

I don't really understand why anyone would lug around an enormous and expensive boat anchor, but I'm sure they aren't idiots: they must get value from doing so, even if I can't imageine what it would be.

One thing I love about capitalism is that it's a huge parallel processing system for satisfying these different needs. If I were the central planning czar, the folks who needed the big portables would be SOL.

[NBJack]

There is certainly a trend in processors as well as GPUs to push the hardware further by pumping more power into it. This (almost) always plays into the various workstation-grade laptops out there, which I suspect many won't unlock their full potential without a beefy power source.

Beyond gaming, the most interesting use cases I have seen and heard are CAD work/displays of highly complex models, creating heavy duty multimedia presentations, game development, and just about anyone in a country that either needs to do a lot of travel or does not have ready access to a high bandwidth connection. I don't know how prevalent those cases are, but they did surprise me a little.

[gumby]

The CAD case was my default guess, though I've seen from my ME colleagues that when you're designing something very complex you absolutely need the oomph of a real workstation class machine. I guess there could be a large "middle" of quite complex but not extremely so.

But how many people need that? I was shocked to see another colleague doing CFD on his ipad.