[ImPleadThe5th]

Do you actually buy a new laptop every year? I feel that's a bit delusional. Year to year most upgrades are pretty minor.

An argument can be made maybe every 3 years if you're doing some incredibly resource intense stuff.

[kristopolous]

> Year to year most upgrades are pretty minor.

Really this depends on the year. We're in a more chunked paradigm now when significant progress is happening more intermittently.

That doesn't mean buy new. Wait it out a year or two and buy used.

Some years matter. Most don't. You can exploit this.

[ImPleadThe5th]

Fair, and I agree. Especially if you're out of sync with the CPU/GPU upgrade cycle.

But even then the odds it will have a major impact on most workloads is very unlikely.

I think as tech people we tend to try to maximize when there is no need.

[cj]

What’s delusional is highly paid engineers not investing money in essential tools to get their work done. A new laptop is 1-2% of the annual salary of many people here.

[MAGZine]

If productivity is so important, why are people using laptops at all? Desktop processors are faster.

[yardstick]

If you just work in one location only, sure. I work from home, the office, coffee shop. When Im at home I often like to code from the couch rather than the home office. Laptops add flexibility. I like their middle ground of flexibility and performance.

I’m also one of those “weird” people that don’t use an external monitor. And yet I’m still just as productive, probably more so, than most of my coworkers.

[musicale]

I like having two large monitors and a desktop-style "mechanical" keyboard, but there's absolutely a benefit to having a full productive work environment with you, with your data and work in progress, anywhere you might want to work - even if you're not online. And when you're in an office (or home office) environment, you just plug in and continue from where you left off.

A high-end MacBook Pro may not be cheap, but it packs some serious mobile compute power along with good battery life.

[glogla]

List of places I worked from last month:

- my desk at home

- my couch at home

- my dinner table at home (in a boring call while preparing and eating lunch)

- my desk at work

- like 15 different meeting rooms in offices across two continents

- couch on terrace at work

- beanbag on terrace at work

- hotel room desk

- airport lounge

- airplane (if you count watching conference talks as working)

Flexibility is great!

[cj]

And cheaper! I personally run on a M1 Mac Mini (and iMac before that)

I paid less than $700 for the Mac Mini right when the M1 chip came out. It’s hands down the fastest computer I’ve ever owned.

[andrekandre]

  > I paid less than $700 for the Mac Mini right when the M1 chip came out. It’s hands down the fastest computer I’ve ever owned.

same, though i did kind of regret getting only 8GB ram (for what i am doing).

[leetcrew]

is BYOC that common at software companies these days? even if I wanted to "invest money in essential tools", I wouldn't be allowed to connect them to any company networks.

in any case, the most resource-intensive thing my work laptop does is have outlook and firefox open at the same time. the "heavy lifting" is done on a cloud instance that can be easily scaled up or down depending on what I'm currently working on.

[klardotsh]

I haven't used a company issued machine since 2017+18, and prior to that, literally never. So 13 months or so out of a nearly decade career. It helps I guess that I'm upfront with companies about being picky about hardware and Linux being a strict requirement (that one job was the lone and exception), they just shrug and go "sure, go for it dude".

[ImPleadThe5th]

I think there is nothing wrong with investing in equipment. I think there is something wasteful with replacing a laptop every year.

Unless its some crazy jump in hardware between cpu/gpu generations that you weren't in sync for.

[Crywastaken]

You can sell your mac every year then upgrade don't cost full price

[HWR_14]

If everyone insists on new hardware, then there is no one to sell your used Mac to.

[gghffguhvc]

I do a lot of Android and iOS app compilation (Lots of flavors/schemes of apps). So lately the upgrades in cores has meant a faster upgrade cycle for my work dev machine than for the intel based MacBook Pro era. I’m sure Apple can’t keep up this pace of the last few years though.

Back in early 2000s we used distcc for distributed compilation of QT apps and reused old workstations in a server room. But with XCode and Android studio it isn’t pragmatic.

[pshirshov]

Why don't you buy an EPYC/Threadripper workstation then? Even best M2 laptops still can't compete with hackintosh on dated 3970x

[kiratp]

Because it’s not faster. Well at least the 3990x wasn’t.

Compilation rapidly drops from parallel to single thread bound for most workloads.

https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257

[pshirshov]

Depends on your workload. For me 3970x is faster in all my workflows.

[gghffguhvc]

I also have a maxed out Mac Studio when I need the extra cores and don’t need the portability. But I haven’t looked into hackintosh options for a long time. Perhaps I’ll check it out again some time. Thanks for the tip.

[ido]

I think you severely underestimate how fast the M2 series is.

[pshirshov]

I compared. They are better on bang per watt but I'm still getting significantly shorter compilation times on 3970x.

[simplify]

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[elliotec]

Yikes. Don’t be like that.