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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

I used to think that was what I wanted. But I think at this point a thin laptop can be good enough, and being able to get away from having a dev laptop and a travel netbook is a huge win. Moving all the ports onto a dock - provided it's a first-party fully-supported dock - is also a win, since it enables me to leave everything plugged in at home and take my computer travelling without having to unplug and replug everything.

/huge Surface Book fan

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I've been surprised by my attitude over this. Either I want a honking 10 pound brick of capability or my Surface Pro 4 with dock. I really appreciate the convenience of being able to just grab the computer and go (nowithstanding the idle==shutdown-without-saving bug), but there are times I'd like to go heavy on the horsepower and battery.

If you want a computer with capability that you don't have to carry around, why not get a desktop?

I think this is going to be my next setup.

Just bought SP4. It is basically replacing my Chromebook. This will be my light weight laptop for work from coffeeshops and couch.

I have a 5 year old Dell XPS 15 for main dev work and some photo editing. Once it dies or gets too slow, I am going to replace it with a desktop. With SP4, I should be able to do a lot more work away from my desk. Chromebook let me ssh into my servers but sometimes it was not easy to be as productive in VIM as in real IDE.

Because my Surface Pro 4 can run 3 1920x1200 monitors just fine (I'm partial to a -|- setup (dontjudgeme)). The dock really makes it, no question. My monitors stands stay bolted to the desk and everything's cabled together, but I'm personally not tethered.

Best of both worlds, to me at least. (Except for when I need to do something irresponsibly inefficient like run three VMs and full screen video at once... which will work, but not be great.)

Are you rocking the i5 or the i7 to be able to do that?

I'm seriously considering getting one.

i7 - I conceded disk space in exchange for more ram and the higher end cpu. It works great, since I have tons of external drive space. It won't be the best for someone who has intense disk usage needs (like running multiple VMs at once), but I don't. I usually have a dozen apps running (like JVMs, SSMS, too many Firefox windows, a few Chrome, Excel, etc; the usual stuff). I really like that it spreads across monitors well. Just don't expect to run movies in HD 60fps (though Excel doesn't really need 60fps, right? You're not doing something silly like that. RIGHT?. Sure.)

I was referring to the "10 pound brick" you mentioned, not the Surface.

Oh I know. That's the normal counter argument, and the answer is simply that sometimes I have to work off-site, sometimes in places with questionable power. And thus more battery is better, and a 10 pound brick is probably going to devote a lot of that heft to power. (But it's rare. My coworkers sometimes need to work in the middle of nowhere, though.)

With USB-C now common for power, you could power the laptop off a USB PD capable battery like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/30000mAh-Portable-Charger-Outputs-Mic...

Because my Surface Pro 4 can run 3 1920x1200 monitors just fine

...

/saunters off to rethink his position on the Surface Pro

//wallet begins weeping in his back pocket

Monitors are a sort of special arena of contention among our types, but I gotta recommend the Dell Ultrasharp U2415 24 inch model. Native 1920x1200 at a DPI I feel comfortable with. The trick here is that it has the DisplayPort inputs and outputs needed to properly daisy chain the monitors. Then you just need to get a high data rate DP cable (Rankie DP 4K Resolution cables are legit and cheap). The crazy that follows from bad standards and misleading specs caused me all sorts of heartache.

Have you seen the new MacBook prob? It's even more impressive in this area

I have-my daily driver for work right now is a 2015 MBP, but after owning an Acer R11 and entering the world of touch screen laptops as a form factor for casual couch & bed computing...I don't know if I can go back.

Depending on how well the SP4 can run Arch (well technically Antegros-and I'm sure it may still be a while for drivers to catch up), there's a very good chance I'll probably move to that platform and never look back.

Thought I may still get a new Macbook for work. Too much of the workflow I've developed and grown attached to include Mac productivity apps

The 5k iMac is gorgeous, weighs only double your brick laptop, runs faster than any stock laptop, and is a delight to use every day. It has a lot more than 3x 1920x1200 pixels but it will take two external displays if you want them. I like mine -| with a 1920 on the side, but you could do |-| or even -|- (wtf is wrong with you?).

Desktops are a shrinking market, but innovation continues. I'm glad I looked into them.

See, I can't use the OSX interface. It makes me feel like a complete imbecile and I consistently do the wrong or useless thing. It's why I can't say good or bad things about Macs - haven't successfully used one since 2003 (thank goodness iOS apps can be compiled via Jenkins or the like!). People I respect seem to love their machines, but I turn into a cussing idiot when in front of one. Like can't-click-on-things stupid. If it didn't have a command line I'd never get anything done. Sure I could learn, but it comes up so rarely for me that I just settle for living in mild fear of having to help the secretary connect to the printer or something.

Plus 4K screens make me squinty (the SP4 has a lovely screen, but Win10 often gets confused on scaling and does horrific things to Java subwindows... and it's small). I'm pretty much a 30 year old curmudgeon now.

Oh and I used to use |-| with two 1080s on the sides of an IBM 2560x1600 monitor. Gosh you could spreadsheet the hell out of things on that 30" screen. Kinda miss it.

I strongly prefer Gnome or XUbuntu myself and I still hate losing focus-follow-mouse, but Mac is at least less brain damage than Windows. I do everything I can on the command line and with Unix or X programs, of course, so I don't even know what the mouse-based interface is supposed to be like.

And Mac does high resolution very well.

Why did you lose focus-follows-mouse? Both of those should have it, and I know for a fact Compiz does.

MacOS doesn't do ffm at all ever.

It's still a big jump between a "luggable" gaming/dev laptop that you can pack into a holdall if need be and a desktop that you can't realistically transport without a car.

First-party docks are very underrated. I like having one connection from the laptop that gives you access to KVM or whatever. I love my MBP (early 2015) but the thing looks like Medusa and I think twice about having to remove all the cables from it to use it on the couch.

But that's part of the promise of USB-C / Thunderbolt 3... interchangeable, standards-based docks that work with a single connection. I'm currently using my Dell XPS 15 (9550) with the Plugable USB-C Docking Station which uses a single cable to power the laptop, drive two monitors (one DisplayPort alt mode, the other over USB), gig ethernet, and a few USB devices.

Granted, it's not as seamless as it could be, but it's still new technology. There are issues with the USB-C connection cutting out when wifi is also on, so I've gotten in the habit of just turning off wifi when I'm docked. We're currently in the "first generation" of consumer USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 devices, so I expect those issues to get ironed out pretty quickly.

I don't know. Switching to Surface made me a lot more conscious how nice it is when everything comes from the same manufacturer and there's no way to pass the blame around. I would like standards-based USB-C docking to be sure, but I will definitely want my first USB-C dock to be a first-party one so that I have a single point of contact for issues like the one you describe (which would actually ruin my use case - my desk at home is across the room from the phone line and it wouldn't be easy to run a cable, so I need to use wifi when docked). After the technology has matured and the bugs are ironed out then I think we'll start reaping the benefits of competition and interoperability.

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