These recent articles about the MBP make me wonder: am I the only one who dislikes working on laptops in general, and refuses to buy one?
They're great. You can change where you're working when you want for a change of scenery or for comfort reasons, you can take a laptop to presentations and meetings, and you can be fully productive on trains and in hotels when you're travelling. It's limiting if you're only able to work from a single physical desk and a bit more power from a desktop doesn't outweigh that for me.
I haven't owned a desktop since maybe 2002, and can't imagine ever getting one again.
It's also just staggeringly more powerful than my laptop. My tower compiles projects in Xcode 2x-3x as fast as my top of the line 2015 15" rMBP, and that time saved really piles up.
If you are fine with your desktop environment that's okay :)
+ this is not an MBP, just a 4 years old Dell with 1366x768 resolution. It's just fine. If I work on a larger project I just plug 2 extra screens and I'm good to go.
My own anecdata: I work in two places, one where I have a 'nice' laptop (some old-but-beefy Alienware thing) and one where I have a 'nice' whitebox desktop. When I'm on the desktop, I find that I'm not keeping my computer's limitations in mind as I do my work, whereas on the laptop I do. It's not at the forefront of my mind, but it's there to some degree. Before I moved to the Alienware (16G ram), I was on an 8G laptop, and I had daily issues with that constraint - even though all I used daily were terminals, about 15-20 browser tabs[1], and maybe a screencap program.
Then I go home and play games, and in that realm, laptops really are the middle-child if the game has any GPU or CPU heft (though again, laptops have the benefit of portability).
[1] not all website are created equal, of course...
Sort of like an iMac's Target Display Mode, but in reverse: instead of the "guest" computer doing the work and the "host" computer acting as a dumb frame-buffer, the "host" does the work and the "guest" acts as a Thunderbolt hub.
This is why I was asking whether there was ever a dock made for a specific computer that had this feature: it requires the guest's disk's OS to have drivers to let it boot the host—or even hardware compatibility such that docking the "guest" would cause it to hibernate to disk, and then boot from that same hibernation image on the host. That basically requires the host and guest [the dock and the portable] to be made together.
(And that's not even getting into weird things you could do with live process migration and NUMA and memory hotplug if you want to make both the host's and guest's processors available without an effective reboot/hibernation/sleep step.)
An aside: before it was revealed what exactly the Nintendo Switch was (a portable with a variable clock rate that overclocks itself when plugged into a heatsink dock), I had a suspicion that it might use this architecture: a portable that just turns itself into a disk and Bluetooth controller for a more powerful non-portable when plugged into it.
Like the Razer Core, with USB-C. Yep, I can see this happening, but also remote gaming where you rent the workstation and just get a thin client which only has to be able to download and see the 'movie'.
Gaming-wise, I can also see use cases where you want to get additional CPU power.
Yeah, I was thinking of my Surface Book (with the graphics card in the base).
> Yep, I can see this happening, but also remote gaming where you rent the workstation and just get a thin client which only has to be able to download and see the 'movie'.
I suspect the inherent latency will always argue against remote gaming - especially for the kind of games where you most want extra computing power.
Excellent example. In theory it could also work with devices like the newest MBPs.
> I suspect the inherent latency will always argue against remote gaming - especially for the kind of games where you most want extra computing power.
Not necessarily. FPS and perhaps LoL, sure. RPG such as WoW, not really.
Not sure about AR/VR.
If one doesn't have/want a PC workstation with a strong graphics card, and one does have a laptop, why not just a Razer Core or akin device?
Until we can just have those in the device itself. But that is gonna take a while!
These days if you're purchasing a computer the default option is a laptop. You have to have a good reason not to go with a laptop.
Once you plug in a mouse, keyboard, and external screens, a laptop then just becomes clutter. So, I mainly use my laptop for on-the-go such as at university libraries.
I'm considering getting a desktop again but would only get the Retina iMac.
Well, maybe not a 5K display, but 4K should be more than fine.
vim :^)
edit: How little humor do people have, christ. Can't even make a joke. people get triggered too easily.