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Comment by melq | Hacker News Reader

This is not a very good argument. I do my development work on my company issued macbook, but its not like I'm doing my work locally. My several thousand dollar macbook pro acts as a terminal interface for me for a HUGE proportion of my work. All my code is developed/built/run/tested on remote machines and my laptop is just a fancy interface to them.

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It all depends on the type of work you do. I work on the latest top of the line macbook pro issued by work as well, and for me it's too slow. Running the company's php app along with all the other dependencies like MySQL/Redis/etc takes a significant amount of resources. All development is done locally on the dev laptops, bugs are reproduced and fixed on local dev laptops. At this point I almost wish that my laptop was a terminal so that I could have access to more resources like RAM (currently at 16 GB).

Exactly the reason why we've started setting up remote (in-house) servers for devs - for the cost of the latest MBP you can buy a server machine with tons of ram that will run all you services super smooth with any old laptop that can run your editor.

32GB of RAM is top for the MBP, not 16.

Edit: OP said he had the latest top of the line. Latest, top of the line has 32.

Only for the new models.

Oh sweet, I am gonna ask for an upgrade then. Thanks for the info.

Backend developer then? Even in that case I would need IntelliJ idea/visual Studio/ whatever IDE, unless you are just working on “small” projects under 500kloc where vi is maybe enough...

There is web based visual studio at https://coder.com

I use C9 which is another web based IDE.. it doesn't have all the power features of a jetbrains ide but it is nifty and should meet the needs of most developers.

Lots of options outside of vi!

VS Code and Visual Studio are different beasts, though.

Hold my beer...

In all seriousness, I use (neo)vim as my full-time editor for several very large projects.

Devops/Secops/ITops ppl seem to fall into this usage pattern.

i assumed OP is talking about "development" machine implying some code writing.

Not only code writing, but debugging, compiling, testing, deploying to physical devices via usb, coding thermal printer, barcode scanners or other input hardware support support, and the list goes on...

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