Your post reads less like a sincere question and more like "you should be doing it this way unless you can defend your position". Maybe--just maybe--people weigh up tradeoffs differently than you do personally.
FWIW 'on the move' can mean going into a meeting room or even just walking over to a coworker's desk with your computer. Desktops kinda suck when you work around humans who don't just stare at their screens with cans on all day.
Yeah, dude, we're all thinking. As a hands-on programmer-manager I can report that creating slides for the fundraising deck that'll raise money to pay you or writing that email about you taking bags of beef jerky home for your post-workout recovery meal can take as much sustained concentration as you spinning in your `while 1 { copy_compiler_error(); stack_overflow_it(); paste_code(); }` infinite loop.
Here's how I think.
I model interaction between distinct parts. I have a mental model of how X fits with Y, how X can affect Y, and how Y can in turn affect X. I'm not doing it with just X and Y, I painstakingly build this mental model[1] over as much of the problem space as I can, and having done this for many years now, I can cover a fair amount of ground before the complexity gets beyond my ability to model. It takes a while to create this, and then when some middle-management type wanders along, taps me on the shoulder and disturbs the concentration, and it all comes crashing down around me, I am less than best-pleased. Bonus points if it's just to "touch base" or "remember we have a meeting in 2 hours time", or ... you get the picture.
Why do I expend this enormous mental effort to gain such a fragile and ephemeral state ? Because I can mentally throw boundary conditions at it and "see" how things will react. It's how I deal with inherent complexity of large systems, and a couple of hours of mental effort can prevent me spending a week coding down a dead-end path. It's happened often enough now that even my line management understand it's worth the time - there's been plenty-a-meeting where I go in and say "yeah, I know we wanted to do <insert X> but I think there's a problem when Y and Z come into play under conditions A, B and C. I think <insert option gamma> is a better route even though we didn't think so at first".
Sometimes you really do just need to be able to be left alone and think. As someone who used to own the company before he sold it, and who's done pitches to VC's and other investors, I can quite categorically state that (for me), the slides, presentations, and client management is nowhere near the level of mental investment. Nowhere near.
Just my $0.02
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[1] It's not visual, I have aphantasia, it's more firing-condition-based.
I can't do that.
So no,
We're not "all thinking", some tasks require deep thought and long periods of uninterrupted concentration.
The problem is working in a team requires communication, and management of interruption, it is not useful to be like this dick with the headphones on, that creates barriers (the attitude, not the headphones) to communication.
This is all off topic in any event.
“Compared to the desktop (sitting), tablet and laptop use resulted in increased neck flexion (mean difference tablet 16.92°, 95% CI 12.79-21.04; laptop 10.92, 7.86-13.97, P < 0.001) and shoulder elevation (right; tablet 10.29, 5.27-15.11; laptop 7.36, 3.72-11.01, P < 0.001).”
“These findings suggest that using a tablet or laptop may increase neck flexion, potentially increasing posture strain.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30373975/
And it is on-topic enough for both the link and the OP.
Might not be for everyone, but I only need it to drive a single external monitor.
I wouldn't class it as a hack since it is pretty standard in enterprise environments. Downside is that it does consume CPU which depending on your workload may/may not be noticeable.
I had a seriously nice mac mini taken off me once, got given a "new Mac Pro". Was huge downgrade, was not happy.
We got docking stations for the laptops but I just couldn't get used to it, and my desktop was just sitting there still functioning happy as could be.
So I still use my desktop for actual work and my laptop is basically a very over-powered video conferencing machine.
Portability.
I think next go round I'm going to get a desktop replacer style laptop and see if I can get best of both worlds.
I don't really care about portability and thus use a desktop but I do want to sit outside or work from the couch sometimes.
I don’t recall if that worked on the smaller models, but it worked on my 15” model. I’ve been using 2 Dell P2715Qs since then and they work great.
Meetings, is another one.
Doing presentations.
Also for me at least: On-Call.
I would prefer a workstation at home and a lightweight laptop with company network access but hey my companie prefers to buy me a Laptop for 3k over a desktop for 1k and a light laptop for 1k.
What can i do? yeah nothing :)
It also greatly simplifies working from home. Not just for portability.