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Comment by harha | Hacker News Reader

Laptops in the early 2010s kind of reached a level of being adequate enough for most use-cases that it's hard to really justify an upgrade.

I feel, as I write this on my late 2013 MacBook Pro, that it's powerful enough for most normal activities, read, browse, video calls, work on not too large data sets, etc. Anything that needs to run longer than I keep the laptop open can run on a different device, many programs are now web apps. The screen has a high resolution and the keyboard is good, if only battery and RAM replacements were easier it would be as good as new.

This is different to for instance my older laptop from 2008 or that before from 2004 - horrible screens, battery life, no fast wifi or USB.

But also compared to newer laptops, mine seems to get exactly the right balance between being robust and lightweight.

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I'm also using a 2013 MacBook pro as my personal machine.

I walked into the Apple store a few years ago with the intention of replacing it with a shiny new one. I hated the new keys and at the time couldn't get a physical ESC key, so I've been happily stuck in 2013 since.

My employer gave me a 2020 MacBook pro (has physical ESC key) and it is a better laptop, worthy replacement.. But to keep personal development separate and save a few thousand dollars, my 2013 is still going strong.

To me VDI is the way to go. I want my development machine to be in the cloud and always running.

I want a lightweight notebook that only takes into consideration screen, keyboard and battery that I can connect to my virtual desktop from anywhere.

I want a dedicated desk at home with a $40 PCoIP thin client purchased used on EBay hooked up to my multiple monitors that connects to the same virtual desktop.

With this you can truly work from anywhere even if your notebook is stolen or dies. With AWS Workspaces you can be as redundant as you want, you can create a daily snapshot of your Workspace if you want and launch it in any region if your primary region goes down.

How do you deal with the noticeable latency? It's pretty annoying even on LAN with RDP. I imagine it'll be worse on the cloud.

I don’t notice any. I also don’t use RDP - for Amazon Workspaces I use their app that utilizes the PCoIP protocol.

Other than that my last job was working at one of the largest banks in the United States. We were 100% virtual desktop since 2014.

My current employer just switched to about 95% virtual desktop.

Nobody ever complains about latency. I think it’s a given that literally everyone will switch to this method at some point - there are too many positives.

Everyone I know who works in VDI complains about latency. My wife’s whole company uses virtual desktops, and anytime she’s working from and I look over her shoulder I shudder, it’s incredibly noticeable.

I have no experience with that. I am connected to a virtual desktop right now that is in my employer's datacenter. I am at home on my personal desktop. On my company virtual desktop I am running Zoom and am on a conference call with 11 people all of us have video turned on and there is literally 0 latency that I can perceive. I have a local Logitech webcam that is perfectly accessible from my VDI desktop.

Moving windows around is something that I typically utilize to test for lag and there is just none. My previous employer was literally using this for 7 years before I came to my current employer and I was so happy when we switched to VDI.

Of course it depends on your Internet connection and your ISP's connection pathway to get to your VDI but I've regularly connected to my VDI desktops over the years from Starbucks WiFi, Dunkin Donuts wifi and many others with no perceived latency.

>I have no experience with that. I am connected to a virtual desktop right now that is in my employer's datacenter. I am at home on my personal desktop. On my company virtual desktop I am running Zoom and am on a conference call with 11 people all of us have video turned on and there is literally 0 latency that I can perceive. I have a local Logitech webcam that is perfectly accessible from my VDI desktop.

inpreceptable latency in teleconferencing doesn't tell you much. There's already so much latency built in (eg. the webcam itself, the encoder/decoder, the time it takes for your packets to travel over the internet to the relay server and then to the other attendants) that the extra latency added by VDI can be buried. On the other hand when you're doing any sort of interactive editing the latency is very noticeable, because there isn't much latency to start with.

I completely agree with this. I recently started a new role that requires me to run 2 separate VDIs. The latency is incredibly frustrating. How people have been working like this for years I do not know. Beyond the latency the resource allocation is far too low. Things just take so much longer to run and Microsoft Teams grinds to a halt if anything else is happening.

Ive been told when my managed device arrives I will no longer need to use either VDI, but if that's not the case I am very seriously considering moving onto another role despite being only ~2 months in.

I prefer having a laptop that's powerful enough on its own, this gives me a lot of freedom when the internet is bad. I also like to have a desktop with a nice screen and a bit more power that I can use to run things that take a bit longer.

Everything more serious happens in the cloud, yes, but it's good to know that I can achieve reasonable results, browse, watch videos and send e-mails.

Even though I'm kind of excited for a new M1 Macbook with way more battery and faster apps, I wouldn't spend money on it until I absolutely have to.

My employer makes us do this and I absolutely hate it. It slows me down so much. I now have to effectively maintain two machines that cause issues at twice the frequency. The server isn't even notably faster than my MacBook. Moreover, in my experience, the uniformity of these cloud development machines also encourages developers to get lazy and start making all sorts of assumptions about the environment the application runs in. This makes it impossible over time to run the application locally and will cause issues during the inevitable hardware upgrades in the future.

I now have to effectively maintain two machines

In a VDI infrastructure, your physical desktop should be either literally or effectively a dump terminal that gives you access to your virtual desktop. Why would you be using both?

The server isn't even notably faster than my MacBook

That isn't the benefit. The benefit is having a desktop you can access from anywhere with Internet access regardless of what physical client you have access to. Another benefit is that everything is centrally backed up including a full-fidelity copy of your workstation. Another benefit is that it is lower cost than distributing high-end desktops/laptops to users.

My most used laptop is still my 2015 MBP, the last generation with that stupid touchbar. It does Docker great, which is mostly what I need. The fan whirls almost constantly when I do a docker start, but so far, no issues. I have a newer 27" iMac and work gave me a 2018 MBP, but that 2015 is still my preferred portable.

This last summer, I traveled to South America. Worried about potential theft and travel load, I loaded Kali Linux to my first gen MacBook Air (2012) for shits and giggles. I wanted something that can do the standard email/web, review and backup photos from SD cards, and VPN/SSH into work in case of absolute emergencies. It went great. Some people warn how Kali isn't the best machine for bare metal, every day use, but I had zero problems with it for my use case.

>I feel, as I write this on my late 2013 MacBook Pro, that it's powerful enough for most normal activities, read, browse, video calls, work on not too large data sets, etc.

Same with my 2012 MacBook Pro, the last unibody non-Retina version. Would I like a higher-resolution screen? Yes. But otherwise, with a SSD, it's really hard to justify spending thousands for a new Apple Silicon computer (as nice as that would be).

Yeah, I love my late 2013 MacBook Pro! I also recently purchased a bunch of ThinkPads (X230 and X220) to round out my options so I have these nice era of computers going forward for a long time, since I know they will become harder to find over time. Def agree about the "early 2010s" laptops hitting a good place, kind of optimal balance of features vs. simplicity IMO

I still use my 2013 MacBook Pro too, but with Windows 10 on it. Honestly it's a very well made machine and perfect couch computer. I've been wondering about refreshing its thermal paste to cool it down and extend it's life further. But I wouldn't dare try to open it, especially since it still works so well.

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