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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of developers today has a laptop as their main machine. Performance-per-watt is absolutely crucial there.

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I'll just never understand this. Chances are you are at the same desk day in and day out. You probably have monitors and external keyboard/mouse hooked up because hunching over a laptop and using a touchpad is unnecessary torture for a fixed workspace. Given that why would you hamstring yourself with a thermally constrained and overpriced-because-miniaturization-isn't free setup?

Until maybe these M1's (and I'm not entirely convinced) I've not in the 20 years I've been computing seen a reasonably configured desktop (eg not just a laptop on a stick ala iMac but an ACTUAL desktop) ever not smoke the pants off of every single laptop you could put up against it. It's hard to beat the one-two punch of lots of power and room to cool it. If you are sitting at at desk why the heck wouldn't you leverage that?

I was a desktop diehard until performance reached the point where laptops are good enough. Being able to take the same computer around with you and use it seamlessly in a different place is a big improvement.

I still have a proper desk-based working environment hooked up to a docking station though. I really wouldn't want to use a laptop that doesn't have a first-party dock as my primary machine.

Meetings, working from home, travel, changing desks every few months. Not having a jungle of cables. Retina screen (still hard to find on external monitors). The vast majority of devs also don’t need an insanely powerful machine. If Docker on Mac wasn’t dog slow, I could easily get by with a $999 MacBook Air.

The only reason I also went up to 32GB RAM(almost bought the 64GB one) was because of Docker.

That’s cool. I am not the vast majority of developers. I am me. I use a desktop for high-end game development. I don’t give a shit about web development or laptop development. I care about compiling large C++ projects as fast as possible.

I agree that most developers are web/mobile developers who use a laptop. That’s great. I am an increasingly niche developer.

The root comment was a comparison against Threadripper. Normal developers should not waste money on a Threadripper. If someone is a niche developer that warrants a Threadripper then pointing out that most developers don’t need a Threadripper is a waste of time.

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