I Am Seriously Considering Going Back to Desktop Computers (2020) | Hacker News Reader

I Am Seriously Considering Going Back to Desktop Computers (2020)

misc-stuff.terraaeon.com

207 pointsivanvas331 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20220223132844/http://misc-stuff...

Oppressive vendor practices aside, I just don't get the laptop fixation some people have, in general.

I find it extremely hard to be productive on a laptop; the form factor is entirely wrong for concentration. Small screen, mushy crappy keyboard with a bad layout, etc. My desktop has a large monitor and a mechanical keyboard and a mouse and without that stuff, and an upright posture and focus, I can't get in the zone.

So, yes, I can hook a laptop up to all those things, but then it's just a desktop anyways. I can see the advantages for traveling, but for the last two years I naturally have not done that.

... But the worst thing about a laptop was while I was working from home there was just always the temptation to sluff off to a couch or bed and zone out. I couldn't program in that posture, but I could goof off.

Since quitting my $job and turning in my work laptop my coding productivity has gone up.

You'll pry my workstation from my cold dead hands, etc. etc.

It's not just about traveling outside: working in a different part of the house / apartment is trivial with a laptop.

This would be the perfect use case for a desktop paired with an iPad with keyboard, but the limited OS makes this unappealing.

Well it depends on your mood and period in life, as a fresh grad student, the first time I found a 12" thinkpad I was shocked. The small screen made me focus, the keyboard (x32 days) was slick as one can be.

These days my issue with laptop is the thermal constraints that cut off luxurious CPUs. Seeing a ryzen 5 sff pc gives you so much more oomph.. it makes the oversized toolchains invisible, no need to worry about VMs, large codebase recompile etc etc

I use a laptop cause I can't sit right for a desktop. I'm currently resting my laptop on my leg. I have my other leg tucked under that leg. The back of my chair is being used as an arm rest.

If this is a choice and you have the freedom to change, I suggest you focus now on ergonomic sitting habits. It will pay dividends later in life, and keep you out of the physical therapy office.

If this is not a choice, my apologies for being forward.

I was right there with you until I started taking college courses again. With four kids, a wife, and a job, being able to knock out school work while talking to my wife or just spending quiet time near her has been a godsend.

This new laptop is the first one I've owned since going to school for my BS which I finished in 2012.

Yeah I think it depends a lot on the nature of the work. Writing documents and researching? Sure. Writing code? No thanks.

To each their own, I don't entirely agree. Some times, being limited to a single screen makes me more productive, since I don't have Slack or a web browser open or in sight to distract me. Especially when working on Jupyter notebooks, where everything in in-line -- no real need to for addition screen real-estate.

For me it's quite situational: I am able to get a beefy laptop that has a higher spec than the standard issue desktop, so I just use the laptop with docking stations at home and in the office. If I have to travel, I fall back to just the laptop.

For my personal use, however, I use a desktop.

I historically much prefer a desktop computer as well. Despite this, I've exclusively used laptops now for nearly a decade. The reasoning is simple:

When combined with a docking station and external peripherals and input devices, a laptop is just a desktop with an integrated battery backup and screen that can become a mobile computing device on demand.

I've fully adjusted to this way of working, and the real crossover point for me was when laptops became available with enough RAM and graphics capabilities that I no longer felt I needed a desktop to do some of my work. I can run two external displays off my laptop with it as the center screen using ergo monitor stands, and run my external mechanical keyboard, ergo mouse, and my headphone stack, boom microphone, external camera, and wired networking all from a docking station with sufficient bandwidth to not be problematic in 2022. I no longer need or want a desktop.

I fully agree with this. I am a desktop holdout as well moving to my first laptop in decades in 2022

One other bonus for laptops is that it's way easier for an IT department to manage. It's got all the guts, all the connectivity, some version of all the major peripherals, and all of that under one SKU.

Support and warranty work is simplified when you only have 4 or 5 models of computer in your org, and can reference a spreadsheet to see exactly what a given user has in front of them.

I still prefer a desktop PC for my personal use, because I play videogames, and a desktop is what's historically best for that. A side benefit of having a personal desktop means that I can reuse whatever peripherals, furniture, etc between either my 'work' or 'home' desk configuration.

If I wanted to go full-circle optimized for my next PC build, which I may as well think about, I could plug all of my peripherals into the same thunderbolt dock, and only worry about that one cable, instead of the (potentially) 4 USB devices I'd be switching back and forth.

> If I wanted to go full-circle optimized for my next PC build, which I may as well think about, I could plug all of my peripherals into the same thunderbolt dock, and only worry about that one cable, instead of the (potentially) 4 USB devices I'd be switching back and forth.

This is what I do with my laptop today. I am considering building a SFF desktop in the future just to have, but before I do so I'd like to find a robust and performant solution for TB4 switching, at which point I'd use the same set of peripherals and input devices for both systems.

I have a Dell monitor (U3419W) that switches USB output based on video input. So all the peripherals (mouse, keyboard, webcam) go to my desktop when the monitor gets an HDMI signal, and to my (work) laptop when it gets a DP signal. Works pretty well.

My next PC build will be SFF, too. I've currently got a small-ish desktop, but want more space on my actual desk, and don't want to move it off because I'd have to deal with variable cable lengths(sit-stand desk).

Going down to mini-ITX motherboard size means I'm going to probably be low on ports and expansion options, so having a dock will be an important part of the setup, and will also help reduce cable clutter/cable shuffling.

One other thing I might look into is an audio switcher. I don't have an 'audio stack', but usually can't stand the electric whine on most basic onboard audio. If I can keep my headphones on, and just flip a switch to change the channel they receive from, I'd be thrilled.

> Support and warranty work is simplified when you only have 4 or 5 models of computer in your org, and can reference a spreadsheet to see exactly what a given user has in front of them.

In theory you could treat desktops the same way. Any hardware problem? Discard entire machine.

This is obviously wasteful compared to replacing only the component which is broken. But it's hard sell to label that as a disadvantage.

True, you can apply it to desktops, but those are bulkier and more expensive to ship. I've kept the box my laptop was shipped to me in, and it's got all bases covered if I need to send it back.

I'd wager that sending a laptop back and forth twice is probably about as expensive as a single round trip for a desktop, and with less risk of breakage, since all the parts are soldered in place, with much less wiggle room for heavier stuff to break off.

Since I've been traveling extensively I have started using a laptop also.

The downsides are the obvious extra cost for the laptop. Less obvious is the maintenance.

Every few years I will spill a drink on my keyboard. If it's an external keyboard I can repair it or replace it easily. If it's a laptop it could be catastrophic failure. Yes I know I can attach keyboard to laptop.

Then there's the laptop screen, it is easily damaged when traveling. Sometimes the damage is minor. My laptop screen recently started having problems, sometimes it works, sometimes it flickers, sometimes it's just a black screen. External monitor is currently attached, but that's a poor mobile solution. Replacing an external monitor is cheap. So, I found a website that can sell me the replacement monitor. I have to decide is it worth repairing or should I get a new one. Cost of repairing is about 1/3rd the cost of a brand new equivalent laptop.

Two more downsides I'd like to add to your list:

- A laptop will never have greater compute power and heat dissipation than a similar tier desktop.

- Current laptop models will often consume more power than can be provided by their included power supplies (one culprit is USB-C's 100 watt limit, the other is simply cost). Thus, their compute endurance is hampered by the battery. I see this when merely running Google Meet.

My first run-in with this was a customer that complained that their computer was slow. When I had a look at it, it was an HP laptop about 10 years ago. While booting I noticed a funny message in the direction of "For full capacity please buy this external power supply from HP". Looked at the power lump and it was about 60 W and the computer had a bad battery so could not keep up at all. They sell expensive laptops and expect you to throw away the power supply and buy a new one?

Yeah, I've seen it justified (by users) as "most of the time I don't need the full capacity and I don't want to pay for that extra capacity when the battery can make up for it".

A lot of assumptions wrapped up in such statements - one of which is the one you found: Batteries are typically among the first components to die.

I always used to unplug the battery when I'm not traveling so it would last longer. Can't do that any more if you need it the whole time.

Nowadays batteries are non-removable and sometimes even soldered in. I miss old laptops.

They still exist but you have to look for them specifically. Usually gaming laptops around 4 kg though :-)

1) My M1 MacBook begs to differ

2) My M1 MacBook begs to differ again

I feel like you are talking about laptops that should not have been laptops in the first place here

First off, I will say that yes, M1 chipsets are much more power efficient than intel based chips. However, this does not make intel based laptops "laptops that should not have been laptops", as evidenced by Apple (and everyone else) producing them for well over a decade.

1) Even with the thermal dissipation a M1 macbook has, a desktop could cool a M1 better. There's simply more room for a larger heatsink with more surface area, and fans that don't have to throttle, than a laptop format could ever provide And with the coming M1 desktops, we will see this in action.

2) The M1 MacBook Pro has a measured draw of ~120 watts under load (measured by anandtech; there's still the GPU to power, despite the better performance of the M1 itself). Apple power supplies, until recently, topped out at around 90 watts.

Here's where Apple's slightly ahead of the game - they're using the updated PD specs in their latest chargers to get a 140 watts out over USB-C, and packing them with the new 16" macbook pros (though not the 14", they're still topping out at 67/94 watts).

So the outlook for M1's in terms of power is better than average, so long as you pay the Apple tax. Worth it? Perhaps. Perfect? Not yet.

> Every few years I will spill a drink on my keyboard

I thought this only happened in movies. I always have drinks around my laptop and desktop, and it hasn't happened to me even once in the last 20 years. In my opinion, the 1/1000 chance of a spill happening in a given year shouldn't guide your purchasing decision.

> Then there's the laptop screen, which is easily damaged when traveling.

How does this happen? Do you drop your laptop often? Do you take it to the beach and does it get full of sand? I always travel with a laptop and cannot picture the screen getting damaged, unless I place the laptop in checked baggage.

Not the OP, but I just lost a keyboard to a spilled drink as well. Not all of us have perfect dexterity and spatial awareness at all times.

I haven't lost a laptop screen to dropping it, though I have had a laptop screen spontaneously fail--two in fact. Both were HP laptops. Not buying those any more.

This reminds me of people who always forget their keys. I always thought: "nah that doesn't happen to anyone", and then I discovered it happens to a lot of people. Different brains work very differently, and there are some common bugs that affect some people but not others. See also those who can't stand watching a video to learn about a subject, versus those that can't stand reading. And that's even without getting started on personality disorders.

It's really hard to internalize it if you are not "weird" in any of those ways, but we should all be more aware of it.

Exactly. I spill drinks periodically, but I don't ever forget my keys.

I don't ever let them leave my pocket, of course, so I'd need to forget my pants to forget my keys...but we did agree not to get started on personality disorders. ;)

Others in the company always buys those paper thin laptops that can't be opened. They either break or get stolen. Not sure how they treat them. Mine is built like a tank and can hardly be called laptop. It mostly gets used with Anydesk from a desktop computer though it does follow nicely on trips for work now and then. Not a scratch on it.

My wife's MacBook was destroyed when a small cup of water was spilled on the other end of the coffee table. Apparently it was so thin that the water could flow right into the back vents. Sadly, we didn't realize it had been exposed, and turned it on the next day.

It's large laptop, 4.56 kg and a 17 inch screen. This makes it a bit bulky for carry on. I often check it in luggage, I take pains to wrap it to prevent damage, but I'm sure at least some has occurred when checked. Yes, I know it's fairly foolish to check a laptop, but for it's weight, it's a pain to lug around as carry on. This laptop has lasted about 4.5 years so far. So, I agree with the 1/1000 chance of a spill happening shouldn't really factor into purchasing decision.

Regarding spilled drinks, sometimes it's just been morning coffee, sometimes it's a beer late at night. I've only had one cup of coffee go into this laptop (apparently without damage as it was months ago), but I've taken out several external keyboards over the years.

I had a mug handle break, shatter my trackpad and spill all over my keyboard. I now treat any mug with a level of distrust.

To be quite honest that sounds like you problems and not laptop problems.

I have never managed to spill anything on my MacBook and I travel 24/7 and it is in prime condition.

Speaking about condition, it seems to me like you really just have to condition yourself to not place any liquid near it and always keep it in a good protective bag.

Sounds like you need a thinkpad. New screens for my x220 are 40 bucks on aliexpress, a new keyboard is like 15. In addition, the keyboard has drainage holes, I use it routinely with dripping wet hands and the keyboard survived a coke spill + cleaning with flowing water.

Add to your list, Flexgate.

Macbooks have become notorious for industrial design faults that come up late in the lifetime of a laptop.

The main advantage of a desktop that you can't get from a laptop with a dock is that they can be a lot faster.

There isn't any laptop that gets anywhere close to a 64-core Threadripper on threaded workloads. There are some that are competitive with 8-core desktop processors, but then they cost ~twice as much.

But this only matters if you care about more than single thread performance.

> There isn't any laptop that gets anywhere close to a 64-core Threadripper on threaded workloads.

Challenge accepted.

https://www.mediaworkstations.net/systems/portable-amd-works...

"30-45 lbs"

If it needs wheels, it probably isn't a laptop!

> Some men see things as they are and ask why, I dream things that never were and ask why not

-- George Bernard Shaw

It's also much easier and cheaper to build and repair a desktop in a normal tower with normal parts that you can get in the neighbour store when it breaks down at the worst possible moment (last week for example when the harddrive broke together... or the week before when the memory gave up and computer started crashing... Or last year when one of the other computers graphics card fan gave up) Open up, replace part, boot up and test. Back to work.

For a company it is often cheaper to give someone a replacement laptop than have them waste time fault finding.

At 45 pounds, I would genuinely consider a rolling rack. My video mixer, using a Silverstone HTPC case, fits in a shorty 5U Gator case with room to spare for an audio interface and a power distributor.

This is how I do it, can't work without the external mouse, keyboard, and laptop stand. Haven't owned a desktop since 7 years.

If I understand correctly, your argument is laptops are better because they can do everything a desktop can and can be mobile? I can't follow this at all.

Mobility is a negative: so now your company can ask you to carry your laptop with you when you're on holiday, or ask you to complete work at the airport when traveling to the Denver office. And I feel like you missed GPs point about ergonomics -- you won't get any of that when moving. If you feel like mobile is a benefit WRT ergonomics you simply don't care about ergonomics.

The laptop form factor takes up extra desk space, and laptops are sill significantly more expensive for similar desktop performance.

Or maybe his work/life situation is different than you imagine? I’ve been working as a solo freelancer for the past 10 years and for the majority of that time I used a laptop connected to external monitor as my primary machine.

You get all the benefits of a desktop environment plus the convenience of being able to work remotely and carry your machine with you when needed.

I don’t have a company telling me to work from an airport. And as for ergonomics, you don’t get those with a desktop machine either when moving so I don’t see what different does that make.

A laptop offers you options. That’s why for some people is appealing.

I mainly use a laptop, almost always hooked up to a monitor or two, keyboard and mouse. I have some beefy workstations available for computational stuff, but mostly easier to remote in or have an automation system send jobs there.

> but then it's just a desktop anyways.

So why not use a desktop? There are typically 3-4 distinct addresses I work at, and the value of just plugging in when I get there and having everything ready to go is high. I've tried basically every available approach to doing this with multiple workstations/desktops, and they all aren't as functional as just dragging my laptop between them...

I view using the laptop as a laptop as a fallback.

When I'm at an office location, I'll setup my mouse and keyboard just like I had a desktop. The laptop just becomes a smaller second screen with a keyboard for some reason. I have the same interface I would if I were to use a desktop, with the added bonus that I can bring a fully functional unit with me wherever I go.

Because, unless I'm going to always be at home, or only leave when I'm on vacation: I will need a portable work station. I could duplicate a setup on a laptop and a desktop, but I much prefer being able to simply fold my work (or gaming!) computer up and take it with me.

A friend just broke his ankle and has had people coming by to hang out and help out. No problem for me - I just packed up my work and my gaming laptops and drove over. Productive during the day, hanging out after work. The next day I went back to my full office setup with no fuss.

I still use a desktop for most things

What I have wanted for years was a small little portable desktop (sort of like those intel NUC's but larger and more powerful) that was basically using laptop like internals but designed more for speed, power, and efficient cooling. You could then pair that with a decent sized external monitor (like some kind of portable 21 or 24" 16:10 widescreen - maybe even one that folds) and a small, folding mechanical keyboard (I have preferred the 87 key layout for almost a decade now for everything). On that keyboard would be a mouse knub (like Thinkpads and many business laptops) and below the spacebar would be two mouse buttons (also like a Thinkpad) so that you can click with your thumbs.

This setup would be super efficient for real mobile workstation use. I have yet to find a system more efficient than the "eraser" mouse knub - you can type and use the mouth without ever moving your hands off the keyboard or the proper row AND you can easily click the mouse with your thumbs which makes for extremely fast transitioning between typing and mouse use. Once you get used to the knub it is actually very accurate (some laptops have much better implementations of this than others) - I would say up there with the best trackpads.

You could also take advantage of any and all screens you might come across while travelling - go to a friends house and they have a nice, larger TV? That becomes your second monitor. Etc etc. And with this keyboard setup you can also even sit on a touch and not have to deal with an awkward trackpad or mouse setup.

You could accomplish the same thing with a decent laptop but you would have a lot of extra space taken up by a keyboard you may not use often and a small screen you might use but not really want to use.

Alternatively I suppose a thicker laptop could be made with this type of keyboard integrated and it could also have some type of fancy fold out screen (similar to those new Samsung phones). I don't personally care how thick my laptop is or what the obsession is with thinness - storing and transporting a laptop (for myself at least) is always limited by the other physical dimensions. I do not also really care all that much about weight - most situations in which I would be carrying one I am not going to notice a huge difference between 5 pounds and 15. Although for backpacking of course (which is pretty niche) a light laptop would be nice.

That's one other reason why the steam deck is appealing to me. Small size, close to average desktop level performance (ballparking it on the fact that it runs AAA games well).

During travel I could bring it along in my carry bag, and an external monitor in a backpack.

I've also seen some nice portable&foldable bluetooth keyboards that have a trackpad on the side. Not a fan of the nubs.

> Not a fan of the nubs.

I thought I was the only one. Now I know there's at least two of us!

Actually a very interesting idea - I wonder if there will be third party cooling plates like we see for laptops that can be used with the steam deck. Would be nice to have a nice secondary little passive/active thing you could place below it to make sure it stayed nice and cool for desktop use.

I used a HP ProDresk (USFF) for that. Quite small, reasonably powerful, supports 3 monitors and linux-friendly (at least the i5-9500T Version I have).

Drawback is that it doesn't really take up much less space / weight than a small laptop and you always need external monitor + keyboard, which makes it much less portable.

I knew a guy that used to use a NUC as his primary work computer. He'd toss it in his bag if he decided he was going to work from home the next day or if he wanted to get some extra work done in the evening. They have plenty of power for anyone doing general webservice software engineering and they are more portable than a laptop.

I think a lot of people would be better off buying a fast workstation and a very cheap laptop.

A workstation/desktop is way better for your posture and has more power for the money.

If you need to travel you can always use a cheap laptop to start a remote desktop session on the workstation.

But maybe this also depends on the kind of computing power you need. Personally I need an RTX GPU which saves me a huge amount of time. Those are just not available in laptops.

That's exactly my approach, too :) Thin client laptop + GPU workstation in the basement.

Docker Image and Proxy are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30909178

Have you considered one of those Thunderbolt-based external GPU enclosures? I've never had the money to play around with them, but have always been curious about how to integrate one into a setup. Theoretically, it would let you upgrade the laptop and GPU separately, while also making the GPU more readily available to be reused on some other machine.

> I think a lot of people would be better off buying a fast workstation and a very cheap laptop[...]

This!

I'm currently in a hotel room using a cheap laptop (5-year old Lenovo 330) to connect remotely to my fast workstation (home-built Ryzen, lots of memory, lots of storage and LTO6 tape for backups). There's almost 1000mi between them but that's not stopping me doing anything I require. If someone steals the laptop, no big deal, buy another one. All I do is sign and and connect to remote stuff, pretty much nothing of value is stored locally.

"My home [PC] is my cloud", as Sir Edward Coke didn't quite say...

how do you connect to your pc? Through visual code plugin or something?

Not GP but there are a number of remote control software. I'm using Anydesk on windows between laptop and desktop. SSH everywhere else.

Tailscale and SSH work great here. I have a ryzen desktop in the office and all ports open in the VPN network, so it is easy to use whatever remote software is needed.

I personally just use vim over ssh.

I don't disagree with your overall sentiment but...

> a very cheap laptop

Overall I think the problem here is just how many things are tied to the price. Quality of screen, keyboard, battery, etc. If it's really only for occasional use, fine, but otherwise, it's probably still worth it to get a mid-ranged but competent laptop to complement the desktop/workstation. (It would be easy to devolve into each user's personal use cases here, on whether to prioritize screen, battery life, etc.)

> RTX GPU ... are just not available in laptops

This is not true, though I'm sure what you mean is "full wattage desktop-version RTX GPUs are not available in laptops." You can get up to a ~150W RTX 3080 in a laptop, plus there are a few "external GPU" solutions like the Asus ROG Flow Z13 which let you plug a desktop-class GPU into your laptop.

> Overall I think the problem here is just how many things are tied to the price. Quality of screen, keyboard, battery, etc.

The secret here is to get an old high end laptop. Then the screen and keyboard are good but the price is low.

Have mentioned this on HN before but I've done this for years, with OpenVPN to connect to my network and then SSH and XPRA for the actual remote X or terminal. On LAN I sometimes use a SPICE VDI. I don't care at all if I break or lose my disposable laptop and there's no data stored on it anyways.

I used to use a desktop workstation for the above, but after I got a rack server (running 24/7 with a bare-metal hypervisor) I'm finding I'm using the desktop less and less unless I require the GPU. If I was back in school now I would've forgone the desktop altogether and gone with a cheap laptop and a used server.

By the way, it's not just about performance. It's about the fact that your data is protected and secure, and you can have backups and redundancy in your private cloud instead of relying on a single laptop. Depending on how your remote access is set up you could even have a browser interface and thus be able to work on a borrowed machine or even on a public library computer.

That's typically how I go. Desktops for heavy lifting, something smaller for occasional portability when needed. In fairness, my current laptop wasn't cheap at around $950 for a then-current i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and nVidia GPU, but it's also 8 years old and still perfectly useful for what I need a laptop to do.

It's not just about saving money either. I just can't really get the performance in a laptop, but I occasionally need to be portable. Not too often, but sometimes. Desktop tends to get the budget and laptop gets the rest.

It seems that younger generations just dismiss out of hand the idea of using anything besides a laptop. Probably just have no interest in building computers. My desktop is a workhorse. It's on 24/7. A BIG case with great airflow and nearly completely silent. I have a nice laptop that I use rather infrequently. Since all my work in on VMs, I can move my work to the laptop if I'll be using it for longer periods. But that hasn't been the case in a couple years now.

A lot of times it may be due to their experience with workstations. I didn’t really see a nice workstation until my first professional job at a newspaper. Before that it was all institutional grade Dells attached to budget peripherals. You could take a break after logging in while the computer got itself in a useable state. Their were some labs on campus that had better machines, but you generally had to have a reason to use them.

Meanwhile my core duo MacBook absolutely killed it.

Now, for personal use I’ve pretty much switched to a workstation that I built as a windows gaming machine, that accidentally works great as a coding and design machine as well.

It's a combination between desktops needing a lot of dedicated space, and younger people not having such space, because they're children living with their parents. Naturally, the youth will gravitate toward devices designed for limited private space (laptops and phones), then when those kids grow up they continue using what they know.

I always have a desktop computer and mostly can only do real work on desktop (graphics/VR/game programmer). Laptops are nice for portability so I always try to have one or two available. Because of my role my jobs have always provided one in the office, but I keep a personal one for gaming and side projects/learning.

While you and I prefer desktops, the market has undoubtedly proven the laptop's popularity.

I put up with the laptop, because I am highly-mobile and I can take it anywhere and work. I don't have to worry about copying files, or installing programs and libraries, because it's my main device. It's "up-to-date" and ready to go by default.

I code more, because I have my "main" computer with me virtually all the time.

That said, we all have different priorities and ways of working productively. While I find the keyboard and display a little cramped, it's good enough and well worth the overall benefits for me. And again, the laptop market seems to indicate this is true for the vast majority.

I solved this with NixOS: my home setup follows me at work and at home (desktops) and on my laptop. I change something in one machine and the change is one git pull away in the other machines.

Same here, exact same arguments as well, with the addition that if I'm buying the computer with my own money, I can get quite a bit more bang for buck on a desktop. Also they're easier to upgrade and expand.

A big part of why I’m a remote is because I like to move around. I mean that in every way possible.

I start my day on a chair with a lap desk, move to my kitchen table, patio, back to office desk, etc.

Then I get tired of being home and walk downtown to drink a beer or have a coffee in a nice venue.

When I travel I can work in the airport during layovers. I get to go visit friends in other provinces for a few weeks without having to take time off from work.

If you don’t want to do those things that’s cool, but I do so I’ll never bother buying a desktop again

In 2019 I decided to build a desktop computer because of the price/performance advantage and the non-throttling advantage

Now in 2022, the M1 exists and I've gone back to a laptop. The gap between a desktop and a laptop computer is not there anymore, and even the price/performance ratio favors the laptop once you consider the price of a high-resolution screen.

Yep. I love the freedom and repairability of a custom built desktop, but until that desktop can magically appear at my sitting desk, standing desk, treadmill desk, and in the park, I'll be working on a laptop.

> I get to go visit friends in other provinces for a few weeks without having to take time off from work.

That sounds kind of miserable to me. Why would I want to work while visiting friends?

If I get two vacation weeks off a year, I probably will use up one week on visiting family, another week on an interesting trip, and then that’s all the vacation for the year. If I want to visit friends as well, I just can’t. But if I can work while visiting friends, it’s strictly superior even if still a bit sad.

>That sounds kind of miserable to me. Why would I want to work while visiting friends?

Because there's still 16 other hours in a day you can spend with them and you don't have to feel pressure to do certain things because you've both taken time off work?

Do you have friends in your home town? Do you only visit them on days off of work?

I do have friends who I visit, yes. We generally get together for a long weekend, Thursday / Friday to Monday / Tuesday a few times a year. We all just take those days off work, because we're meeting up to hang out together.

No, I'm talking about friends who live in the same town as you do. I assume you can't see each other on weekdays for dinner or drinks since you're both working and that would be miserable, right?

So true. I'll add another: I don't want to travel with my main computer. It might get lost, stolen, confiscated, or broken.

For travel, I just get a cheap used laptop from the pawn shop, load it up with what I'll need for the trip, and don't worry about it.

I used to have a personal laptop in the 2000s exactly for mindless web surfing in front of the TV. My mobile phone has now taken over that function though. So I just have a desktop for doing work and creative things and have never personally bought a laptop again (I do have a work supplied one). Also with multi-monitor set-ups now being inexpensive and all TV is available by streaming it's now reasonable to assign some screen space to watching TV on a desktop. So I spend less time on the couch.

Same. I get it if you are super mobile and need things that only a desktop OS can do. But I work at the same desk most days. I've had to work on a laptop and I hate it. If a job makes me I can deal with a clamshell laptop where the laptop is hidden away somewhere (but I can't deal with having a laptop keyboard / trackpad just sitting there unused, the laptop must be closed).

On top of that, even though I know that the traditional desktop OS metaphor was built on and for tiny low res screens--I just don't think Windows/GNOME/KDE/macOS/whatever work on screens smaller than 20" or so. A 12.9" iPad Pro is my main mobile computer and I mostly just use full-screen apps with very occasional split screen--and I think adding overlapping windows beyond a few widget-type things like QuickNote to iPadOD is a bad idea. Meanwhile, on a desktop I do the classic Mac tons of overlapping windows thing and the kinds of things I can't do on my iPad I wouldn't do on a laptop either (like, run a Plex server).

> Oppressive vendor practices aside, I just don't get the laptop fixation some people have, in general.

Different people have different perspectives born from different priorities, life experiences, and constraints.

> I find it extremely hard to be productive on a laptop; the form factor is entirely wrong for concentration. Small screen, mushy crappy keyboard with a bad layout, etc.

I prefer laptop keyboards to the extent that I've used them on desktop based machines for easily ten years. Same thing with touchpads. They work better for me, both in terms to typing accuracy and reduced hand pain.

Regarding the screen, it's a bit of a tradeoff. More screen space means more screen space to manage. (I recently went from three screens to two and don't miss the third screen at all.)

The counterpoint is that I find it hugely valuable to be able to move my computer around. I've had a few desktops over the last ten or fifteen years and the common element between them is that they're very difficult for me to fit into a longer term workflow and so never get used.

> But the worst thing about a laptop was while I was working from home there was just always the temptation to sluff off to a couch or bed and zone out.

That's less an issue with the hardware and more an issue with the habits formed around the hardware.

I find it depressing to work in one place for long periods of time. Even if you give me the most ergonomic and high-end workstation, it would still make me less productive the more time I sit there.

Not to mention the ergonomics of working at a laptop are so much worse than at a desktop.

As someone who’s young enough to have had a laptop during their teen years, a laptop feels more joyful to me, probably because of nostalgia. The family computer station docked in the living room was where my dad did taxes and cranked out spreadsheets. The laptop was the magic portal that I snuck down into the basement to look up game guides during al-nighters with friends. To this day, holding a laptop makes me feel like I’m about to to fun work, not just work work.

Also the keyboard on my MacBook feels way better than any keyboard I’ve tried (membrane or mechanical).

and, dual/triple/quadruple monitor setups - once you go multi monitor, once can never be happy with a laptop.

I have done this.

During the pandemic I switched jobs and got a new MacBook Pro... it failed, then it failed again, and again. I sent it back a few times and each turn-around took a couple of weeks.

Whilst that happened I still had to do some work and fell back on my gaming PC. It wasn't a good PC, just an entry level gaming PC. Yet I found it out-performed my MBP for a load of things I cared about: Running Google Meet without fans spinning to full speed, reactivating a Google Doc tab almost instantly rather than it appearing to be blank for 30 seconds. Things like that.

The MBP finally got repaired, but I've owned that for barely 2 years now (it was new at the time) and it's been out of action about 10% of the time. In the meantime my desktop has been rock solid and reliable.

Recently I figured I'd do something different... sell the entry level gaming machine and build a desktop with work in mind. The result has been really great, with a silent and powerful desktop based on components I like and that work together. It runs Linux, and a surprise to me I'm also running Windows. Everything just works, and it all works well and the computer is fantastic at every task I throw at it. This includes local dev, compiling things, lots of meetings, webinar editing, and some occasional gaming post-work.

I still have the MBP... it's not a primary work device, my experience with Apple means I don't trust the machine at all, but for a travel device it feels fine and it's that which gave me confidence to go all-in on a desktop.

The M1 MBP is a new class of machine. Rock solid, faster than just about any other laptop, insane battery life, immune to the thermal issues that plagued Intel MBPs. It could probably easily replace that desktop you built with power to spare.

I can say the same about the M1 Mac Mini and its much cheaper

Indeed. AFAICT it’s a damn fine computer.

I have one. I am not impressed. At all.

(In all fairness, I have the smallest one, but still.)

What was it that you didn’t like about it?

If kids have logged in it becomes slow even after they are all logged out.

Not faster than my > 3 year old linux laptop.

Try ARM-native apps.

Night and day difference. Seriously.

Mine is the smallest one and I love it.

Honestly I see no reason to invest in Apple if they are fine with 5 years of shitty laptops.

One reason would be that you don't like shitty laptops. Any other laptop (I tried top end Dells, Lenovos and Asuses) are much worse in all things considered.

Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse. Do you not like fans when you Google Meet? How about fans when you look at your desktop or start your computer?

> Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse.

This is patently false. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster for Apple. Financial reports suggest it may have cost Apple an additional billion dollars per-year in warranty repairs. The M1 machines are nice and Apple seemed to have fixed their reliability issues; but your post is essentially, at best, a cover up.

So what? It was still the better keyboard. I had it for two years. Much better than anything Dell or Lenovo or any other brand I've ever seen had.

Yeah, it had issues, but it never had the issues my Lenovo and Dell laptops had - like keys literally falling off, for example. Two keys on one of my Lenovo machines were broken from the factory. The Dell i9 machine had a key that was attached only on one side and they refused to fix it.

You think Apple's Butterfly keyboard was better than a Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard? That certainly would be a minority opinion. I can't comment on cheaper Dell and Lenovo machines, but that wouldn't really be a fair comparison.

My Lenovo thinkpad keyboard doesn't register the spacebar unless you press the middle of the key. Never had a problem like that with a Mac.

Yeah my Lenovos had or developed the same problem, also not considered something to fix by them. Probably all of them except the really old 4:3 ones I had, which had the oldschool IBM keyboard.

The Lenovo keyboard is good when it works - but I never had a fully working keyboard on any post-2013 Lenovo laptop (my old T530 had awesome and reliable keyboard, but it was the last). I generally spend around $4-$6k on a laptop, so not the consumer-level models. Always at least few keys had issues (or soon developed some) and they didn't want to fix it.

The Apple keyboard was weird for a week and then I got used to it without much further issues. Occasionally a grain or something got under a key, compressed air fixed that immediately. After a year one key became squishy and Apple fixed it free of charge within few days.

Dell keyboards are squishy and unreliable and have the same problems with grains Apple butterfly keyboard had - but in 2022. Dell average is much worse than the worst Apple ever got.

Are you sure? I have both an Intel Macbook Pro (work) and a Lenovo Thinkpad and I love my Thinkpad. I hate the Macbook so much.

It's true my fans turn on a little more with my Thinkpad but I rather have fans over a sluggish Macbook. Plus with my Airpods Pro on, neither the other person or I will notice any fans. (I also won't get fans during a meeting anyway.)

Plus for half of the price of that Macbook, I get a much lighter laptop with 64 GB of RAM and a beefier CPU, plus a touchscreen that I love for the couch.

I had a great Thinkpad once, too. But the 2 subsequent models were all shit - laptop board burning (needed a replacement few times), RAM integrity issues, boot loops, driver crashes etc.

Then I tried 2 Dells - both of them shit in all ways possible (and I spent more than Macbooks cost!) - battery life bad, noise bad, performance bad, thermals bad, sound bad, keyboard bad, display horrendous (never get shitty 4K OLED from Dell, it hurts your eyes!)... - that's a machine that costs $4k+.

Regarding the CPU... I was not able to use even 50% of its i9 CPU because of thermal throttling. And when it was on "full", it got like 2 hours of battery.

M1 is like from another galaxy. The sound continues to amaze anyone who hears it. People can't take their eyes off the display. It literally does not have fans. It never gets hot. I can work 2 days on one battery charge.

And most importantly - even though I have only a 7-core M1 Air - it outperforms my i7-7770 desktop as well as every laptop I ever had, even the beefy i9 Dell - and it cost less than $1500. It has less RAM (only 16GB), but that's alright, I never had a problem with it (as a JS developer).

I agree. The display and touchpad in a Mac laptop are out of this world. And they're are even better if you have one of those new 14" Pros. There's just nothing in the PC world that compares.

Sounds like there are trash models of Thinkpads like there are trash models of MacBooks.

Have to do your research either way.

I personally picked my Thinkpad model. I did not get to choose my MacBook model.

Those 5 years were when Johny Ive had full reign over Apple design with no Jobs to keep him in check. I imagine engineers were screaming in agony but unable to do anything but work within these constraints that heavily prioritized form over function. It's really funny to see all Ive's bad ideas undone over the last 2 years — the touch bar, the lack of ports, the thinness taken to the extreme, etc.

On the other hand we are probably gonna have a stupid camera notch in the next Air. Do you blame Ive for that one? Or is that it’s own disaster?

Or another way to look at it: there's now screen around the notch and that's more useful than that area being just black glass instead. The menu bar used to eat into your screen, but now it's wrapped around the notch in that area and you have more screen for other things.

I'm looking at the menu bar of my laptop right now and I sure do have a bunch of menu bar items that go past the center of the screen. Personally I'd rather just ditch the camera, I never use the thing. Or just not scrape for every fraction of an inch of screen possible. Margins are nice.

As someone with both an M1 and various intel and AMD machines.

The M1 tends to outclass most laptops (primary in single thread based workloads) but they are well down the ladder of performance in comparison to what is possible to put in a desktop form factor.

The mac studio seems to take a nice bite out of those options as well, but its not a laptop either, and depending on workload its quite likely still loses pretty bad if the desktop is tuned to the workload (aka toss a couple 3090's in, or a threadripper/etc for massively parallel stuff, or faster disks, etc).

People who are stuck in the laptop mindset, seem to forget that desktops have a lot of add in card/etc flexibility for workload tuning. Need a 100Gbit network card, just plug it in, need 2T ram pick a motherboard with support/etc.

Think about what this (somewhat randomly picked) motherboard can do, that you can't get from an apple device.

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards...

I never need any of that though, or any additional performance. I need to have about twenty browser tabs and a few electron apps open. If it can handle that smoothly without painful latency we're good.

I don't forget what desktops can do I just don't care and would rather be able to work from the couch when I feel like it.

I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much.

I've built a 5900x with 64GB high speed ram, 2x NVME 4.0 because my 2018 i9 Macbook pro was hot garbage and would crawl when working on a project with a bunch of docker microservices.

I regret this decision now because the new M1 MBP would do everything I need and I wouldn't have to worry about SSH workflows, keeping my PC/internet up while I'm away/traveling, having to work on two separate devices and migrate over all the time, two keyboard layouts (Mac/PC).

I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).

> I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much.

What do you think happened when the people with powerful workstations got sent home during covid?

Obviously for some employers the answer was SSH, or taking a workstation home - but for other places (e.g. CAD users), the answer was 'mobile workstation' laptops.

The answer for many games studios was Citrix/Parsec and ilk, maybe some of the smaller ones allowed people to take PC's home...

Nobody was getting workstation grade laptops.

(speaking from experience).

> maybe some of the smaller ones allowed people to take PC's home...

I worked for a large studio at the time and anyone who could carry a workstation home could take it.

>I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).

Eh, YMMV. I have an M1 and an i7-1185g7 based Linux laptop. Honestly, I never use the M1. Side by side, there is no noticeable speed difference for my day to day work. The M1 is more efficient, that's for sure - but my Intel laptop already has "all day" battery life. If I need to spend more than 8 hours working without access to power, the M1 wins - but I never see that situation happening (to me).

The biggest thing that turns me away from the M1 is the lack of Linux support, which I understand is also a personal preference thing. Also the M1 MBP is slightly bulkier despite the same screen size.

Depends what you are doing with it. In single-threaded tasks, I noticed my M1 Pro can outperform my gaming PC (5950x).

That is also however a VERY old processor at this point even if it was probably the best thing Intel has ever made (comparatively for the time)

5950X is probably referring to latest AMD flagship desktop CPU [1]

[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x

ahhhh nvm then. Should that not absolutely destroy an m1 though?

Not really, Apple is one generation ahead of AMD in manufacturing process at TSMC.

According to Passmark even the 10 core M1 Max gets absolutely destroyed by the 5950X just like I thought. Great chips for mobile use due to power savings but the top desktop chips still are all of course much faster at the expensive of extra watts.

OP was talking about single core performance.

It depends on the benchmark the 5950X is faster single threaded in a number of benchmarks but the converse is also true.

But, it does tend to win overwhelmingly in multi threaded.

Slightly, although less so if you have code you can compile yourself and use -march=native. The M1 is heavily default optimized for the M1, random x86 binaries are generally optimized for something like a Pentium 4. Just tweaking this one thing, can easily double perf.

Also, as someone who owns both, make sure the 5950 is actually turbo'ing correctly. Mine was a real pain to get it up to speed, despite having a seriously overkill water cooler.

I got an M1 on loan while my Intel Mac was in the shop and I was terribly unimpressed. Only 8 GB of ram was part of the problem, but I just didn't notice any performance improvement between it and my Intel Mac.

I went from a 16" MacBook Pro with an i9 and 32 GB of RAM to the MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, and my build times at work were almost exactly the same. But the single-core speed makes everything _feel_ so much faster than the stupid slow i9 cores. (At less than half the price, and without a fan!)

In my opinion, the Air is the perfect addition to a heavy Linux/Windows workstation. You get the full spectrum from iOS development to gaming, albeit at the cost of having to babysit two or three operating systems. You can use the Air for meetings or conferences, because everything that's not a game has a macOS version (think Microsoft Teams etc.)

It's worth noting that if your workload is still on x86, it's running through Rosetta emulation and it's significantly slower. I've heard of a few people having similar "what's all the fuss about" to "wow this is great" transitions after their key applications get fully ported to ARM.

I had the 16" Intel i9 MBP with 64Gb and recently got the new M1 Max with 64GB (had to wait almost two months after ordering) and it's not even close. I used to have to be quick about closing things in the back ground etc. Force closing things etc. Fans were always loud. New M1 I have NEVER heard the fans. It just works. And works well. No beach balls waiting. Just works.

My company gave me a i9 MBP for work, but I use my own personal M1 Macbook Air instead as it's so much better; no fan noise or smell of cooking thermal paste! Also and sites nicely under the 45" 4K QLED screen that I use as a main monitor.

That and desktop cooling tends to be lightyears ahead of laptop cooling; you can thrash a desktop for a long time before hitting a thermal limit, unlike most laptops.

A good desktop should never hit its thermal limit no matter how long you thrash it. 24-hour 100% CPU/GPU torture tests are standard whenever I build a PC.

> with power to spare

...but without money to spare. If the desktop fits his needs there is nothing gained in replacing it with a proprietary and form-factor limited device like an Apple laptop unless he's hog-tied to the Apple world - which does not seem to be the case here.

I use a bunch of devices, some portable, some not. When I need something portable I take, let's say, a T42p running Linux. I'm typing this from a resurrected iMac 27" running Linux which sits next to a Compaq 6910p in a docking station connected to a 24" monitor. The iMac is the newest device at 12 years, that T42p is 17 years old yet it still works fine for most things as long as I can reach the server-under-the-stairs. Sure, that M1 makes for faster media consumption but... that is not what I use these things for. I also foresee a not-so-distant future where that M1 lies in a cupboard due to some malfunction - bad battery being the most likely - which is deemed too expensive to repair while most of those old devices around here still continue to work.

Let me jump on this opportunity to give a little unpopular opinion on the M1 MBP, after 1 year of using one (being completely new to apple), since most (all?) of the comments I have seen here are dithyrambic.

Granted, the hardware is great. Silence, good perf, no heating, amazing battery life. I love this.

The software part has not been that smooth for me:

- I use the python scientific stack, and it's not there yet. This will probably improve in the future, but for now, I'm stuck using rosetta stone and well the perf is not as good as it should be.

- I thought the stability of Mac OS X would amaze me. It did not. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely OK and I did not lose any work. But I have had to 'hard poweroff' the thing quite a few times.

- As a long time debian user, and for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion. Homebrew helps, yes, but feels so 'second-class' compared to [your favorite distro] package manager.

> dithyrambic

I pride myself on knowing words, and I did not know this word. Thanks!

According to Merriam-Webster: a statement or writing in an exalted or enthusiastic vein

Great word and apparently an old one:

Webster's 1913 Dictionary:

• Dith`yram"bic (?), a. [L. dithyrambicus, Gr. ?: cf. F. dithyrambique.] Pertaining to, or resembling, a dithyramb; wild and boisterous. "Dithyrambic sallies." Longfellow. -- n. A dithyrambic poem; a dithyramb.

• Dith"yramb (?), n. [L. dithyrambus, Gr. ? a kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus; also, a name of Bacchus; of unknown origin: cf. F. dithyrambe.] A kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus, usually sung by a band of revelers to a flute accompaniment; hence, in general, a poem written in a wild irregular strain. Bentley.

> I use the python scientific stack

> for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion

I'm in a similar scenario (genomics, not ML). I pretty much gave up on using any local machine for this work and use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work. It just isn't worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments setup and in sync for work like this. I still use the Mac for other things like email, writing, generating figures, etc... but there are far faster machines for more difficult number crunching.

One of the exceptions here would be something more interactive like video or image editing (which is a workflow the Mac is really well designed for).

>use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work

In my case, the primary computer is the linux desktop machine and I use the macbook to remotely connect to it when I am not home. Feels a bit weird to use a $2500 laptop as a dumb terminal, but I guess that's the world we live in (and which I am part of).

>worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments

In my experience, debian stable + poetry + the occasional container have been great so far. De gustibus...

Similarly, I'm kinda looking at a Macbook Air and running Jetbrains Gateway to a big fileserver, as well as pushing a bunch of personal stuff off to my NAS as well. Remote desktop into a VM for casual browsing and doing my taxes and so on.

I could get old RDIMM/LRDIMM sticks (it's not widely known but some X99 boards support it) and a 1660v3 and be up and running with 8 cores at ~4 GHz for basically the cost of RAM, and that would probably be sufficient for my needs. And using RDIMM/LRDIMM would set up a migration path forward to Epyc eventually - Epyc is still Ryzen and still likes fast RAM, but those faster sticks are 3-4x the price per GB, so getting something running now with an upgrade path forward would be fine.

> rosetta stone

I'm confused, are you doing scientific Python or learning a language?

You got me, rosetta, not rosetta stone.

> It could probably easily replace that desktop you built with power to spare.

Not even close. A 5950x will absolutely smoke an M1 max on a multithreaded workload, and if your workload needs more than 64GB ram the difference is even starker.

I’ve that cpu and 64gb of ecc. It’s so stable. Can even play games when I’m no doing compiling! Or at the same time!

Same with the M1 Air. First time I've ever considered an air. I really like the idea of not having a fan:

- No dust can get in because it's sealed.

- Mechanical parts break more often.

- I often block the vents anyway because I'm sitting in bed or something.

However, it's not all green grass. Non-replacable SSD and RAM is horrible, horrible practice. I root for the competition / right-to-repair advocates to force apple into fixing this. I usually perform a major upgrade on desktops & laptops after ~4 years.

No! Apple's integrated design has huge advantages. Then performance ceiling of RAM built on-chip, for instance, is much higher (because light can only go so fast) than even soldered-on discrete RAM chips, which in turn are potentially higher performance than DIMMs. One of the reasons why the M1 is so blistering fast is this integrated RAM design; it's like having 8-64 GiB of L3 cache.

The same goes for SSDs; by building the SSD controller into the CPU, you can get I/O performance that vastly outperforms even PCI NVMe drives.

Over the next few years, it will be the case that the most powerful computer you can buy will be a Mac. The M1 series Macs signal a return to the Amiga days, when thoughtful engineers designed the whole system with integrated hardware and software for speed and responsiveness that cannot be matched or surpassed by the cobbled together PC ecosystem that has dominated for so long.

Is it possible that the entire integrated chip can be replaced? Even if at a higher cost, it's better than throwing the whole computer away.

The SSD controller is on chip in the M1 family, but the actual SSD controlled by that controller can still be removable. The Mac Studio proves that. The actual storage is on a removable card in a socket.

I don’t think Apple has said why they did it this way in the Studio. I’ve heard three theories.

1. They plan to at some point support upgrading storage.

2. It is so failing SSDs can be replaced instead of having to do a whole logic board swap.

3. It is for easier and cheaper inventory management. It is easier for them to build most of them with the most popular storage configuration or two and then when someone orders a less popular configuration change the SSDs than to build ahead of time and stock the less popular configurations.

This is ARM now. Look at any SBC out there and you'll see soldered RAM.

If only the M1s were compatible with CUDA....

It seems like chronic problems with laptops are often the fault of Nvidia or AMD discrete video cards. Even for Macs. Once I started avoiding non-integrated graphics in laptops, things got a lot smoother.

I have the exact same experience, the 2020 intel macbook pro was annoying enough that I genuinely went back to linux on the desktop.

Loud, hot, sluggish.

Now everything is snappy and smooth. Low regrets.

I wish I could do this but I build mobile apps in addition to any backend stuff. Kinda need to be on an apple for making iOS apps.

I know I'm just whining, but it's ridiculous this is still the case.

There's £2k+ worth of compute on my office desk, the size of a thick book that I haven't touched in years...

All because Apple deems it the only way to run xcode...

At least the client paid for the machine (enterprise, this was their way of having reproducable builds... Until the pandemic but a halt to their project)

Yeah, it certainly hurts a bit less if you're not the one paying for it.

I know we're in a high income profession, but buying another $2.5k+ laptop just for iphone development isn't a trivial expense if you do contracting (especially if you're not working 40 hours a week).

I do all of my mobile development cross-platform.

99% of the app dev happens on Android, and I just test on iOS when I need to--and for that I have an older, cheap, MacMini.

For your case sure, you only deal with iOS 1% of the time. For me it is 50%.

Well, that's why I use cross-platform tools. Heck, I often can simulate without even the Android emulator, if there's a Web or PC target for the cross-platform environment.

I have my old Intel® Core™ i7-5820K desktop with 32GB ram and a vega 54 running ubuntu and it's my main driver when working from home. Still does pretty much everything I need.

X99 is a great "tinkerers" platform before stuff really got locked down. You've got tons of PCIe, quad-channel RAM, dirt-cheap xeons with decent core count (some of them are even multiplier-unlocked), and some X99 boards support RDIMM and LRDIMM.

It may seem odd to say that you want both RDIMM/LRDIMM and overclocking but many of the server processors run at very low speeds compared to gaming systems, often 2.0-2.4 GHz or so, and just running at a modest 4 GHz or so on all 8 cores is easily achievable on X99 if the chip is multiplier-unlocked. Epyc is still better, you can achieve similar performance with much higher core counts, but you can get X99 chips and decent boards for a song, while (eg) Epyc 7402P is still almost a $1500 chip with $600+ boards for it.

The one downside to X99 is that the System Agent is just not very mature compared to later iterations. Even 3000 speed RAM often requires a "BCLK strap" which is like a special multiplier just for the System Agent. This is often set automatically when you enable XMP, usually a 1.25x multiplier, but this can cause some problems with some PCIe and NVMe devices which don't maintain their own clocks. I haven't run into major problems with consumer-tier hardware but YMMV and "dumb" devices like IO Fusion cards might have more issues.

I am thinking seriously about getting 8x32GB 2133 LRDIMM and using that as big NAS for homelab stuff, then transitioning to an Epyc 7402P at some future date, then upgrading RAM to something higher clocked once it gets cheaper.

yeah mine runs at 3.9 Ghz stable without any major issues.

I think this guy is pretty confused about UEFI, which is little more than a boot abstraction. It doesn't lock anyone out, although secure boot can be used to do so, but so can any other firmware (phones anyone?). So at this point, the fact that UEFI secure boot standardizes how users can enroll their own keys/etc make it probably the _best_ of the current choices.

The part he seems to be confused about are the PEP's required for modern standby, because instead of extending the UEFI/ACPI specification to cover those corner cases (or wedging them into the existing notification mechanisms) they allow platform providers to continue to create machine specific power management blobs that aren't portable between OS's. The older ACPI power methods, were of course opaque as well, but the API was standard enough that non Microsoft OS's weren't at a disadvantage.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...

He was probably referring to secure boot when talking about UEFI, which effectively prevents you from installing linux (unless you know exploits or you get the unlock code from the manufacturer).

That said UEFI sucks and it inflicts unnecessary pain every time I setup a new computer.

Can you really not turn off UEFI in the BIOS settings? I don't think I've ever used a computer that didn't have an option to unlock it, as far as I know.

No you cannot "turn off UEFI". You can make your UEFI-enabled board boot in a BIOS compatibility mode for some things. But that isn't turning it off.

Your terminology is really confused. UEFI is the firmware that boots the computer and is a replacement for a BIOS. There are no "BIOS settings" on modern computers.

Windows specifications currently require that AMD64 computers have the ability to disable secure boot. Are there any counter examples?

> which effectively prevents you from installing linux

This was going to be the state when Microsoft first proposed secure boot. But the backlash lead to (1) being able to disable it and (2) being able to load customer keys.

Are any motherboards actually locked down to where you can't install another OS? My older Gigabyte motherboard, my Thinkpad laptop, and my HP business line desktop all support both of these.

UEFI was definitely a pain point for booting Linux when it was first available. The same Gigabyte motherboard mentioned ended up having it all turned off and just used legacy boot for years. But everything works great with UEFI USB boot installers and the OS. I'd recommend giving it a try again.

I personally use secure boot for Linux through custom keys and a kernel install hook that resigns the EFI+kernel+initramfs+cmdline blob. It's quite nice in combination with LUKS unlocked by TPM2 (similar to Bitlocker). Secure boot actually lets you be more selective in which PCRs to verify for LUKS unlocking, meaning it's much less fragile during updates.

>He was probably referring to secure boot when talking about UEFI, which effectively prevents you from installing linux

??? Most distros have signed boot loaders and run fine with secure boot on.

Whenever I reach the point of thinking about getting a laptop to replace my desktop I keep being reminded that my desktop has parts that are at this stage around 9 years old. I am reminded that it still does everything I need, it still connects to anything I want, any way I want and it still runs my os(es) of choice without batting an eye. And if a part fails? The used market provides!

I am so sad to see things go down this path and it is so frustrating to see common sense beaten to death by some product manager, marketing vp or CEO saying that thin, light and unrepairable is the future...

My desktop is a 4790k, so maybe not far off the age of your system. I had to buy a laptop due to covid and, to be fair, things have progressed on the laptop front so much that it outperforms my desktop. I now only use the desktop for gaming as I didn't bother getting a discrete GPU on the laptop.

The laptop is high-spec and costly (Dell Precision 7750), so much so that I doubt my employer would have bought it for me. So costly, in fact, that it makes no financial sense to upgrade my desktop.

I am still using my 6yo Dell Inspiron I got for $500 now and then.

I ran my second hand Dell computer from work for about half a decade, it cost $75 when I bought it from work after a merger. The CPU finally called it quits, and I parted it out for a profit.

I thought it was going to be about usability not user freedoms.

I dont understand people who work on a tiny 15” screen when they can have multiple large monitors. Yes, you can use externals with your laptop but then you need to invest in a squid (commonly called dock?) that will link your stuff to the laptop. And disconnect/reconnect your stuff when you go away.

Also let’s not forget the full size keyboard. I suppose that’s why no code coding initiatives come out once in a while, those people can’t stand typing on their laptop :)

My solution is one serious desktop with everything and one mid range laptop that I can work on if needed, but avoid like the plague.

Not all work requires massive computing power locally. I find the "squid" much less of a hassle than having to sync stuff between two computers. Especially with "newer" computers that can be charged over USB-C. You only plug that one cable, and you've got your screens, keyboard, wired network up and running.

I used to the two PCs for a while, but a single computer is so much easier to deal with.

> I find the "squid" much less of a hassle than having to sync stuff between two computers.

Hmm the only thing I need to sync is done via git pull. Mail is imap and docs are online.

Depending on the monitor/laptop combination and their support for USB-C that's not too much of a hassle.

For reference, I am using an XPS 13 and a Lenovo P24h. All of the peripherals are plugged into the monitor, and when I unpack my laptop, I just plug in a single USB-C cable and I am on my way.

Multiple monitors can (supposedly) be daisy-chained as well, although I have not tried this.

I've been using a 13" MacBook Pro for years. No issues to report. I'm not sure what type of programming you people are doing. Multiple monitors is nice but it really does not improve my productivity.

> I dont understand people who work on a tiny 15” screen when they can have multiple large monitors.

You can have it either way. When I'm away from my desktop, I attach a portable external monitor to the laptop via USB-C. It has an identical screen, and works really well. I do prefer desktops, but I have to move around a lot.

Laptops create freedom from a fixed position, desktops do not. Sometimes I want to work in the living room. Sometimes I want to work at the coffee shop. Sometimes I want to go into the office. I cannot achieve any of that with a desktop, while I can achieve a desktop-like at any point by plugging in a monitor and using a bluetooth keyboard.

A Mac Mini is smaller and lighter than a MacBook Pro. I could carry one between my home and office easily. It even simplifies hot desking in the office in a WFH-first world.

I never work from the living room. When the weather is nice I sometimes work from the park but to be honest I rarely achieve anything, it's just an excuse to go outside. Same for coffee shops, I can but almost never do.

Notably, the Mac Mini does not have a stupid external power adapter, but just uses a standard cable that costs like $1. I did carry mine around for a while, and it was glorious! I'm not sure why Apple's competitors insist on including a brick that's almost as large as the PC itself.

It would have been really cool if the portable profile concept caught on with iPods. Then we could just have a room full of Mac Minis and plug in our iPhones for (literally!) roaming profiles. But then the company would have to provide me with a iPhone/iPad. Sadly we got iCloud instead, which is radioactive from a corporate infosec perspective.

> I'm not sure why Apple's competitors insist on including a brick that's almost as large as the PC itself.

It's more expensive to design an internal PSU than source a random power brick. Oh wait, i thought it was called "an Apple tax"...

But you're required to bring a power cable, keyboard, mouse, and monitor wherever you want to work, and sit near a power outlet.

With a laptop you just bring a single slab-shaped piece of hardware.

I have all that at home. And a hot desk can provide the same. 14 years ago at my business school we were hot desking with standardized ThinkPads.

A mac mini is not a usable piece of hardware on its own; it's an unpowered box with no means of input or output. A brick. To make it viable you must connect all the elements that are integrated natively to a laptop: keyboard, mouse, screen, and power. If you showed up to a completely empty desk with just a mac mini, you'd get very little done.

Right but I already bring my laptop to a desk with a keyboard, mouse, monitor and dock. So the practical difference is nothing. In fact the Mac Mini is actually less duplication of capability.

My MacBook Pro has been out of clamshell mode less than 25 times in a year. Almost all of them to wake up after an OS update.

What you're describing is two desktops with a shared piece of hardware between them. If that works for you, great! However it does ignore my original point of "freedom from a fixed position", and why I made it in the first place. If you don't need to move around, then by all means use a Mac Mini. I personally find myself in a lot of places where there are no traditional workspaces, hence I use a laptop.

I addressed why this would work for me in my initial reply. I don't need to work from any point. It is enough for me to work from one or two fixed points. The difference between two desktops and carrying a Mac Mini between two workstations is that the computer itself is the same in both locations so all data is still local. It's all the benefits of a laptop that I actually use. I do not use the screen or keyboard on my MacBook, but I suffer the compromised thermals and bulky form factor anyway.

Chromebooks/low power laptops can basically act as terminals for a beefier machine at a comparatively small cost (Can you do a gaming pc for less than 1k?). The first time I saw this being done was a game changer, running modern AAA games on a surface tablet, nintendo switch before its time. Your local internet needs to be fast enough but I think that's still a decent population of HN.

What I like about desktop computers in a WFH role is that they are tied to a physical space. The desktop is where I do my work and once I shut the door for the day, I’m done. No temptation to sit on the couch in the evening catching up on emails and reviews. I have to physically move to my desk to be in work mode. That separation is very valuable for a long term WFH gig.

Word. But now I have a negative emotions in that workspace because I don't enjoy my day job :/.

Better to have those negative emotions confined to that workplace than to that workplace, your couch, your bed, the dining room table, and the kitchen counter.

By that logic, even better to have those outside the home and in a physically dedicated workspace owned by your company.

Suddenly, I feel like there will be some mental gymnastics to justify why WFH is okay but WFlaptop isn't.

Prior to pandemic, that is how I felt. (I expected to hate WFH; it turns out I love it, but I did enjoy the forced break and time for podcasts that the commute provided.)

I'm in the WFH-and-hate-my-job group but I would never go back to the office.

I would rather shut a door and ignore my office than have to go back to commuting to a job I hate.

My day ends in seven minutes. In eight minutes, I'll be outside enjoying my yard.

>I would rather shut a door and ignore my office than have to go back to commuting to a job I hate.

And some people don't have a need to have a specific workstation or room that they can isolate in such a way.

It seems weird the internet pushes such a specific working style and refuses to acknowledge that other preferences exist. The prevailing

This is a huge, huge, HUGE reason to have a dedicated workspace whether it involves a desktop, laptop, TI-85, abacus, or hammer and chisel.

> I know that new "open" laptops are still available, but most of them--the System76's, the Purisms, etc.--are overpriced in my opinion.

The author cares enough about this issue to write this article, but they are unwilling to support companies that are trying to address the issue due to increased cost. Is this really as important of a problem to the author as the author indicates? How will this issue ever change if companies that try to appeal to this niche market are not validated by consumers?

Reminds me of how many products are now made in China due to savings even at the expense of the middle class of many nations. People weren’t willing to pay more for products made in their own countries, and now there are critical supply shortages created by the wave of the hand of a leader far away.

> I know that new "open" laptops are still available, but most of them--the System76's, the Purisms, etc.--are overpriced in my opinion.

He understands the value of these open devices, but isn't willing to pay more for something he values more.

I upvoted for the sentiment, but a lot of the extra cost, unfortunately, isn't very well-justified. I have both a 1st gen System76 Galago Pro and a Purism Librem laptop, and I even bought a System76 Thelio desktop machine, to find out that they were making terrible design decisions that sorely impact usability. The Galago Pro should never have been released imo, that 1st gen machine's just that bad, and my Purism laptop doesn't even work anymore due to poor build quality making the power connector break off of the motherboard.

Laptops are terrible compromises all-around, so I thought I was out of the woods when I got my Thelio. Sadly no, the gorgeous case's power button connector is the jankiest setup I've ever seen. I ended up taking it apart and now the power button dangles out of the hole it was set in, I wound up building a second machine for my daily driver and use that one as a server.

I wish them the best of luck, and I really hope Purism's phone is good enough to replace my iPhone 7, but they're not getting any more of my money for the time being.

The justification for the cost is lower volume. There are big fixed costs associated with bringing hardware to market.

If you sell 100x as many units as your competitors, you can spend more on R&D, under cut your competitors prices, and make more money.

Products targeted at niche markets are at a cost disadvantage inherently.

Also: in some cases the makers of ‘secure laptops’ are playing an entirely different game to lower costs. From economies of scale (in every stage of the pipeline) to deals with advertisers and parts vendors, bringing a new laptop to market with none of those strings is a much more challenging undertaking than I think many of us (including me) give them credit for.

Except if they didn't make usability / design compromises then there would be much less R&D needed and they could take that money as additional profit for the next gen. I have no problem paying more for a more niche system. What I don't want to encourage is adding useless crap onto the machine in an effort to justify the extra $$$.

System76 is a worse offender in this regard than Purism, my problem with Purism was a build quality issue, which is understandable. I still wish they'd have make it more rugged and less pretty, but at least there weren't any glaring design issues.

> The justification for the cost is lower volume. There are big fixed costs associated with bringing hardware to market.

System76 isn't bringing hardware to market - these are rebranded Clevo and Sager systems.

Galaga Pro for example is a Clevo NV41MB-D.

https://www.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/k8pnxn/i_think_i_...

System 76's value-add is in the software, not the hardware. AFAIK there is actually nothing stopping you from buying the OEM systems and running the System 76 software on them actually.

Of course it's true there's not zero cost running a hardware-based business but their "big fixed costs" are much smaller than, say, Minisforum or the other boutique mini-PC companies. They are just putting in an order to Clevo or Sager and loading their own custom Linux image.

Their other value add is customer support which is fantastic.

The MNT Reform has the potential to be the laptop we all want, but speed is an issue.

The cost relative to speed is high. I think the other laptops mentioned are probably better in this regard, but I think they still live on the same supply chain that is incentivized to produce unserviceable, overly thin, borderline thin-client machines.

I'm waiting for a System76 laptop with AMD graphics, no numpad(!), and not a 1080p screen. It's hard to talk about price when it doesn't exist.

Same! ASUS has some coming out but it feels like it's always "soon".

We need to move beyond 1080 on laptops.

>The point is that they are making it harder and harder for us to do what we want with our computers. They are successfully taking away our general-purpose computers and replacing them with little more than Internet appliances.

This is the most important point in all of computing. I don't want a thin client, unless it's a thin client into a workstation or server(s) that I control.

Fuck the cloud.

I was considering what to switch to from my elderly ThinkPad. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that newer ThinkPads go as far in the direction of less user control that they stopped providing BIOS revisions that don't contain openly advertised "anti-theft" spyware.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/Replaci...

I never want to enable it, and I don't want to live in the danger of enabling it by accident, either. If it reported to infrastructure that I own, I'd be talking different.

Sounds like the author's concern is that as more devices move towards becoming locked-down consumer appliances in the future that they will eventually lose control, making the DIY-desktop the only "safe" choice. I agree with the premise in the large, but the success of the Framework laptop tells me the market will always support a reasonably open, linux-friendly device. Also, I don't know a ton about UEFI but I remember the anxiety around it, has that materialized at all? I haven't had a problem installing linux on recent model Lenovo and Dell laptops which I believe had UEFI, so is it really a problem?

Yes it has materialized somewhat. The UEFI and Secure Boot are not the issue here - neither is uBoot/fastboot on phones. The issue is who holds the keys - if it is the owner of the device, then great! But most laptops and phones don't allow you to set your own keys, just Microsoft's or OEM's, and that is what the issue is. Linux distributions work around this by either explicitly requiring disabling Secure Boot / Unlocking the bootloader, or having Microsoft sign a shim that they can use and using that allow the user to add additional trusted keys.

I've not seen much issue from UEFI beyond mobo manufacturers occasionally releasing really buggy firmware.

UEFI also permits rather advanced features. For example, if a mobo manufacvtorer wanted to, they could theoretically code in support for using a USB monitor for the bootup display, enabling firmware access without any video adapter on board at all.

One can quite easily add new boot-loaders to the EFI system partition, and add the entries to NVRAM, making it possible to add add custom pre-boot diagnostics programs, or a small direct-boot emergency recovery kernel, or other fancy features.

>Thin laptops are thermally throttled due to insufficient airflow

Yes, the U-series intel i-X CPU's all do this. I have an old desktop w/ a 4th gen i3, and it performs better in benchmarks than new U-series i5 CPUs. And in practice outside of benchmarks, it feels significantly faster for have tons of tabs open, toggling between a few excel files with thousands of rows, data visualization (mostly Tableau) and gaming.

Same with a 10yr old Xeon proc I had in an old desktop workstation at work compared to the 3yr old work laptop. A couple months ago I was due for a laptop upgrade and insisted they give me "anything but a U-series". They dug up a 9th gen H-series and they seemed to think the thing was worthless because it wasn't the latest gen. Meanwhile it had 32GB of RAM and a quatro 2000 GPU, so I jumped at it. I only get about 1.5 hours of batter in high performance mode, but it's fine. I'm not doing heavy loads in meetings so I just swap power profiles.

In short, it's extremely likely that any mobile CPU is seriously underpowered compared to a desktop CPU from 6-10 years ago.

Depending on what you do, you may be impressed with zen 3 u cpus.

I was in the same boat, with an old 8-core Xeon something from like 2013 (it takes DDR3 RAM, and was one of the first to support PCIE 3). It was so fast, it ran circles around my current work computers (basic enterprise i5 HP). Then I insisted on a zen 3 laptop at the end of last year, and for rust compiles, it's almost twice as fast as the Xeon. It only has a 5650U (6 cores + HT), and a teeny-tiny heat sink. It does get somewhat noisy under load, but it's dead silent most of the time, including in Teams video chats!

Good to know-- I'll consider AMD hardware the next time around. I have them in my primary home/gaming laptop, not a low power version though, and greatly prefer it to the 7th gen i7 I had previously. Both were about the same on single core (doesn't seem like there's been a lot of movement on that in recent years?) But the AMD is much better on anything multi core and seems to punch above it's weight class on GPU.

I don't get this part:

> General-purpose computers allow us to own our music and videos--not just watch them until Netflix's contract for our favorite Star Wars movie expires or Apple decides to somehow prevent us from accessing our favorite song in its inventory.

You can still buy music and videos to own. Music from iTunes and other download services has been DRM-free for decades. Plus there's always CDs. I bought one from Amazon recently, believe it or not! You can buy DVDs/BluRays for movies and TV shows. This has nothing to do with internet appliances or walled gardens, or whatever else this article is about.

Depending on where you live ripping user hostile restricted optical disks is illegal, even the possession of tools that can free you from the digital restrictions may be illegal, making you dependent on your bluray player supporting the disk you bought and leaving you behind should you want to watch the content anywhere besides your living room. In addition, there are now lots of movies and series that are only available if you agree to some streaming service's TOS without the option to own anything at all.

I’ve been buying mp3 albums from Amazon recently, which has been great because I can load them into my local MPD daemon for playback. I have a pandora account, which admittedly is how I discovered all this music in the first place, but MPD takes up next to no resources, so I end up using that most of the time!

I bought a new Mac Mini a couple of years ago, and set it up with 2 nice 27" UHD monitors, a good keyboard, and an excellent mouse. I love this setup so much. Since it's always plugged in, it's optimized for performance, not portability. There's no issue with docking, as everything's always where I left it. And finally, I have a desk in my home office and that's where I work. When I leave my office at the end of the day, I'm done doing "serious" work.

I have an iPad Pro I carry around the house for content consumption and doing lightweight work like blogging (with a keyboard case) or replying to emails. But while I could write software on my iPad, it's just so much more comfortable at the desk in my office that in practice I'm not going to.

So far, separating between "work" and "play" modes has been a huge success for me.

The Mac Studio looks like a perfect replacement for my always-docked 2017 MacBook pro. If you were replacing this today, would you stay with the Mac Mini or go with the Studio?

There was always such a wide gap between the Mini and the Mac Pro that I have preferred a decently specced MacBook to the Mini. But I think the Studio changes that for me.

I have an M1 air, which is the same chip as the mini, and I haven't hid a performance point for coding yet and that is with the air throtting after about 8 minutes on max CPU (something which the mini won't do, because it has a fan).

Of course if you do GPU intensive stuff, that might be an issue. Do keep in mind that the single core is not much faster on the studio, there are just more cores.

My only regret is only getting 512 GB disk space.

Definitely spring for the 1TB since you can't upgrade it later.

If I were buying one out of my own wallet, I'd probably get a Mini. It's such a great little computer. If work's picking up the tab, like if it's time for a hardware refresh, I'd definitely get the Studio. It's not that much more than a nice MBP and seems to be a beast.

I'm curious. Has there ever been an x86 laptop on which secure boot can't be turned off? The most obnoxious I've encountered took quite a few steps, from an obscure key combination to even get into the setup menu, to a couple of "are you sure?", "enter these digits to confirm" kind of scare prompts, to at least one restart, before it was off. Felt kind of like unlocking a carrier-locked smartphone. Pain in the ass and a bit scary, but ultimately possible, and once it's done, for good.

After that a Linux install went just fine. Probably would have even without that, given what I read about trusted boot shims and so on.

Mind you, all my (older) laptops still support proper suspend, you know, where the LED will happily blink for a couple of days on battery and you still have enough to use the computer.

This post, and the many people here celebrating their preference of desktops and wondering why anyone would ever use a laptop, spurred me to get under my desk and disconnect everything from the USBC breakout box so I could wrap some electrical tape around its fraying cable. Thanks, I've been putting that off for months now.

FWIW the great thing about laptops for me is that I can plug it into my desk, with a big monitor, when I'm at home, then unplug it (just one plug now, used to be all of four, which takes about 60 seconds once you've figured out a way to make sure the business ends of the power/usb/monitor/audio cables never stray too far from where the lappy lives) and go sit out at a cafe. Or in a park. I really don't miss having to spend all my work hours in the home office.

I never really switched off desktop PC's.

For work, it makes sense to have a laptop. Portable, in case I need to be on the go. If I need extra computing power (which is rare), I can spin up cloud resources.

For my personal stuff - nothing will replace a fast HDD, big CPU, big GPU. Rock solid, quiet (if you have water cooling), powerful. If I need that power on the go (which I sometimes do), I can remote into it. I usually do personal travel with an HP Spectre x360, which is quite light with an OK screen and keyboard. My desktop is kinda old at this point, with an i7 4930K with 64gb DDR3 and a GTX 1060 3gb. I have far fewer issues with my desktop than my work provided laptop, and it's a lot older, and has suffered a lot more abuse.

It's amazing how long people have had performant productive systems with Ivy Bridge CPUs and Pascal based GPUs (NVidia 10xx parts)... If it wasn't for many of these older boards not having a TPM for Windows 11 support I'd have probably gotten years more still out of similar systems I own too. My similar Pascal equipped build has to have been one of the best value systems I've ever owned - I've bought two Macs in the same timeframe this box served as my gaming rig/desktop PC. Granted these were MacBooks so not fairest fight, but I've never had any computer last me as long as this PC build has.

My 1080ti has been one of best PC part investments I've made; if you ignore lack of Ray Tracing its still able to knock 60fps/1440p in just about anything, a god-send during these chip/GPU shortage times.

I weaned myself off of laptops years ago. I still have one, but I hardly ever use it. For mobile purposes I use a Surface Pro with Linux installed. Laptops are terrible from a usability standpoint. It's a rare day when I want to use a machine without some kind of drink on hand. Spill that puppy the wrong way and your day and wallet are ruined. Laptop keyboards are always a compromise, just because you like yours doesn't mean it can't be massively improved. I want my display right in front of my face, craning my neck down caused no end of pain until I stopped using them.

Do yourself a huge favor.

My concern hasn't been uefi, but general repairability after a personal experience where a removable ssd helped in recovering data (had backups, but had notes written before the next backup), and lack of ergonomic innovation on laptops.

It's led me to trying Linux on a raised tablet PC and starting https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/ .

I've always maintained separate desktop and laptop. No laptop has ever run as well as a properly built desktop.

The bottom line is physics. Never will hardware crammed into a tiny case, a laptop sized case, perform as well as desktop components in even a slightly larger case. Even less so than components in a real mid tower allowed to be effectively cooled and run wide open. It's just the physics of it.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is whether you can fit the computing power you need into a certain size and budget. If you only browse reddit, you can. If you want to play new AAA games at 4k@120Hz, probably not.

If it fits, and you can take the typically higher price, then going for the theoretically "more optimal/efficient" would scratch the "optimizer itch", but is arguably of no importance. Just like getting a nice $200 chef knife gets you a nice blade that cuts better and is more maintainable than the one you can get for $5, but if you only cut tofu, all those benefits are pretty abstract.

What's the purpose of using 2012 hardware to avoid UEFI? All UEFI-capable hardware I have used had options to disable secure boot from the BIOS or would boot signed Linux kernels anyways.

My primary computing device is a desktop PC. I have four monitors hooked up to it (two horizontal, two vertical). The primary monitor is for browsing. The secondary horizontal monitor is for coding. The two vertical ones are for things like reading logs/documentation, and for various chat apps (Slack/Discord/WhatsApp/Signal - yes I use all).

I started a new job recently and they got me a top of the line Macbook Pro. For the first two weeks, my productivity was in the gutter. Not because I'm not used to MacOS, but because going from four 27" screens to a single 15" screen was devastating. Things improved significantly once I bought an ultrawide, but I'm still having to do a significant amount of desktop-switching (using the three-finger swipe) and it's just not good.

I know the MBP supports more monitors but I'm out of desk space!

How often do you visit your chiropracter?

Desktop is actually better for that. At least getting the laptop up to eye height with good posture. My chiropractor says they see more younger patients (30s and 40s) with degenerative disk disease in the neck related to laptop and smart phone use.

Large home desktop, cheap replaceable linux laptop is the perfect combo. I've saved so much money over the years by swapping out desktop parts and using a beat-up thinkpad for off-location work. Every once in a while I'm missing a newer display port, but overall it's a great system.

How do you keep the laptop in sync with the desktop?

I just rsync the root partition from time to time, ignoring /efi and /etc/fstab. Although this (obviously) only works in one direction, but that's enough for my use case.

I don't, but the things that I do are modular enough that I can make parts separately and plug them in when I come back.

Not OP but -

wireguard to git host of choice

git-annex is an awesome thing and much more useable then any of the normal sync services across the board (once you understand what it can do).

ansible to make all the hosts consistent configuration wise

Syncthing has worked fairly well for this. It has some caveats, and I don't recommend syncing anything other than some specific directories in your home folder to avoid conflicts with syncing config and cache folders.

What I synced: ~/files (contains all my projects, cat pictures etc.) ~/ide (contains just the IDE installation and other apps) ~/.ssh

Absolutely, +1 for Syncthing. I use it for pretty much all of my devices at this point, and it's maybe failed me... once over nearly 12 months of daily usage? For not having a centralized sync server, it works so much better than it has any right to.

I find myself in the weird position of agreeing with the desire for computing power, general purpose computation, software freedom, and ergonomics, and being baffled by the rest of this take.

Platform availability: Others have pointed out that UEFI hasn't even been a minor hindrance to the linux ecosystem for several years. But also, the post author's argument against the numerous efforts to make linux-first laptops is "They're overpriced", which is not only barely true, but also nuts considering their other positions. Price-fixing is the classic monopoly play, and if you're not willing to initially pay more, you're not serious about fighting Microsoft, period. Also, the Framework Laptop has gotten a ton of press in tech circles, and exactly solves the problem of laptops not being upgradeable. Yes, the basic consumer market is going the direction the poster claims, but alternatives do exist and supporting them is not that difficult if you care.

Ergonomics: SSH provides a perfect way to run your own "cloud" computing solution by having a powerful desktop that you access through a portable laptop (not to mention having a built-in protocol to make a secure tunnel for any service you can imagine). Barrier makes this even more seamless with the ability to ad-hoc treat multiple computers as multiple monitors which still run separated userspaces. These two pieces of software alone give you the best of both worlds, and are simple to configure and available in every linux distro there is. I've repurposed numerous old laptops into workspaces with their own monitors, which I can then use as a dynamic multi-monitor setup with my tower and any laptop I currently use, and I tend to aim for either ridiculously cheap (Like the Pinebook Pro) or ridiculously portable (Ultrathins. I honestly really love having an effectively weightless computer I can put in a backpack I'll be biking with without a second thought about weight, and will totally pay a premium for it) for those. Also, maybe I just have tiny hands, but I don't find laptop form-factors that annoying unless doing very specific tasks that need a real mouse. Even typing on chiclet keyboards with acrylic nails (not something I'm used to having) was a 5-minute adjustment at worst

Throwing up your hands and saying "the battle for general computation is already lost!" strikes me as premature doomer nonsense, given how many people care about this and are creating solutions to all these problems. Hell, the solutions to the problems the author mentions aren't even hard to find

How about the best of both worlds? I WFH 100% and my home desktop is a W10 PC with a Ryzen 5 1400, 24GB memory, RTX 3050, a modest (too small) SSD that needs an upgrade to a 1TB NVMe, but the real thing that makes it my Go-To for everything is my four 23/24" 1080p monitors, with one of them being portrait mode. Screen space wins. There isn't anything I need to do that this computer can't do. The PSU is several years old. The case is from the Vista era. It's not scoring any points for being snazzy, water cooled, or RGB LED'd. It just works.

The laptop? An old T420 that does what I need when I need it, and nothing more. I don't TRY to do my Whole Life on it because it's not good at that. In a pinch, it's enough.

I like that if I'm on the move I can take my laptop and I have my complete work environment with me, I can continue my work wherever I'am, etc.

How one could replicate this with a desktop + laptop combo? Setting up a work environment which syncs between the two constantly?

How can you drag three monitors with you whereever you go? Just the full-sized keyboard would be a drag.

I have three desktops. Projects are on SSD VMs that I carry, or in the cloud. So no issues about syncing.

And what would you do if you lose your laptop?

With that in mind (except probably a very heavy data) you already need a way to sync your environment... to something, depends on what are you doing.

And if you can sync it for a fast recovery then, probably, you can make it sync between N+1 computers.

If your work environment is reproducible this shouldn't be an issue. Nix works well for me personally.

Another boon is that if your system goes kaput for whatever reason, you've already done the legwork to immediately get up and running again.

Remote to your desktop from your laptop and never worry about losing/breaking the laptop. I've spent little over a year on a job where i remote desktop'd to office computer from home in a WFH scenario. Was perfectly doable and stable.

In this way you won't need the laptop at all and can use a nice tablet. I'm thinking of going this way, but not quite there yet.

I do this in reverse. My work provides a laptop, but never provided any other hardware at all once we switched to full remote. So I throw it in the closet and remote into it from my personal desktop. I much prefer to sit at a desk in a nice chair, with a good keyboard, monitors, etc.

My latest job is like that - from home with just a laptop. I used it as a secondary monitor (chat, email). At end of day i simply close it and turn on the desktop.

Also thinking the same, looking for a monitor for my Surface Laptop 3 (Running Linux) and realising the lack of HDMI port really makes this a challenge USB C for a monitor lacks options currently, so am looking at dongle hell.

It's not hell. One type C to HDMI dongle. I use one.

Even better: there are type-c to HDMI cables, no dongle at all.

I should have been clearer, it would be really nice to just have one single USB C lead from my laptop to a monitor for video and PD. Overall I am happy with USB C. Having a laptop with many cable's connected for me defeats the object hence me looking at desktops.

Sounds like a prime use case for a dock or one of those multiport dongles. What's holding you back?

As above I am trying to avoid multiple cable's in the laptop, be ideal to have just one USB C for HDMI and PD, A laptop with a load of cables in it for me defeats the object, at that point I may as well use a Desktop.

I Displayport and power over a single USB-C with my Dell U2720Q.

I would recommend a longer cable than the one provided if you want your computer to connect to a usb-c on side that doesn't face the monitor.

Interesting. I use a single TB3 cable connected to my Caldigit TS3+ to connect:

- dual 4k60hz monitors - keyboard - mouse - webcam - microphone - ethernet - ... other miscellaneous things I'm forgetting

One cable, dock setup. I guess I don't understand how a dock would force you to use multiple cables, since that's what they're supposed to help prevent?

Something that's worked well for me is using "docks" with my laptops.

I'm typing this over a cheap-ish (80€) Chinese thing from Amazon [0], which gives me power, a bunch of USB 3 A ports, one C, gigabit network, HDMI and DisplayPort, and audio in/out (didn't try it). The video is pass-through, as opposed to a DisplayLink chip.

One thing to be aware of, is it requires two USB-C connectors. I've never tried only using one, since the provided cable has a dual-connector. It also looks quite nice, doesn't feel cheap at all.

MS, Dell, HP, Lenovo all sell similar contraptions, but they're much more expensive. At work I have a HP G5, which works well, and uses a single USB-C port.

You can also find cheaper alternatives that only do HDMI.

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[0] https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B09MTTZ36K/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...

Interesting for some reason did not consider a dock, that one looks great but the Surface Laptop only has one USB C port. Will take a look at the MS version though thanks.

Eek £250 for the MS one https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/d/surface-dock-2/8qd908364sg...

There are also products like these: https://www.amazon.fr/Concentrateur-Anker-adaptateur-PowerEx...

Don't know what they're worth, though.

Thanks, we're getting closer, that's interesting as it has power pass through. Now to find something similar with a longer lead so I can tuck it away, to Amazon I go..

You could just get an USB-C cable with a female connector on one end. Just make sure it's up to the spec you require, PowerDelivery + Video.

It's not the topic of the article, but I will never understand how anyone can do work like programming and data analysis, or even write reports that pull together information, without a desktop computer.

Lenovo dock(no squid), and 2 vertical 27" 2k monitors, of course.

Same way you would with a desktop: external screen, pointer and keyboard.

When I’m not using a docking station to turn my laptop into a desktop, I tab between windows, use exposé, and have multiple virtual desktops.

It’s fairly chaotic but my spatial memory handles it pretty well.

I've considered it due to remote work. Simply because I'm sitting here with a company laptop that is plugged into a docking station literally 100% of the time. Apple's battery management functions (pausing charging to not cook batteries) has bitten me on the ass a number of times it doesn't seem to realize that i'm working the cpu pretty hard (intel) and it drains the pittance of a battery i have left an d shuts down without bothering to start using wall power.

I wonder if all the recent work-from-home has changed anything? My reaction to the headline was, "Some of us never left." But then I've worked from home for seventeen years. If I drove to an office every day, I might prefer to own just a laptop too. But working from home with an overpowered desktop is great! And if I want to work from the back porch I use the old Macbook Air, ssh in, and attach to my tmux sessions.

I've used laptops occasionally when I had to, but I've never even thought about giving up a desktop computer as my main computer for daily use.

I've done this. I have serious issues with computer/internet overuse (I have to avoid the "a" word), if I am able to have a computer in front of me all the time I will.

My desktop is confined to a single space in my home unlike a laptop, a space that I don't actually want to spend all my time in. This alone gets me away from it more than I otherwise would be and has been very helpful to me.

I decided to main a Ryzen desktop back in 2018 to replace my aging 2010 ThinkPad. I doubled the RAM to 32 GiB and now I have a workhorse that can chew through compiles at breakneck speed and spin up multiple VMs without taxing the host desktop. Or run a couple Electron apps :) Best part is, I can upgrade the components in the future for additional growth.

Note that by going with a desktop you do not avoid UEFI. UEFI with Secure Boot is the standard boot environment for Intel PCs, regardless of form factor. Microsoft is the only root of trust vendors will recognize; you will have to contact the vendors individually and pay out many millions of dollars each to become a root of trust for UEFI PCs.

For the time being Microsoft has deigned to require disablement of Secure Boot or installation of user certificates, but that may change. The reality is, your PC only boots Linux (or BSD, etc.) because Microsoft allows it.

UEFI is OK if the user can disable it. It is clearly a restraint of trade issue. We probably just need to make a law.

Running at full load without noise is something that is easy to achieve on a desktop if you want it, and almost impossible on notebooks with any kind of comparable processing power. The coolers and fans you can put into a desktop are just so much larger and quieter than anything that can fit into a notebook.

If you care about fan noise and regularly put high load on your computer, a desktop provides much better options here. But I was also surprised just how much processing power you can put into a modern notebook, my Ryzen 8 core CPU in my notebook is not that much slower than the one in my desktop (which is a bit older than the notebook). But the desktop is silent at 100% CPU load, the notebook isn't.

For me the biggest issue though is monitors, I like to have two large screens. A single screen always feels somewhat limiting to me.

> ...I am still using laptops with mostly USB 2.0 ports and internal SATA SSD's. That means dealing with very slow backups. I seem to be forever making backups. Eventually, laptops manufactured before 2012 will be too slow to do the things I need to do...

This my dilemma as well. I love me some older machines (thinkpad as one example), but the slowness of those older components kills me for running backups. Yeah, i know that there are tools which backup only deltas, etc...but scripting for legacy backups methodology seems so much easier for my brain...i guess either i have to get newer machines, or adapt to leveraging those backup tools that rely on deltas (in essednce sending less over the usb dongles). /old-man-rant-over

We're a two person household with four or five laptops and a variety of tablets. But we're also a two-person household with a full fledged GPU/CPU compute workstation, a dedicated gaming/VR tower, two (somewhat) upgradeable all-in-one kitchen computers that are getting a bit long in the tooth and of course, the usual clutch of miscellaneous servers. We run Linux, macOS and Windows in a variety of configurations.

Many people don't have a need, or a desire, for a dedicated computer, not even a laptop. The world that we as technologists live in is vastly different from the majority of people who are passive consumers of content rather than active producers.

ITT: people swearing its impossible to use a laptop because some marginal differences, and because a mechanical keyboard 10x your productivity.

I use both a laptop and a desktop, but I mainly work on my laptop, because I can have my work there with me, and I can work from everywhere, I don't feel like it? I go to a cafe and work from there. I have to visit my sister today and I wasn't planning to? ohh nice, I am taking my laptop with me.

People act like programming is data entry, and that's it all about actions per minute. "My button clicking speed lineary correlate with my code output", doesn't work like that.

When I retired I returned the work MBP. Now I have a M1 Ultra Mac Studio and I miss nothing about that sad 16GB Intel laptop. The MBP roared like a freight train all the time. Now the loudest sound is the ceiling fan.

I alternate between this. I had a Mac mini as my main computer but decided on a MacBook Air as my next computer because:

1. Every now and then it got disconnected from electricity because of my stupidity or the electricity going out. Having a built-in UPS is very nice.

2. Laptop has no fan. I much prefer to have my computer slow down than have to hear noise. Mac desktops for now don’t go for this trade off.

3. Every now and then it’s nice to be able to bring my main computer to a different place. I leave behind my monitor and mouse and take my keyboard and laptop and it’s not too bad for those odd occasions.

I’ve never left desktop computers and laptops are terrible for your posture.

I tried this and it made me more productive than using a laptop from work.

I built a PC during the pandemic for work and gaming. It runs OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Windows 10 (the latter purely for gaming but I'm looking to ditch it for Proton/Wine on Linux).

I realized how much I prefer working on a desktop after years of using a laptop for work. Not gonna lie, I still like the niceties offered by my Macbook Air M1, namely great battery life and very good performance, so I use it primarily when I am out working remotely.

I also haven't owned a desktop in about 15 years but recently built one to replace my laptop. I specifically chose parts that had the most upgradability potential over time and while I'm at the beginning of this journey I'm pretty happy with my choice. I'm sort of thinking about only using a laptop as a commodity dumb terminal at this point.

Crucially it gives me an exist to tinker again and that's why I got into computers in the first place.

My desktop is fully quiet, despite running a parallel build on all cores. My macbook pro pushes jetplane levels of noise if I have the audacity of opening Teams

Many of you reading this are directly involved in this awful future, and if you are one of these folks you should be deeply ashamed of yourself.

I'm more productive at desktop but I just can't sit in one place for more than 2 hours in span of 10 hours so a laptop allows me to move to sofa, bed and other places... Standing, sitting, laying, and horse posture when your knees are on ground but laptop on bed. Also reason I always abhorred office life. 8 hours in a chair made me want to punch a person next to me

I am a software engineer and engineering manager and there's no way I can be productive on a laptop. Even when I have to use a laptop due to requirement by my job, I am using a large monitor as a USB-C dock station, with real keyboard and mouse connected. Even on the go I have a Bluetooth mouse and HDMI cable with me to connect hotel's TV as a large monitor.

I never left, every laptop i ever tried just feels inferior against my desktop environment, its just not the same in any category..

Author states "I know that new 'open' laptops are still available, but most of them--the System76's, the Purisms, etc.--are overpriced in my opinion."

These companies are not manufacturing in China. They assemble their machines here in the U.S. and they don't have the advantage of economies of scale like other much larger firms.

I just bought a Dell Optiplex built in... I think 2015, on Ebay for $120. Gonna upgrade the memory and storage, then see how it goes. If I like it, I might pick up a few more for the kids. Everyone in the house right now has laptops, and they just sit in the same place, always plugged in, all the time.

After getting a decent workstation I can never go back to a laptop only. IMO laptops border on luxury toys. I use mine almost exclusively for checking emails and programming in places I just can't lug a desktop into, like the outdoors or an internet cafe.

I remote into a desktop wired into my home cable modem and basically use my macbook as a thin client a lot of the time. Modern remote desktop software is crazy good. Using parsec.app even from hotels it's almost like I'm sitting at the machine.

When working at home (most days) my Macbook Pro is mostly a terminal to my desktop running VMs on ESXi. Silent, fast, solid.

I love that the Mac can run the VMs I need in a pinch when I need to leave the house but it's always whining when doing so.

I never left.

I mean work gives me a laptop.

But my desktop is from 2014. i7, 32GB RAM, I updated the GPU to a 1070ti w 3x 1440p monitors. And better keyboard and mouse, mechanical keyboard and mx master 3 mouse.

Why use a laptop? Show me a laptop from 2014 that is still good.

Calling the 1980s the "Golden Age" of computing is a big stretch lmao

That's why I got my son a desktop. He's not a big fan yet but it has access to my steam, dual boot to ubuntu, and a webcam so he has no excuse to avoid doing "school work" on it.

My laptop belongs to the suits. My pc (ASRock + GTX + Ryzen + Corsair) belongs to me. Sure I have a chromebook to toss around the living room to browse the web, but me owning a laptop? Ha!

MDI til I die.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface

I went the Intel NUC8 way a couple of months ago after wanting larger 4k displays and faster drives. Pretty good value for money. I dont game etc, so I just needed the basics.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889488

This might be a weird idea, but what about: a laptop style wireless interface for a desktop computer. Does this exist? wireless display+bt keyboard+ bt touchpad

A more practical and commonly used solution would be to use a cheap laptop to remote into a desktop computer. I've known people who've used chromebooks for this exact purpose.

I only ever used a laptop once.

It was a company issued device, high quality, good brand, powerful enough. I hated it.

I only took it home once. The small screen, the cramped keyboard, the noise, painful downward angle when looking at the screen without a support.

Everything was a downgrade from my habits of using good old chunky desktop computers. I like comfort, silence, lot of interfaces, large screens, ergonomics.

I need a workstation, not a toy I can use in bed.

And to be honest, I can't help but look down on young coders using their shiny macs in coffee shops, I think they are delusional if they think they can be 100% productive with a toy computer.

> I think they are delusional if they think they can be 100% productive with a toy computer.

I seriously doubt many who are working in a coffee shop are even trying to be "100% productive" or they wouldn't be there in the first place.

Ultimately I agree with you, but for most laptops are "good enough". Dock them when at home, use them as intended when out and about.

>I seriously doubt many who are working in a coffee shop are even trying to be "100% productive" or they wouldn't be there in the first place.

I go to the coffee shop specifically to be more productive than I am at home. I don't think about my bills, or mopping, or laundry, or the cats trying to get my attention, or the games I want to play on my more powerful home PC.

You are incorrect to think that people intend to be sub-optimal by being in a public place without 2x 4k monitors and a clacky keyboard.

Sounds like the author wants a Talos II https://www.raptorcs.com/

"Starting at $5,165.00" for the entry level system: 4 cores, 8gb ram, 128gb SSD, integrated graphics. Thanks but no thanks.

My stack:

- omen 15, 32g ram: Windows11 for gaming + wsl2 + vbox hackingtosh + bluestacks.

- fully rooted poco x3 pro running lineage

wsl2 is a must

For the life of me I can't understand why any software engineer would want an under-powered machine that's optimized for battery life (i.e. a laptop.) I've worked from home and always opted to build my own PC (not that you can't find powerful pre-built desktops.)

If you need mobility, get a cheap laptop and remote into your powerful desktop machine.

my laptop is only a backup computer/travel computer. I love my big box 6 year old pc that'd I've added to over the years.

I’ve been saying for years that laptops come with rather severe tradeoffs for features that most users do not need.

A website in 2022 that doesn't use HTTPS? It takes like 5 minutes to install certbot...

... and a lifetime to monitor and administer it.

Time I've spend monitoring and administering certbot over the last few years: 0.

Certbot (and other acme clients such as acme.sh) are practically set and forget. I’ve never once had to touch those configs again once they were made ~4 years ago.

Certbot is a snap application nowadays. I was pretty screwed up when I decided to install it on CentOS system without SELinux, which snap requires.

But I would agree here, even when I had the problems with LE (botched cron config) it only required me to 'administer' it 4 times a year. And when I fixed cron config I don't need to do even that.

I’ve personally switched to using acme.sh over certbot. Much easier to setup (since it’s just a bash script) and supports practically every DNS API.

I have for some years.

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