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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

Right, that's why they said "outlier". Most people aren't going all around the country and multiple other countries. Most people sit at home on a computer, and sit at work on another computer.

Like you, I am also an outlier, using my MacbBok all over Hades.

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That also suggests that modern tech workers who have a hybrid work arrangement are outliers. That's getting to be a pretty large group.

Heck, even before COVID, my previous company only gave out laptops. Those things would get moved all around the office - from desk to desk, to multiple conference and meeting rooms, home, etc. This has been the norm for at least 5 years in my experience.

From my experience it's better to use both laptop and workstation. When I'm normally working I use the comfort/performance of the workstation, when I'm on the move I can use the portability of the laptop.

Basically all developers I know have "hybrid work arrangement", working some days from home/travels and some from office. They all remotely connect to their workstation at work either from their home computer of from laptop when traveling.

Maybe it depends on type of development or age of developers, but I'm not 20 anymore and laptop is an ergonomic nightmare. If you want to use it for a longer period of time and avoid health issues you should get an external keyboard/mouse/screens anyway. Which means you just recreated workstation, but it costs more money, has worse performance and all kinds of issues while connecting so much stuff to it.

We all had external keyboards, mice, and multiple monitors on our desks. The only time we were ergonomically constrained was when we were mobile. But we could be mobile at a moment's notice, and with all our stuff still running.

Now what I really would like is a high quality, low latency complete remote system. I got pretty close to this with a recent experiment, but it took a good bit of effort (and I still had some weird issues). It was great in that I could go to any computer with enough power to drive a browser, remote into my server "desktop", and continue right where I left off.

If that could get perfected, I would probably switch to an iPad Pro with optional keyboard.

> Most people sit at home on a computer, and sit at work on another computer

a) You don't know what most people do.

b) I would add that those of us that are in a hybrid mode e.g. working equally from home and work are given laptops specifically because we are expected to use the same computer in both environments.

a. Sure I do. It's pretty easy to reckon. I don't see "most" people traveling across the country and countries on a regular basis.

b. Sure, but again, that's a minority of even the professional demographic. Now, if you're thinking the developer demographic, sure I might agree with you, but that's not what OP said.

You think a minority of professionals are going to the office full-time ?

Because in Australia at least that is not what is happening at all.

Occupancy levels in the CBDs of our major cities are still well below pre-COVID averages.

I wonder how energy prices are going to change that. If someone needs to pay $1000 a month to heat their homes all day in the winter because of WFH, I can see that tipping over lots of folks to go back to the office.

If that becomes an issue, I think it's reasonable that companies will start providing extra money to remote workers to cover operating costs. After all, those same companies will need to lease less office space (meaning lower costs for space and electricity).

They don't need to travel across the country to need a laptop.

I have two data points for you:

The company I work for does little dev work. 99% of the people have laptops. They don't travel cross-country, mostly work in the office. But they also need to move to conference rooms, work from home, etc. We only have to handle one PC per person this way, instead of figuring how to handle their own personal PC when at home, etc. These are mostly "non IT people". Sure, you can argue they don't need the power of a desktop anyway. Which is absolutely correct.

I have a friend who does "actual dev work" working for an "actual software company". Java and C++, so they actually require powerful machines to compile (at least more than my company), etc. They used to have big-ass Xeon workstations. Those were replaced with some kind of Dell laptop [*] with a bunch of cores and RAM. He also basically never travels for work, but can now easily work from home without installing the company crap on his own PC. My friend is much happier with this arrangement.

Both companies provide multi-monitor setups with external keyboards and mice, so the comfort part of a desktop is still present when they're sitting at their desks.

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[0] They look like the XPS line, but seem somewhat thicker and don't have the XPS logo.

The only use case for a laptop is when you are travelling across the country? What sort of bizarro argument is this?

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