Do you actually buy a new laptop every year? I feel that's a bit delusional. Year to year most upgrades are pretty minor.
An argument can be made maybe every 3 years if you're doing some incredibly resource intense stuff.
An argument can be made maybe every 3 years if you're doing some incredibly resource intense stuff.
Really this depends on the year. We're in a more chunked paradigm now when significant progress is happening more intermittently.
That doesn't mean buy new. Wait it out a year or two and buy used.
Some years matter. Most don't. You can exploit this.
But even then the odds it will have a major impact on most workloads is very unlikely.
I think as tech people we tend to try to maximize when there is no need.
I’m also one of those “weird” people that don’t use an external monitor. And yet I’m still just as productive, probably more so, than most of my coworkers.
A high-end MacBook Pro may not be cheap, but it packs some serious mobile compute power along with good battery life.
- my desk at home
- my couch at home
- my dinner table at home (in a boring call while preparing and eating lunch)
- my desk at work
- like 15 different meeting rooms in offices across two continents
- couch on terrace at work
- beanbag on terrace at work
- hotel room desk
- airport lounge
- airplane (if you count watching conference talks as working)
Flexibility is great!
I paid less than $700 for the Mac Mini right when the M1 chip came out. It’s hands down the fastest computer I’ve ever owned.
> I paid less than $700 for the Mac Mini right when the M1 chip came out. It’s hands down the fastest computer I’ve ever owned.
in any case, the most resource-intensive thing my work laptop does is have outlook and firefox open at the same time. the "heavy lifting" is done on a cloud instance that can be easily scaled up or down depending on what I'm currently working on.
Unless its some crazy jump in hardware between cpu/gpu generations that you weren't in sync for.
Back in early 2000s we used distcc for distributed compilation of QT apps and reused old workstations in a server room. But with XCode and Android studio it isn’t pragmatic.
Compilation rapidly drops from parallel to single thread bound for most workloads.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes.