The 3nm chips in the M3 are rumoured to bring about a 30% improvement in power efficiency. If I wasn't moving towards using an Android for everything, I would definitely think about selling my M1 for that sort of improved battery life.
On the software side of things, I’m going to do all my dev work in containers via Codespaces/CodeCatalyst. Apparently someone has made a native android version of vscode now, if not there is the browser version. For gaming, I can use an 8bitdo SN30 Pro/razor kishi and Nvidia GeForce Now which in addition to the standard streaming library allows you to play games you’ve already purchased on Steam. I’m opting for taking two 8bitdos as well as a usb-c to hdmi cable in case I make any friends on the go I have a portable 2 player gaming setup that doesn’t take up much more space than a sunglasses case. If that doesn’t end up happening after a year or so I’ll ditch the 8bitdos and the cable and get a kishi for more convenient solo gaming. I was originally going to do this entire setup with a Steam Deck instead of an android but found it awkward to pack and it’s also not available worldwide so if something happened to my machine in say Australia, I wouldn’t easily be able to get another one without waiting a while and paying through the nose.
If there’s any specialist software I want to use, I’ll spin up a cloud instance for it using AWS/Azure, there’s a few options for this now:
- AWS workspaces and Azure Virtual Desktop if you want a GUI desktop experience in the browser.
- AWS Appstream and Azure RemoteApp if you want to stream just a single application.
- EC2 and Azure VMs if you’re no bothered about a GUI or you want to roll everything yourself.
I don’t expect to have to do this often as I reckon I can get by on mainly android apps. I use Obsidian for notes, there’s Adobe Premiere Rush for video editing etc.
If you want more examples, head over to the Samsung Dex subreddit. There’s quite a few people on there who have ditched their computers and have been using Dex for the last year.