A 24" 4k monitor is better than any laptop screen (Real estate and bigger UI elements). And I like to work in a single place, taking breaks instead of moving the workplace. I like the iMac, but I went with the mini + monitor for more flexibility.
Of course it is. But just get a Thunderbolt or USB 4 external monitor, where a single cable charges your laptop and instantly connects however many wired accessories you want. Then you have portability when you need it and a big screen when you need it. Best of both worlds!
Or just go for AR glasses and make the view as big as you want.
Anyway, the iMacs I have seen at the Apple Store has decently sized text.
Because the person you are replying to hasn’t learned about the existence of the resolution scaling setting yet.
Now, a control to change text size, that's actually different.
It does. Rendering at high DPI, especially for text, is amazing.
Otherwise, it would be like claiming that there was no advantage to macbooks switching to retina displays back in the first half of 2010s. The display size didn’t increase, and the rendering scale was increased to make things on screen appear the same size. You have no idea how thankful my eyes were for that DPI increase.
The iMac I belive is capped at "looks like 2560x1600" while my 4k display "looks like 3008x1692".
But according to Apple, you need a sound proof dedicated room with 2 couches, and 4 external 4K monitors with a M3 Max and 128GB of memory! :D
Honestly it's getting ridiculous. I'm a dev and I can work on a macbook air no problem. My time wasted reading bad documentation or groking bad code is far more loss than the compile time difference! :)
I'm wondering, who will be their target market with the M3 Ultra? A professional who trains LLMs while producing Hollywood movies, that likes to work from the local Starbucks?
Maybe with M3 max they could finally claim "this thing can start Microsoft Teams in 3 seconds!"
I remember though, compiling UE4 in 2016, from scratch, was a half-day job on my non-potato PC.
That's not surprising. It may certainly depend on the kind of development work you do but in my experience web development has always been quite easy and lightweight on the hardware compared to audio or video production. Those tasks will absolutely make use of better hardware. Back when I was recording music big projects could easily struggle even on capable hardware.