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And, the laptop gives you extra freedom for very, very little sacrifice (at least for Apple Silicon devices). I don't see any way you can argue for a desktop.
The performance is better than all but the super expensive performance halo parts... sometimes. Sometimes it's just better full stop.
As someone who despises macOS: get the mac.
If you look at stress tests from a M1 on a Macbook Pro and a M1 on a Mac desktop, performance is similar. There might be a difference on sustained performance on the M1 Air, but that's because it doesn't have any fans.
I'd be very annoyed if my work chained me to my home desk.
Great if your company allows it, but the “working vacation” thing has been either discourage or disallowed at every remote job I’ve had due to past abuse.
Some jobs can handle truly asynchronous work and some people can be responsible about getting their work done away from home, but for every 1 employee who was pulling it off well we had 3-5 more who were just writing short responses in Slack and to emails to pretend they weren’t actually on vacation. Ruined it quickly for everyone.
Lately I try to look for jobs at smaller companies where everyone can be trusted and there isn’t room for people to get away with those games. Seems much more likely to find more WFH freedom in those environments.
They also have an on-call rota where they need to respond to incidents remotely: I'd rather not chain my on-callers to their work desks throughout the night!
But as a lot of the other comments say, the latest MacBooks are comparable in build performance to pretty decent desktop machines. You can use them for really serious work, in fact you'll find lots of AI hackers are buying up the M2 Max right now because the AI processing it can achieve is well beyond similarly priced desktop hardware, and can happily run open-source models locally.
I'm unsure of your background but laptops as work computers has been the case in all my jobs for the last 10 years, including a stint in Amazon, consultancies, and several start-ups. It's the norm now, and it comes with few downsides.
* this will probably also change with naval Starlink becoming deployed more...