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Comment by bionsystem | Hacker News Reader

I'm a desktop guy, considering the switch to a laptop-only setup, what would I miss ?

For $10k, you too can get the power of a $2k desktop, and enjoy burning your lap everyday, or something like that. If I were to do local compute and wanted to use my laptop, I would only consider a setup where I ssh in to my desktop. So I guess only difference from saas llm would be privacy and the cool factor. And rate limits, and paying more if you go over, etc.

$2k laptops now days come with 16 cores. They are thermally limited, but they are going to get you 60-80% the perf of their desktop counterparts.

The real limit is on the Nvidia cards. They are cut down a fair bit, often with less VRAM until you really go up in price point.

They also come with NPUs but the docs are bad and none of the local LLM inference engines seem to use the NPU, even though they could in theory be happy running smaller models.

> For $10k, you too can get the power of a $2k desktop,

Even M1 MBP 32GB performance is pretty impressive for its age and you can get them for well <$1K second hand.

I have one.

I use these models: gpt-oss, llama3.2, deepseek, granite3.3

They all work fine and speed is not an issue. The recent Ollama app means I can have document/image processing with the LLM as well.

You'll end up with a portable desktop with bad thermals, impacting performance, battery life, and actually-on-the-lap comfort. Bleeding-edge performance laptops can really only manage an hour, max, on battery, making the form factor much more about moving between different pre-planned, desk-oriented work locations.

I take my laptop back and forth from home to work. At work, I ban them from in-person meetings because I want people to actually pay attention to the meeting. In both locations where I use the computer, I have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse I'm plugging in via a dock. That makes the built-in battery and I/O redundant. I think I would rather have a lower-powered, high-battery, ultra portable laptop remoting into the desktop for the few times I bring my computer to in-person meetings for demos.

I wish the memory bandwidth for eGPUs was better.

Huh? Bleeding edge laptops can last a lot more on battery. M3 16'' mbp lasts definitely enough for a full office day of coding. Twice that if just browsing and not doing cpu intensive stuff.

Even the M4 Max is not "bleeding edge". Apple is doing impressive stuff with energy efficient compute, but you can't get top of the line raw compute for any amount of financial of energy budget from them.

I'm genuinely interested in what kind of work are you doing if bringing m4 max is not enough? And what kind of bleeding edge laptops are we even talking about (link?) and for what purpose?

Upgradability, repairability, thermals (translating into widely different performance for the same specs), I/O, connectivity.

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