Any tips on how to be reasonably productive in our industry with just a laptop?
I worked around 7 years on the smallest 11 Zoll MacBook Air from 2015, on my lap sitting in an armchair in my living room and all was fine. Party even developing in Java. The only pain was the SSD was too tiny once I got into audio stuff.
Now, it's a 2022 MacBook Pro M1 Pro with 16GB and it's enough for most stuff I do. Only the 1Tb SSD got too small again.
If you want to work and get results, just get it done with whatever you got. Everything else are excuses.
On a side note, every dev should be forced to code on average consumer computers.
This is important, but only if they're developing consumer software.
At home, I use towers.