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Desktop gives you a ton more oomph when you need it. Not that it is affordable today, but my personal desktop has 192GB of RAM, 24TB HDD, beefy GPU, and is basically never going to thermal throttle.

If you are just making web apps, it does not matter, but I do data processing where having the headroom can make a big difference.

I do have the cheapest used laptop I could find for those moments when I might require portability.

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That’s a fair point. The most I use my laptop for is some local LLM processing. I’d have more headroom on a desktop, for sure, but 96GB M2 max has plenty of oomph for my needs. Maybe I’m underestimating how many power users there are. For my day job I tend to offload most of my work onto a big server anyway so I could probably get by with a Neo at this point.

I priced one out for my current job and honestly the savings just weren’t there. The ram, gpu, HD now take up a disproportionate share of the price.

I’m keeping applecare on my macbook paid up and planning to hunker down for a few years hoping prices relax a little.

I always do the same thing: work for a new company, get offered a MacBook, ask to choose my own non-MacBook for the same price. When we part ways, I offer to buy it (at used laptop prices). Never had someone say no.

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