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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>It’s hot and also LOUD and runs the battery down quick.

Who'd run this on battery?

Or do you mean kills the battery faster even when used while charging?

There was a lovely window of a few years when processors were fast enough and low-power enough that real development work could trivially happen on a Macbook Air in a lounge.

That window is waning as more and more memory and graphics processing power is being used locally.

I suppose the future is most likely going to involve farming out AI requests to your desktop machine, your company's compute farm, or a cloud endpoint, but if you're expecting to run an AI offline on your lap with a battery...your lap will get warm.

No idea what you are talking about. My battery lasts longer than ever while running vim and make and GCC. It’s amazing. Not sure why your windows are closing.

Because the local LLM, which you are not running, is running for much longer than gcc and is eating the battery. Different choices, different outcomes.

So don’t run a local LLM?

Bur the implication here in the parent comment is that for ‘real dev work’ to be done you must be running an LLM, and therefore you can’t do it on a MacBook anymore.

Turns out you can still accomplish stuff with a text editor and compiler.

Of course we can code without a LLM, but if we want to, as the sibling comment says, don't run a local LLM on a laptop. I'm offloading the LLM to the LLM vendor, like most of us IMO. The CPU is still busier then it used to be, because of the local harness.

I envision a future when the potential energy in a laptop battery, could take out 17 city blocks if it exploes.

Running your dev environment on your laptop is so 2025.

Running the laptop hot ages the battery even when you’re plugged in.

Merely existing noticeably ages most battery chemistries.

You can take half an hour out of every week inconveniencing yourself to protect your battery, or you can spend an hour once a year just putting in a new one (or having it done for you in-store if you're using an Apple device) and save yourself the nagging worry.

I was trying to do some work on the train with no signal.

Couldn't you just enjoy the ride?

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