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Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

Why buy a laptop? A desktop is usually faster and/or cheaper, has a bigger screen, and has much better ergonomics.

I am planning on building a Haswell-E machine when it comes out. The new procs are supposed to have 8 cores (16 threads). The chipset also supports 64 GB over 8 DIMMS (8GB sticks) and 10 SATA III 6.0 Gb/s connections. I plan on just adding 256gb or 128gb SSDs in raid zero. You could even throw in a Titan Black for CUDA and gaming and still get it for cheaper than a loaded Macbook Pro Retina.

I currently have a 2012 MBPR with 16gb and 512gb of ram that has served me extremely well. It drives my 20 30 20 PLP monitor setup just fine. I work at home now so I just need a desktop. I plan on picking up MBA 11 to use as a netbook when I am on the go. I want to get it setup so I can run Android emulators etc on my desktop over the network when I am out on my MBA.

I have trouble using my desktop on BART.

True, but I doubt that BART is where developers do most of their real work.

I wouldn't want to do without a desktop, but I also like having the option of going to a coffee shop or park to work, especially when I'm having trouble staying on task at home.

Agreed - Desktop with a nice multi-monitor setup is great, but getting out and working somewhere different really does help refresh things and gets you back in focus.

The only problem with laptop is the small screen and it's harder (/more expensive) to do a multi-monitor setup. I don't know how people are listing an 11" laptop to do any dev work. I guess if its just a straight editor and not an IDE that works.

I use PyCharm and WebStorm om my 11" MBA without much problem. Just hide all the panels when you're editing and open/close them with the hot keys as and when you need to use them. Sure it's not as nice as working on my nice desktop setup at home or in the office, but it's not really difficult.

There's people that code on their phones, so...(not me , but there is)

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