Apple Silicon devices can get the same performance as a desktop in a laptop size. The only reason to get a desktop is if you need the Ultra chip.
And, the laptop gives you extra freedom for very, very little sacrifice (at least for Apple Silicon devices). I don't see any way you can argue for a desktop.
I have the first generation of the M1 (M1 Max) and this is the first Apple laptop I own that doesn't seem to hit any thermal or power limit. I do use an app to spin the fans faster when doing something like encoding a blu-ray movie with HandBrake, but it keeps going for hours without any noticeable drop in performance.
If you look at stress tests from a M1 on a Macbook Pro and a M1 on a Mac desktop, performance is similar. There might be a difference on sustained performance on the M1 Air, but that's because it doesn't have any fans.
Nothing. GP is making an assumption that all people need the same kind of hardware for the same kind of work as they do. None of my work touches on ML or heavy data processing (in the numeric sense), so hardware like that is useless to me and my coworkers. A beefier workstation is still useful (more cores, more RAM), but recent-ish laptops (post 2020 definitely, tail-end of the 2010s is still fine) provide more than enough horsepower.
Perhaps many people building code do not need multiple 16x PCI-Express cards in their day to day workflow, but like being able to move around with their laptop?
For lots of workloads it is basically true, though. Not something exclusive to Apple laptops of course, others have also been capable programming workhorses for quite some years. It's just weird to say that no compiling should be done on a laptop - that might've been true 10 years ago.
Great if your company allows it, but the “working vacation” thing has been either discourage or disallowed at every remote job I’ve had due to past abuse.
Some jobs can handle truly asynchronous work and some people can be responsible about getting their work done away from home, but for every 1 employee who was pulling it off well we had 3-5 more who were just writing short responses in Slack and to emails to pretend they weren’t actually on vacation. Ruined it quickly for everyone.
Lately I try to look for jobs at smaller companies where everyone can be trusted and there isn’t room for people to get away with those games. Seems much more likely to find more WFH freedom in those environments.
Can't agree more. My M2 MacBook Air has been a major game changer. No battery anxiety, no throttling, no heat issues, etc. Allows me to work from anywhere. The productivity boost has been excellent.
If you genuinely don’t understand any of the perks of having a portable workstation, that’s one thing, but this comes across as a snide deliberate dismissal without even acknowledging them.
Our team frequently work when travelling or from home, where they'd prefer not to have a desktop station.
They also have an on-call rota where they need to respond to incidents remotely: I'd rather not chain my on-callers to their work desks throughout the night!
But as a lot of the other comments say, the latest MacBooks are comparable in build performance to pretty decent desktop machines. You can use them for really serious work, in fact you'll find lots of AI hackers are buying up the M2 Max right now because the AI processing it can achieve is well beyond similarly priced desktop hardware, and can happily run open-source models locally.
I'm unsure of your background but laptops as work computers has been the case in all my jobs for the last 10 years, including a stint in Amazon, consultancies, and several start-ups. It's the norm now, and it comes with few downsides.
Ferry* and maybe plane i understand, but especially the later is changing with many flights offering (complimentary) internet service afaik, but your aunt i don't.
The alternative, to me normal setup would be using a workstation at the office and then remoting into it via SSH (behind a VPN, VSCode supports this great). This allows for a thinner client (eg Macbooks Air) which need less replacement and where battery runtime/portability can be weighed more.
Sure now connectivity is a concern but to me that's mostly a non issue where i travel/the work spots i choose, but i guess it can become more of a problem in other (less developed) parts of the world...
* this will probably also change with naval Starlink becoming deployed more...
> A laptop compromises performance in order to be lightweight, portable, and stylish.
I'd agree with this ~2 years ago. Then I bought a MBP with a M1 Max and honestly I don't see many compromises with this machine. Coming from a 2019 Macbook Pro, it was a night and day difference. Ports, performance, efficiency, heat, battery life, etc.
Now, of course this laptop doesn't have the fastest CPU or GPU available, but it's so fast that it's no longer a compromise for me. It's actually faster than the desktop I upgraded a few months before buying this laptop, and since then Apple has released faster machines.
