Also I think the thin laptops are a big part of the problem with the PC industry.
They are trying so hard to compete with phones they aren't doing anything to improve performance. Back in the day you could buy a new PC every 2 years and get a big performance boost, today that is not so. Get a cheap netbook and put in an SSD and you'll get something that feels more responsive than an i7 machine saddled with a mechanical drive.
No wonder people are not buying PCs. I remember when Tom's hardware used to be interesting but for a long time they have been colonized by this "power efficiency" thing which is really bogus because you can work really hard to power optimize your machine and then some stupid flash ad makes your CPU spin at 100% and it is all for nought. People buy things because of product attributes they can feel, not because of attributes which require careful measurement under controlled conditions
Study after study have shown that screen real estate and system performance improve our work output, let us use more of our working memory for task-critical state, etc.
If you need portability, then sure, laptops are necessary trade-off so that you can get any work done at all. However, that's all they are: a trade-off.
It's a shame if we're only optimizing for use cases that are ultimately regressive.
Most of the time, I use my laptop docked to two large monitors. But even still, I value the ability to take it unplugged for 12+ hours at a time when I'm travelling much more than I would value it being faster.
This, and this is why I loved the 17" MBP. I'd love a 19" rMBP with 4K or even native QHD screen, dedicated graphics, two SSDs (M.2 would be fine), lots of fast IO ports, and an all-day battery. I don't care how thin it is. It would spend most of the time docked to 2 or 3 external 4K displays for "real work", but then come with me to meetings and on trips.
The only thing that comes close right now is a Thinkpad P70. Can get it with 64GB ECC RAM, Xeon E3-1505m, 4K 17" screen, 2 SSDs + 1 HDD, and a Quadro M5000M. The only problem is that it can't run OSX in some supported fashion, and the battery life likely isn't great. Sad that Apple has been falling short in the professional market for a while now and they expect everyone to be happy with thinner & lighter.
Why not both? I have a few laptops, and a high-end desktop; I get the best possible performance when I'm working at a desk, and acceptable performance when I'm traveling.
It's really not a pain; just update the SCM working copy.
If your project has tendrils into the local system, that's the real problem to fix, because it's going to introduce pointless inefficiency at every level: new developer setup, production deployment, support for enterprise-installation, and ... inability to use the ideal hardware. available.
Performance translates directly into working efficiency. There's no such thing as "fast enough", there's only "too expensive".
With good scaling, performance and battery life are related. If the CPU can quickly finish what you ask it to do and get back into a low power state you can get better battery life.
It was a painful and costly (+$150) lesson for me to learn that most of the watercooling systems are actually louder than standard fans.
A few years ago I built a pretty awesome-looking, water-cooling machine, and just the noise of the water pump was louder than anything I had before. The fans I needed to the radiator also were just as loud as my previous GPU fan.
Yeah, big air cooling has come a long way. My i5-2500k on a stable 4.5ghz with 2 Radeons is nearly silent (thanks Antec Sonata + extra acoustic damping sheets inside). It's hard to beat a NH-D15 these days, and phase change is an order of magnitude more costly.
I have an old-ish Celeron CPU with 2.6 GHz which costs about 35$ a few years back. I still use it as my main PC and it is more than fine for every task (except video encoding and compiling large projects). I was thinking about upgrading but it just does not make any sense to invest money in this. Instead I am going to buy a better monitor this year.
Including SSDs, often by default, is improving performance. Most laptops also come with way more RAM than they did just a few years ago. And the newer 6th-gen Core processors are faster than say 3rd-gen and much more power-efficient. A laptop with a charge left is infinitely faster than one with a flat battery!
If Microsoft, at some point, said that you couldn't put a windows 10 or 11 sticker on a machine that has a mechanical C: drive, everybody would be saying that this version of Windows is awesomely faster than anything they've seen before.
They are trying so hard to compete with phones they aren't doing anything to improve performance. Back in the day you could buy a new PC every 2 years and get a big performance boost, today that is not so. Get a cheap netbook and put in an SSD and you'll get something that feels more responsive than an i7 machine saddled with a mechanical drive.
No wonder people are not buying PCs. I remember when Tom's hardware used to be interesting but for a long time they have been colonized by this "power efficiency" thing which is really bogus because you can work really hard to power optimize your machine and then some stupid flash ad makes your CPU spin at 100% and it is all for nought. People buy things because of product attributes they can feel, not because of attributes which require careful measurement under controlled conditions