For 11 months when I was backpacking, I did all my development on a laptop with 16GB of ram:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/

Scala development, and some devs ops stuff that required spinning up VMs. I mean not a lot; like 6 ~ 8.

At work, I use a 16GB ram laptop, Scala development an no VMs (we do everything in Docker and deploy to Mesos/Marathon).

I do have a desktop at home now with 32GB of ram, but it honestly feels like overkill and I may scale down. There is a lot of dev work that does require a pretty beefy workstation, but I've been doing HD video editing, Photoshop/Lightroom and Scala/Java work on laptops for years.

You're literally wasting money and your brain by forcing yourself to work on downsized hardware.

Studies are consistent here.

Time you spend waiting? Distracts you from your tasks, overall focus drops -- you're dumber.

Less screen real-estate? More working memory dedicated to what's not on screen -- you're dumber.

I run several Docker containers with Java-based microservices on Win10 Dell XPS 13 laptop, while debugging PhoneGap client app at the same time. Don't see any performance problems with that. The moment when laptops became good enough for cloud development happened 2 or 3 years ago.

Hm, I don't know -- have you used more powerful stuff? I have a 2x10 core desktop with 64G RAM and a relatively powerful Dell Latitude workstation laptop -- and the latter is significantly slower. (I'm also running Java microservices inside containers, mostly.)

No, I didn't use such beasts. I have a desktop with 8 cores/32 Gb RAM, but I don't spend much time on it. Top hardware wouldn't add much to my personal performance, so I won't spend money on building such workstation.

There are a lot of different "developers" in the world. Some require server farms. Some would be just as productive on a 486.

Oh yes I do. Traveling consultant, need a laptop. Run VMs, Docker, many tabs open. Really need 16G.

16 GB is nuts...