> These recent articles about the MBP make me wonder: am I the only one who dislikes working on laptops in general, and refuses to buy one?

They're great. You can change where you're working when you want for a change of scenery or for comfort reasons, you can take a laptop to presentations and meetings, and you can be fully productive on trains and in hotels when you're travelling. It's limiting if you're only able to work from a single physical desk and a bit more power from a desktop doesn't outweigh that for me.

I love laptops. Easy to carry, always has my stuff on it. I connect to a big monitor/keyboard/mouse at my desk both at home/work... use a laptop when I travel or work from the coffee shop/bar/etc.

I haven't owned a desktop since maybe 2002, and can't imagine ever getting one again.

I use a Mac mini hooked up to a 34" ultra wide monitor and love it. Have no use for a more powerful machine and would hate to do work anywhere but my desk. My iPad mini is fine for browsing when I'm not at my desk.

After using desktops exclusively for over a decade, I went exclusively laptop in 2012. It was alright, and while laptops were able to fill most of my needs (they were all 15" high end models), there were always times here and there where the limitations inherent to being a reasonably portable laptop reared their heads, and it was always frustrating. Just a couple months ago I built myself a new tower and now it's where I do most of my free time computing, and it's really great to not have to deal with aforementioned limits.

It's also just staggeringly more powerful than my laptop. My tower compiles projects in Xcode 2x-3x as fast as my top of the line 2015 15" rMBP, and that time saved really piles up.

Probably no, but it all boils down to personal preferences. I type this in my bed with a glass of wine next to me. I use the same machine in class on Monday and I use the same thing for client work... and so on and so on.

If you are fine with your desktop environment that's okay :)

+ this is not an MBP, just a 4 years old Dell with 1366x768 resolution. It's just fine. If I work on a larger project I just plug 2 extra screens and I'm good to go.

I think very few people choose to work at a laptop when a desktop is available.

A docked laptop is as good as a desktop.

No, it really isn't. Desktop cpus blow mobile cpus out of the water (same with gpus, of course), and can use far more RAM and disk storage. Laptops simply have the rather massive advantage of portability.

Does the horsepower give you any extra capability these days though? My laptop (Surface Book) is plenty powerful enough for development, even a certain amount of 3D rendering.

It depends what you're doing as to whether the CPU is enough, but RAM is still a frequently-cited constraint in the laptop world. Obviously with the immense rise in popularity of laptops, mobile CPUs are now 'fast enough' and have been for a while, but when you do need the grunt, desktops are nice. I imagine most developers these days have 'forgotten' how nicely desktops perform, simply due to lack of access.

My own anecdata: I work in two places, one where I have a 'nice' laptop (some old-but-beefy Alienware thing) and one where I have a 'nice' whitebox desktop. When I'm on the desktop, I find that I'm not keeping my computer's limitations in mind as I do my work, whereas on the laptop I do. It's not at the forefront of my mind, but it's there to some degree. Before I moved to the Alienware (16G ram), I was on an 8G laptop, and I had daily issues with that constraint - even though all I used daily were terminals, about 15-20 browser tabs[1], and maybe a screencap program.

Then I go home and play games, and in that realm, laptops really are the middle-child if the game has any GPU or CPU heft (though again, laptops have the benefit of portability).

[1] not all website are created equal, of course...

I've always wondered: has any computer ever come with a "dock" that actually contains its own CPU+GPU+RAM+disks+etc, such that, when you plug the "computer" into the "dock", you're really telling the "dock" to boot and parasitize all the "computer's" PCI-E peripherals into its own address-space?

Sort of like an iMac's Target Display Mode, but in reverse: instead of the "guest" computer doing the work and the "host" computer acting as a dumb frame-buffer, the "host" does the work and the "guest" acts as a Thunderbolt hub.

You want to be running the "guest" since that's where all your work is (just having access to the disk isn't really enough, you want to run your apps/settings/etc). I think we may see a move towards docks with graphics cards, but the CPU and RAM probably want to stay on the guest computer.

I would imagine that the "host" would be diskless and would treat the "guest"'s boot disk as its boot disk. It's effectively the same as swapping the guest disk into the host, but all its other peripherals (ports, sensors, etc.) come along as well.

This is why I was asking whether there was ever a dock made for a specific computer that had this feature: it requires the guest's disk's OS to have drivers to let it boot the host—or even hardware compatibility such that docking the "guest" would cause it to hibernate to disk, and then boot from that same hibernation image on the host. That basically requires the host and guest [the dock and the portable] to be made together.

(And that's not even getting into weird things you could do with live process migration and NUMA and memory hotplug if you want to make both the host's and guest's processors available without an effective reboot/hibernation/sleep step.)

An aside: before it was revealed what exactly the Nintendo Switch was (a portable with a variable clock rate that overclocks itself when plugged into a heatsink dock), I had a suspicion that it might use this architecture: a portable that just turns itself into a disk and Bluetooth controller for a more powerful non-portable when plugged into it.

> You want to be running the "guest" since that's where all your work is (just having access to the disk isn't really enough, you want to run your apps/settings/etc). I think we may see a move towards docks with graphics cards, but the CPU and RAM probably want to stay on the guest computer.

Like the Razer Core, with USB-C. Yep, I can see this happening, but also remote gaming where you rent the workstation and just get a thin client which only has to be able to download and see the 'movie'.

Gaming-wise, I can also see use cases where you want to get additional CPU power.

> Like the Razer Core, with USB-C.

Yeah, I was thinking of my Surface Book (with the graphics card in the base).

> Yep, I can see this happening, but also remote gaming where you rent the workstation and just get a thin client which only has to be able to download and see the 'movie'.

I suspect the inherent latency will always argue against remote gaming - especially for the kind of games where you most want extra computing power.

> Yeah, I was thinking of my Surface Book (with the graphics card in the base).

Excellent example. In theory it could also work with devices like the newest MBPs.

> I suspect the inherent latency will always argue against remote gaming - especially for the kind of games where you most want extra computing power.

Not necessarily. FPS and perhaps LoL, sure. RPG such as WoW, not really.

Not sure about AR/VR.

If one doesn't have/want a PC workstation with a strong graphics card, and one does have a laptop, why not just a Razer Core or akin device?

Until we can just have those in the device itself. But that is gonna take a while!

I have Dell XPS 15 with quad-core i7, 512 SSD, dedicated GPU and 16 GB of RAM. It's plenty for anything I want to do ... with the added benefit of mobility. Why desktop?

These days if you're purchasing a computer the default option is a laptop. You have to have a good reason not to go with a laptop.

I have a NUC, which is the size of a video cassette and thus doesn't consume much desk space.

Once you plug in a mouse, keyboard, and external screens, a laptop then just becomes clutter. So, I mainly use my laptop for on-the-go such as at university libraries.

For awhile I had a desktop with two 24 inch monitors, and a retina Mac Book Pro. I would always use the Mac Book because after having the Retina screen there and on the phone, standard PC monitors looked fuzzy. I stopped using the desktop and eventually junked it.

I'm considering getting a desktop again but would only get the Retina iMac.

It doesn't have to be either or. Use the best of two worlds i.e. laptop for mobility and desktop for the rest. Various forms of sync and remote desktop aid where needed.

I am of similar views. The feel of both performance and real keyboards/screens boosts my productivity significantly but I can see how others are able to get things done on a laptop.

I also dislike laptops but they are nice in that you can work anywhere. Nothing really beats a nice mouse, keyboard, and 5k screen.

Um... you can connect all of those in a laptop.

Well, maybe not a 5K display, but 4K should be more than fine.

> Nothing really beats a nice mouse

vim :^)

edit: How little humor do people have, christ. Can't even make a joke. people get triggered too easily.

Why not have both?