Re:Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet developme...
by robocat on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @10:55PM
(#19386160)
I do some of my work where there is no internet (except satellite).
I happen to be CPU/memory/SSD bound for some of my development work. A four year old 4k laptop with equivalent speed and battery life!? - this one will pay for itself fairly soon by improving my productivity.
The 8950HK processor is fast[1] and NVMe is way faster than SATA.
I just use the integrated Intel GPU (I don't play games on my work laptop. If I were to play games, I would use a dedicated gaming rig or console).
I am expecting that in 4 years time I can get equivalent improvements to productivity by getting a replacement laptop (or even better, retire to a pacific island!).
[1] Benchmarks are not the answer, but anyway: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2145#family-64-sing...
Re:Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet developme...
by Dylan16807 on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @10:18PM
(#19385999)
Laptops with GPUs tend to be power-hungry and expensive. But the middle ground of a laptop and an external GPU has a good shot at getting even more power per dollar, having sufficient battery life, and still being quite portable.
What does 'last' mean? Any laptop should 'last' 8+ years.
> have a high spec (i9 etc);
I really don't see the point of high-spec laptops for development use. Higher end, high power components just make the batter life worse - reducing the entire point of a mobile device. And you're paying a premium for the mobile version.
A much better option is to have a beefy linux desktop that you perform work on remotely. There is very little reason to locally compile code on a laptop. The economics work much better IMHE... If you have a $2000 budget for instance, you can build a $1300 desktop and buy a $700 laptop which gives you much more power and flexability than buying a single $2000 laptop. So yes, I do think many Google engineers just need a portable terminal to connect to beefy VM's remotely. If you are often working on a mobile internet connection, Mosh works very well for high latency connections.
The $2000 laptop makes sense if you want to game while traveling and/or are using Windows where offloading work to a remote machine is a bit more clunky than just using X11 forwarding and/or tmux over SSH.