I was tempted to make a joke about the Porsche or Corvette being luxury vehicles but I've noticed we spend way too much time nitpicking after fine details. It deflects from the thesis to do so and I'm not a fan. I can understand GP's point just fine without getting into quibbles over that.

Instead I took umbrage with the idea that a $3000 laptop which is our primary tool is a luxury item. I think it's one of many signs that we're a bunch of cheapskates. Other industries have different perspectives on this.

While I tend towards being a cheapskate on many physical things I also understand diminishing returns, and to me once you hop to the other side of the price-performance curve I define that as a luxury. For me, I get a lot more value out of a laptop and accompanying software ecosystem that helps me be more productive for my typical development cycle, and a lot of the stuff at the OS and above is pretty darn subjective and context-sensitive to the kind of development cycle.

From an overall productivity standpoint, because the biggest bottleneck to programmer productivity is mental and physical health, data would imply that I should spend more on exercise equipment, a better chair that keeps me from getting injured than on a laptop that gets maybe another 10% faster compile of already less than 30 seconds (incremental compilation anyone?) for the $1k difference between a 15" Macbook Pro and a 13" Macbook Air. No amount of money I dump into any hardware or software will make AWS provision its resources everything faster either, and that's what I sit and wait on the most for feedback rather than direct code compiles. And a fat CI / CD server is not run on my laptop unless I'm running Jenkins locally or Concourse.

Am I really a cheapskate if I can do my job just as well on a $1k machine as on a $6k one? The new Mac Pro is overkill for many development workflows.

For a great craftsman, I expect them to get something out of any tool that a lesser person could accomplish. They can make a good tool do things I wouldn't think of, but can also work around the limitations of a lesser tool.

So if you couldn't get anything out of a better tool, I'd start asking uncomfortable questions about you.

Do I think I as a developer could leverage a Mac Pro to speed up my code-build-test cycle? If the whole team had them, then I'd absolutely tune our tools to use the extra cores, monitors, etc. We are better at troubleshooting when the feedback loop is shorter.

But to me the Mac Pro is more of a tool for designers. If a designer is turning in the same work on a 1k machine I would ask about our process first, the designer second, and the tool third.

They run a network of containerized linux machines.

On a serious note: why doesn't Apple do any modern container/virtualization?

For example, why can't you set up containers for different versions of xcode and build your code in the appropriate one? or farm it out?

Then they're waiting for a Taycan.