That's a good point, and outside of my personal development workflow. Condolences!

I don't get this argument. Run local for basic testing, else use it as an ssh machine. I work with super computers. The power of my development machine usually doesn't make much difference, I spend a lot of my time ssh'd anyways. So if something has a nice screen, good battery life, and a comfortable keyboard then I'm good. As long as it works for presentations and can compile my latex files, I'm good.

I don't see Airs as development platforms. They are portable platforms.

It doesn't even take that much. Docker Desktop on MacOS is widely known to be terrible and have extremely poor performance. Running webpack-dev-server with filewatching through Docker nearly grinds my 2017 Macbook Pro to a halt. Obviously most node/webpack/JS stuff can run natively on Mac but it's not uncommon to see dev stacks that dockerize everything because that's how the production stack works.

You can improve this substantially on MacOS using docker-sync (the issues with Docker performance on Mac are primarily related to the file system)

I wrote a little about this; it's for Rails but the same ideas apply:

https://medium.com/@bdcravens/fixing-docker-for-mac-and-rail...

docker-sync helps a little bit, and so does limiting Docker to 1 CPU core, but I still routinely get spurts 100% CPU from Docker that despite supposedly being on 1 core still grind my machine to a halt.

I often have up to 10 VSCode editors, an IntelliJ window and two browser instances open.

Add some server processes, UI watchers/builders, and my Thinkpad starts to freeze up. In an ideal world, I would have a low-latency remote desktop going, but even in 2020 it seems like a pipe dream.

I’ve been using paperspace cloud machines with parsec for low latency Remote Desktop. Originally used it for gaming. It’s remarkable how good it is for everything else too.

5ms encoding lag, 10ms network lag, totally workable.

That's my work pretty much except not k8s but it does spin up between 4 and 8 containers (depending on which system) some of which require 4GB of RAM or more (don't ask..).

On the flip side standard issue laptops are now 16" Macbook Pro's with 32GB of RAM which is pretty hardware.

Just because there are needs for high-end CPUs for some developers it doesn't mean that all programmers need them, as OP's comment implied.