> If your job is not technology related you can do it with a 5 years old laptop of any brand

That really depends on what technology you're working with. In general, if you're not working with a bloated JS project or a multi-million line C++ codebase, a computer from the last decade will do just fine as long as it has 8-16 GB of RAM.

I mean these days the difference between an i5 and i7 is almost non-existent to me as when possible I disable hyperthreading out of an abundance of precaution.

There's a lot of "real work" in tech that can be handled on an i5.

Most embedded programming work could easily be done on an i5 from a decade ago.

> We buy new machines because we always need more power

We need more power because people keep developing bloated software for newer machines.

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Can you define to me what real work is? Without simply saying "it's work that needs more than an i5 to handle", that is.

> computer from the last decade will do just fine as long as it has 8-16 GB of RAM.

That was my point as well, if you aren't working on anything that requires power you don't need a "working machine"

But if you do, the A13 is not a solution

> We need more power because people keep developing

I'm not the one putting hundreds of ML/AI models in production

But I do enjoy having a system that makes it possible to test an entire stack on a single machine, something that just a few years ago required multiple VMs and complex setups

Even if you're developing puzzle games for low level Android phones an i5 is not enough

You can not believe it, but it's the truth

> Can you define to me what real work is?

Of course I can, even though you can't define what it is that can be done with a baseline i5 that qualifies as "real work"

A typical dev will do some, all, or more than these things

- open up an editor, with multiple files open, with integrated language server, linter/formatter, background error checker

- open up an ide, jetbrains, Android studio, Xcode, on a middle sized project, with a few tens dependencies and start working on it

- launch a maven/gradle compile

- launch a docker build

- launch a docker-compose up with a main application and 2 or 3 services (DB, redis, API backend)

- launch the training on any of the ml/ai framework available. Of course you'll launch it on a very limited subset, it's gonna be slow anyway

- process gigabytes (not even in the tens of gigabytes) of data

- on my i3 even apt upgrade is slow. That's why I use it as a media player and not as work machine.

If your definition of working machine says that they were nearly impossible a few years ago, your standards are probably too high.

These machines have become very capable. If we don't move the goalposts, they can be working machines.

I really doubt they are, I'm an average programmer

My laptop is a working tool for professionals, if I use it as a dumb typewriter I don't really need modern generation CPUs, a Pentium 2 would be enough

Ram is a more pressing issue these days, given the amount of bloated software one has to run just to page a colleague about something (yes slack, I'm talking about you, but not only you...)

When I am at my computer working I want it to do things for me while I do something else effortlessly, without noticing something else is going on

If I have to watch it while it finishes the job, it would be just a glorified washing machine

And it means it is underpowered for my workload

That's why people usually need more power than the baseline, because the baseline is the human using it, the computer's job is not to just display pixels at command, it's much more than that

Imagine you are an administrative employee, you are typing a report on your laptop, you're doing real work BUT you're not doing real work on your laptop or to better put it your laptop is sitting idle most of the time which is not real work for it

Work is a physics concept, real work means there is force involved and energy consumed

If the energy is minimal or the force applied almost zero, there is almost zero work done

Simple as that

> real work means there is force involved and energy consumed

See my reply earlier in the thread. I think the primary source of contention here is that you assume everyone should only think of the definition you give for the phrase "real work".

Obviously many of them don't.

> Even if you're developing puzzle games for low level Android phones an i5 is not enough

  $ sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string
  Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5287U CPU @ 2.90GHz

Works just fine for Android development.

Hey, do you mind me asking what mac you're using? (Or hackintosh?)

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015).

Nice, that's a good model. I have a lot of coworkers with the same setup and dreading the upgrade (mostly because of the touchbar).

Yup, I bought that one within says of the October 2016 because the new ones were outrageously expensive compared to what I was used to and I was not willing to give up inverted-T ;)

It really does not

There are tools that work and tools for professionals, tools work, professional tools are for people that do it as a daily job and their job depends on them

Your opinion of "what works" is not universally shared by everyone.

You don't know the details of saagarjha's work developing on Android (unless, perhaps, you actually know them in real life, which seems unlikely given the way you responded), and neither do I. saagarjha is the one best able to determine what works for them.

If your point is that that having more resources avaiable to you can make you more productive, that's fine. It's always nice to have as beefy of a machine as possible.

However, not everyone has that luxury. Businesses have budgets, and most developers I know don't get to set their own budget for equipment. Sometimes you are lucky, and the money is there, and your management is willing to spend it. Sometimes that is not the case. Regardless, my primary development machine right now is a 5-year-old laptop, and I get plenty of development work done with it.

The way you worded this latest response makes it sound as if you are saying that I am not a professional, and my tools are just "toys", because I don't work on an 8 core machine with 64GB of RAM. I don't know if that is your intention, but if it is it is both inaccurate and insulting.

> Your opinion of "what works" is not universally shared by everyone.

Earth orbiting around the Sun wasn't either.

See the problem is not if you are a professional or not, but if the tool is.

If I do the laundry and the washing machine takes 4 hours to complete a cycle I'm still washing my clothes, but I'm not doing it using a professional tool

There's no place where I implied people using less than optimal tools are not professionals, I'm talking exclusively about tools.