30% hit to performance isn't the same as 30% hit to power.

Right now, I'm typing text into an HTML textarea element. Most of my laptop's power is going to the LCD backlight, I would guess. Dunno, though. Maybe some tab in the background is sucking up 100% CPU not doing anything, in which case, power consumption is the same. In one scenario, that tab is sucking up less compute.

If you're sitting in a cafe, using your laptop to train machine learning algorithms, you might lose 30% battery time, but you're probably doing something wrong.

And I would gladly pay 30% more on my AWS bills for more reliable machines. It depends on what you're doing, but for what I'm doing, server costs are a rounding error in our budget. Most money goes to people.

But I don't think I'd pay 30% more in AWS bills since a lot of what they do is IO-bound and not CPU-bound.

I think the tougher calculation would be on GPUs. At least for what I do, on the rest of the computer, it's a no-brainer.

I made a mistake of buying an expensive gamer laptop (Razer) with a strong Intel CPU and NVIDIA 2070 RTX GPU, and I just didn't like it. Sure, I could do machine learning on the laptop, but I gave up so much flexibility in my life, as the battery usually died in a few hours even when I was just web browsing.

Right now I just bought an M1 MacbookPro machine, and I love it (especially the great screen that I can use in the bright sun, and the instant on that finally feels like a phone/tablet), although I prefer the 14/15 inch form factor (maybe an AMD Zen 2 laptop would have been a great choice as well, I'm not sure).

You’d better see those numbers, then: desktops saw a major rebound since COVID. Employers are buying their remote employees home-office workstations, rather than laptops. A work laptop (as we’ve mostly stabilized on for the last decade) doesn’t make as much sense when the employer knows they won’t be asking the employee to commute, let alone travel for work. May as well get more bang for your buck with a fixed installation.

Sadly, my laptop doesn't devote 100% of its power budget to CPU.