When I was in the market for a new machine, I had the same attitude. As I was about to hit "Buy" on a standard issue $2k MBP, my wife said, "What if we got you a top of the line machine?"

I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...

2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!

For the ability to run our full server-side application stack locally, including all services and as much of the test suite as possible, as well as the profilers, debuggers and telemetry tools to debug issues. Way faster to develop when you can have a change running live in about 3 seconds instead of 5 minutes, run targeted tests in seconds and a full test suite in a few minutes.

That's fair, I've never worked in a domain where I need to run that locally. Is there a reason to not just SSH into a workstation that can run it?

Not op here, but: i have a build box i ssh to, but when on the go: planes, taxis, etc. its annoying to constantly have to connect. Slightly. Having a fallback, fast local laptop is a convenience. Tho I do travel a lot - usually >100 flights per year.

1. I have team members who live and work in very remote places, SSH-ing from there is possible but terrible.

2. We're all in the on call rotation and being able to reproduce a bug from literally anywhere is valuable.

3. We all spend at least a few weeks a year traveling for work, and hotel/conference center/random office wifi can be terrible.

We do have cloud based builds and some dev environments we can "check out" as needed for running stuff async or certain tests that can't be run on a laptop (e.g. Nvidia GPU specific functionality, certain functionality that requires a real server network instead of a local virtual network, large scale tests)

Standard issue at our company. There's just some apps that are huge, especially legacy ones.

Big test suites. I have one project hitting 35 mins on m1 max, vs around 12 min on the m5 max, vs. 7 min on the linux box I keep in the basement. Unit tests, integration tests, headless browser with webgpu stuff.