There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation that are hard to beat with a laptop.

If you're compiling code, you generally want as much concurrency as you can get, as well as great single core speed when the task parallelism runs out. There aren't really any laptops with high core counts, and even when you have something with horsepower, you run into thermal limits. You can try and make do with remoting into a machine with more cores, but then you're not really using your laptop, it might as well be a Chromebook.

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intrasight 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation

I've historically built my own workstations. My premise is that my most recent build may be my last or second to last. In ten years, I will still have a workstation - but not one that I build from parts.

	▲	barrkel 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I also built my own, since the late 90s. But I'm not building my newest: a 96 core threadripper with 768GB ram. I went with a specialist to ensure it works compatibly. I expect it to last me a good few years, and I don't really anticipate replacing it with anything too similar.

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whatever1 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

All of these can be done much better on the cloud (I can spawn as big of a machine as my pocket can afford). And with today’s tooling (vs code & jetbrains remote development) you don’t even notice that you develop on a remote machine and not your local.

So the desktop developer market is for those who are not willing to use cloud. And this is a very small minority.

(FYI I am not endorsing cloud over local development, I just state where the market is)

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tekne 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Much of my PhD thesis was/is done traveling in places with poor, poor Internet. Currently on my laptop in rural Calabria, where I pull a blazing fast 60 kbps, sometimes. Would be very irritating waiting for the compiler/theorem prover to go brr, remotely… I can hardly edit a Google doc out here!

This doesn’t contradict your minority point, but it really does make me appreciate local-first.

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simgt 3 days ago | parent [-]

CS thesis that requires traveling, tell us more! What's the topic? :)

	▲	tekne a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I work on verifying compiler optimization passes, mainly using weird category theory, so the traveling is mostly orthogonal!
	▲	jll29 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Perhaps the Italian girlfriend was not where the mainframe on which the theorem prover ran? ;) If I had been in Italy, perhaps my Ph.D. would never have been finished...

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LtdJorge 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, until the day you get an attack by a North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe, losing your gigabit+ connection and your entire set of tools with it.

	▲	whatever1 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I mean there are also prepers with power generators, solar panels and dry food and water tanks waiting for the apocalypse to happen. Again this is a very small minority.

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hulitu 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> of these can be done much better on the cloud. If you forget about the latency, yes. Suddenly your "cc a.c -o a.o" becomes " issue the command, wait for the server to start it, ping pong between your teminal and server for messages, final file available on the cloud"

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barrkel 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed I use such a machine in my day job. 64 slow Epyc cores, presumably power efficient. But even on that machine, builds are slower than they could be, and distributed builds are the way.