> they're only barely portable,

Maybe for a very small person or someone who strictly travels light? But I’ve never had any problem with 15” or 16” laptops even while traveling internationally.

> and you lose a lot of the power and flexibility you'd get with a desktop

This isn’t really true any more unless your desktop is a gaming monster or full of multiple drives or something. I can have a 128GB RAM laptop with ultra fast CPU on the go now and it’s not a problem.

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heavyset_go 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You lose a lot of potential performance that comes with both efficient cooling and maintaining throughput in sustained loads.

Laptops are thermally inefficient and require throttling even with active cooling, meaning mobile chipsets are programmed to emit less heat over time. You might hit advertised boost speeds for a little bit, but you can sustain them on properly cooled desktops.

Then there's the fact that mobile chips are TDP capped at much lower rates than desktops, both to save power and to limit heat.

Theoretically, your mobile chipset has a better $/Wh rate, but you leave some performance on the table compared to desktops.

	▲	Aurornis 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You lose a lot of potential performance that comes with both efficient cooling and maintaining throughput in sustained loads. So? I can’t carry a full desktop or even Mini ITX build around just in case I need to run a very long sustained load at absolute peak performance. My 16” MacBook Pro has no problem consuming 80W or more at a time. The fans spin up, but it’s fine. It’s basically near desktop level performance for everything I’m actually doing on the go. I think people talking about the sacrifices of laptops are either comparing to extreme high end builds or they’re stuck thinking about laptops from 6 years ago. A 16” MacBook Pro is basically a high end Mac Mini or a base Mac Studio with a battery and screen built in. They only really start to diverge from the bigger machines when you get into the really expensive Mac Studio builds. > You might hit advertised boost speeds for a little bit, but you can sustain them on properly cooled desktops. If you’re looking for sustained high performance computing then a laptop is a bad choice, I agree. But what are we even talking about here? Even for compiling large codebases or exporting a YouTube length video project, you don’t need the full thermal solution of a desktop anymore. Throttling also isn’t a hard stop where the system comes to a halt any more. It just means the system is 60-80% as fast as it could be, which is still very fast. Throttling has become a bogeyman but really, it’s fine. I’ll take the boost for compiling that big project for several minutes. It’s great. I’m guessing some of these comments are coming from people who haven’t experienced modern MacBook Pro level laptops?