To be absolutely crystal clear:

I am not saying don't use a laptop.

I am not saying you have to use cloud inference.

I am saying using a laptop for inference is dumb. If you want private inference:

- use a dgx spark or similar plugged in at home

- set up tailscale so you can connect from anywhere

- use your phone as a hotspot on the go

- work on your laptop, using tailscale to connect to your home inference server if you're on the go

This gets you everything except for the few hours you might be on an airplane.

100% agreed, and people saying they need a laptop are missing the point; I wasn't saying don't use laptops, either.

The simple point I'm always trying to make is that area vs volume is a fundamental physical difference regarding cooling, which is critical for high performance applications (that's why they're considering an RTX Spark in the first place, right?).

There's so much more I could say about my Strix Halo machine, which fits in the palm of my hand and I have a wonderful portable screen and keyboard+touchpad (and only cost me 2k with 128 GB fast memory, idles at 4w, amazing 32 thread Zen 5 CPU with AVX-512, ...), but it's either preaching to the choir or pissing against the wind.