alt Hacker NewsYeah I never get this complaint about 16" laptops. Hell, I don't really get 16" laptops at all: they're huge! You're making a very strange trade off: they're only barely portable, and you lose a lot of the power and flexibility you'd get with a desktop.
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I have a 17" XPS and it's great as a computer for that floor of the house. Ie: for sitting at the kitchen table or the couch. I have a 13" for portability which is great because it's so small and light.
MacBook pros these days are really heavy. Having a MBP and an Air is actually a fair inventory but the MBP is just so expensive.
I do like the desktop form factor of keyboard and monitor but the 17"er is nice to use while I'm up making coffee in the morning or while sitting on the couch at night
I have one. It's my main computer. I can use it on a desk, on my lap, at a cafe.
I find smaller laptops much harder to understand because they compromise the coding experience so much.
My vision gets worse as I age. A larger screen lets me continue working with the same amount of code, etc. as when I was younger with a smaller screen.
The majority of 16"+ machines are being made specifically as portable desktops. The target audience is college kids. If you live in a dorm that you have to move in and out of yearly, it is leagues easier to travel with a bulky laptop than even a small form factor desktop machine, because of all the peripherals needed to run it.
> 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.