13 inch screen is a toy usable only for browsing social media and not for real work.
13 seems to have emerged as the generally best compromise for using at your desk and traveling. Even a 15” is still small relative to an external monitor and is getting large to fly with.
You don't use your laptop as just a thin client connecting to a more powerful machine over the Internet?
yeah real programmers only use the biggest screens, the bestest cpus, and discrete graphics
That's a take, for sure. I use a 14" as my daily driver. Sure, I plug it into a big monitor when I'm at my desk, but it's perfectly usable standalone.
I used to use an 11" as my daily driver (and that was before retina-resolutions were a thing). It wasn't ideal, but it was fine for development work.