alt Hacker NewsThat's interesting. (I mean that genuinely. Sometimes when people say that, they mean "You seem crazy")
What's the appeal there? Doing big-RAM-requirement stuff that just won't run on a laptop?
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Back in the Intel Mac era, it used to be that running even a single docker/vagrant container would bring any MacBook to its knees, so having a nice beefy machine for doing the Real Work was useful while the MBs were mainly used for lighter work loads while on the go.
Nowadays, the M series chips are so powerful that I’ve not had a real need to use my Studio and work mainly using my M2 Air.
The whole point of having always on machines is you can close your laptop and the rest of the work keeps on going. Like you can leave home and work keeps on keeping on. I've been doing that for like 30 years. In combination, especially if you have a good laptop, then you can have best of the both worlds.
It’s not that what I do can’t fit on a laptop, but rather that I prefer to minimize weight in the machines I travel with, and if I need power while I’m out there’s always macOS’ built in remote desktop capabilities which work quite nicely with Tailscale.
So if I’m going to have a machine always sitting on my desk at home anyway, it may as well be a desktop with fewer compromises and no battery to slowly degrade while never getting used.
A nice bonus is that it takes a lot more to make the fans on a desktop noisy relative to what it takes on an MBP, and if there’s one thing I dislike about computers it’s fan noise.