I really like laptops for research and prototype stages of programming: my Macbook works great at finding, curating, reading, and composing documents; handling

I really like laptops for research and prototype stages of programming: my Macbook works great at finding, curating, reading, and composing documents; handling email, IM, VOIP, VPNs, etc to actually communicate with services; dealing with internet search and websites for services (github, aws, etc); and I find that I even do better at writing "naive" implementations of things with just some paper and a laptop at a coffee shop, because it forces me to skip over most of the technical details (eg, efficient file IO) and just write the essence of the program (ie, the main algorithm or idea I'm trying to implement). For actually writing a finished production-ready product, a desktop with several monitors and a real keyboard is preferred. But being able to switch between the two modes -- research and creative, focused and technical -- gets the best results.