3 ms·

Buy a really cheap laptop and remote desktop (assuming it's Windows) into your your PC. Desktop PCs are way way way way more powerful than those shiny MacBook

Buy a really cheap laptop and remote desktop (assuming it's Windows) into your your PC. Desktop PCs are way way way way more powerful than those shiny MacBook Pros. I have 2 desktops (3930k, Threadripper), a 13 macbook pro, a 15" XPS (2017) and the original retina iMac 27" and hands down the desktop machines (even the 3930k which is from 2011) beat the laptops in performance (yes they all have SSDs, save the macbook pro, they all have 32gb of RAM.) I don't get the appeal of doing development on hardware that's optimized for mobility, especially if you spend 99% of the time working in the same place (like me.)

laythea 9y ago
I develop on a macbook and the good thing is that it forces you to develop efficient software, so when it runs on a desktop it runs oh so nice :)
- GiorgioG 9y ago
  I guess it depends on the tooling you're using to develop said efficient software. I use Visual Studio + Resharper all day long and it's a hog. I've used Xcode & Android Studio on my iMac and it's just a better, faster experience than on a MacBook Pro.
noir_lord 9y ago
Up to a threshold more power is good (and that threshold varies based on what you are doing). I have two machines I use, the Desktop at work (Ryzen 1700/32GB) and my laptop (T470P - i7-7700P/16GB (for now)) 95% of the time I don't notice the difference and even where there is one it's simply often not noticeably different. Take my incremental webpack build times with Typescript and some multi-thread hacking around, on my work desktop it takes ~545ms if I touch a bunch of stuff, same change on the Thinkpad is 620ms and on the Ryzen I give it more cores to play with. Hilariously (to me) some things on the Laptop run faster (Selenium tests and anything involving heavy disk I/O (Thinkpad is NVMe, Desktop is SATA SSD). The 5% cases are when I need to do something that really benefits from more and faster cores (like rip 60,000 hidpi multipage tiff's to multipage jpeg compressed PDF's - don't ask...) there the difference was huge (Ryzen finished in <50% of the time of the Thinkpad).
lonesword 9y ago
The desktop is not that powerful. The only decent thing inside is a gtx 950, which let me play Witcher 3 in medium-high and I was contend with that. The cpu is a 6th gen i3 with 8gigs of RAM and an SSD. Works well for what I need to do. The main reason for me to assemble a PC was that if some component fails, I can just replace that. Having to discard my student laptop because of an Nvidia chipset failure left a bad taste in my mouth.

laythea 9y ago

I develop on a macbook and the good thing is that it forces you to develop efficient software, so when it runs on a desktop it runs oh so nice :)

GiorgioG 9y ago
I guess it depends on the tooling you're using to develop said efficient software. I use Visual Studio + Resharper all day long and it's a hog. I've used Xcode & Android Studio on my iMac and it's just a better, faster experience than on a MacBook Pro.

noir_lord 9y ago

Up to a threshold more power is good (and that threshold varies based on what you are doing). I have two machines I use, the Desktop at work (Ryzen 1700/32GB) and my laptop (T470P - i7-7700P/16GB (for now)) 95% of the time I don't notice the difference and even where there is one it's simply often not noticeably different. Take my incremental webpack build times with Typescript and some multi-thread hacking around, on my work desktop it takes ~545ms if I touch a bunch of stuff, same change on the Thinkpad is 620ms and on the Ryzen I give it more cores to play with. Hilariously (to me) some things on the Laptop run faster (Selenium tests and anything involving heavy disk I/O (Thinkpad is NVMe, Desktop is SATA SSD). The 5% cases are when I need to do something that really benefits from more and faster cores (like rip 60,000 hidpi multipage tiff's to multipage jpeg compressed PDF's - don't ask...) there the difference was huge (Ryzen finished in <50% of the time of the Thinkpad).

lonesword 9y ago

The desktop is not that powerful. The only decent thing inside is a gtx 950, which let me play Witcher 3 in medium-high and I was contend with that. The cpu is a 6th gen i3 with 8gigs of RAM and an SSD. Works well for what I need to do. The main reason for me to assemble a PC was that if some component fails, I can just replace that. Having to discard my student laptop because of an Nvidia chipset failure left a bad taste in my mouth.