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I have a 4 year old W530 and I built my own PC this year for the first time in over a decade. There's no comparison. If you can deal with the lack of portabilit
by lj3 9y ago
I have a 4 year old W530 and I built my own PC this year for the first time in over a decade. There's no comparison. If you can deal with the lack of portability, you'll see a huge benefit.
Also, if you're a programmer, there's no such thing as "most hardware is overkill anyway." Not in this age of bloated and slow software and tools. It's worth it anytime you can shave a couple of seconds off the time it takes to compile and/or interpret software. When it's something you do a couple hundred times a day, the time you save adds up fast.
- herbst 9y agoI build a $3000 beast like half a year before i bought the laptop. I also had a MBP 2015 before. While given i dont do compiled language very often i dont fully agree. My VM startup times barely differ (dont most scripting languages boot single core anyway?) but i notice a real difference when working with huge databases compared to my MBP because i simply have better RAM and a faster SSD. However surely my desktop build was even faster.
- lj3 9y agoYes, single core speeds matter quite a bit. I can get faster single core clock speeds for a desktop for a lot cheaper. It is useful to have a lot of cores for running multiple VMs, but I would agree it's not worth spending 3k+ for a 16 core machine unless you're doing something that can utilize those cores. In my mind, where the desktop rules is ram, bus speeds and cost. You can build multiple desktops for the price of a similarly priced MBP.