I have a quite similar story to tell. During my time (PhD) at academia, I always had access to plenty of computing resources. What's the point of having a power

I have a quite similar story to tell. During my time (PhD) at academia, I always had access to plenty of computing resources. What's the point of having a powerful laptop? Mostly the possibility to do some heavy lifting also offline (during travel, in hotels with bad WiFi, at conferences, etc) and especially without latency (doing visualization with remote GPU rendering over VNC is fine, but annoyingly slow if you have a slow WiFi). Having said that: being equipped with a decent work station can really feel much better. Maybe you can manage your university to pay for it (sometimes your advisor/professor has some money left).