> Even 5-10% productivity gain can offset the 2.6x difference. I think this heavily depends on what you're gaining. I think for a lot of tasks or scenarios it'

> Even 5-10% productivity gain can offset the 2.6x difference. I think this heavily depends on what you're gaining. I think for a lot of tasks or scenarios it's not worth it. Especially around things like video encoding. For example if you're a solo worker and you need to batch render 10 hours of video and your computer is essentially unusable for that time you would do this action overnight. If rendering everything finishes in 5 hours instead of 6 hours that doesn't matter because you're sleeping. If you need to render a quick 1 off video that takes 10 minutes there's a bunch of semi-productive things you can do while that finishes and it finishing in 9 minutes instead won't make a noticeable difference. Now you might say if you're a professional video renderer you'll want to render videos during business hours as fast as possible in which case if you're operating at that scale you wouldn't use your daily laptop to do the rendering. You would remotely render it on a dedicated server (this is how most "pro" places work). This way you can comfortably edit video #2 while video #1 is rendering. Even 6 year old hardware that costs $800 all-in can give you sub-100ms code reload times in most Rails, Django, Phoenix, Laravel and Node web apps even with Webpack or esbuild running -- even running within Docker on Windows (WSL 2) or native Linux. Also all major code editors can run well without input latency. That's a decently large amount of "pro" web development use cases. Unless you're doing hardcore continuous compiling in a spot where you expect to do this sequentially on your main laptop I can't really see a 10% gain being worth a 2.5x+ cost increase for most dev work.