4 ms·

i had a 12in macbook and used it for the year i transitioned from design to dev. it ran our rails+pg+angular dev environment like a champ; the one adaptation i

i had a 12in macbook and used it for the year i transitioned from design to dev. it ran our rails+pg+angular dev environment like a champ; the one adaptation i had to make was to cut out a bunch of atom plugins i didn't need. i never needed a second port because, well, it's a netbook. the butterfly issues did bite me, after two years of heavy use, and the replacement was free. these days my work takes up too much memory for that, but my ideal is still a superlight laptop with just enough compute--i have a 14" now, but will probably go back to a base air if it's available with 32gb ram. i am happy to wait a little longer for compile, or drop from 120fps to 60, if it means i can fit my work in my purse again

kjellsbells 3y ago
Thanks for this analysis. Curious what the HN commentariat is shopping for today. Trading up to more power in a machine seems a fruitless endeavour: I'll never have as much memory or CPU as I could rent in AWS or Azure, and I'm sufficiently well-connected to both that running remote desktop or SSH is feasible virtually all the time. So is it worth paying top dollar for what is essentially a terminal onto a remote computer? Probably not, but the urge to have local compute capability is deeply ingrained.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > I'll never have as much memory or CPU as I could rent in AWS or Azure, and I'm sufficiently well-connected to both that running remote desktop or SSH is feasible virtually all the time. But do you actually do that? I don't use cloud computing for my desktop activities and I wouldn't, for privacy reasons (after all, the cloud is just somebody else's computer). I wonder who would. The experience is not really ideal if you're used to Mac either, as cloud Macs are incredibly expensive. So you'd end up with Windows or Linux. We had one mini in AWS at work for testing purposes but it burned 800 euros a month, meaning we could actually buy one M1 mini a month! It made no sense.
  - kjellsbells 3y ago
    This is my own n=1 sample, maybe not representative. Agree that the full remote desktop model is too costly right now. I dont need a lot of juice to run an email client, a browser, IDE, and a terminal. Those could run locally on 16G of RAM. I do need a lot of juice to compile code, train models, etc. So maybe I can get away with a $1000 laptop augmented with a few cloud VMs that get spun up for a few hours every month, instead of a laptop that costs three times that and weighs multiple kilos.
wkat4242 3y ago
For me it was really the keyboard. It was just literally unusable for me. The non-existent travel and awful feedback, it was just something I would not use. If my work would buy me one I'd literally refuse it :) It wasn't the reliability issues even, just the horrible feel.

kjellsbells 3y ago

Thanks for this analysis. Curious what the HN commentariat is shopping for today. Trading up to more power in a machine seems a fruitless endeavour: I'll never have as much memory or CPU as I could rent in AWS or Azure, and I'm sufficiently well-connected to both that running remote desktop or SSH is feasible virtually all the time. So is it worth paying top dollar for what is essentially a terminal onto a remote computer? Probably not, but the urge to have local compute capability is deeply ingrained.

wkat4242 3y ago
> I'll never have as much memory or CPU as I could rent in AWS or Azure, and I'm sufficiently well-connected to both that running remote desktop or SSH is feasible virtually all the time. But do you actually do that? I don't use cloud computing for my desktop activities and I wouldn't, for privacy reasons (after all, the cloud is just somebody else's computer). I wonder who would. The experience is not really ideal if you're used to Mac either, as cloud Macs are incredibly expensive. So you'd end up with Windows or Linux. We had one mini in AWS at work for testing purposes but it burned 800 euros a month, meaning we could actually buy one M1 mini a month! It made no sense.
- kjellsbells 3y ago
  This is my own n=1 sample, maybe not representative. Agree that the full remote desktop model is too costly right now. I dont need a lot of juice to run an email client, a browser, IDE, and a terminal. Those could run locally on 16G of RAM. I do need a lot of juice to compile code, train models, etc. So maybe I can get away with a $1000 laptop augmented with a few cloud VMs that get spun up for a few hours every month, instead of a laptop that costs three times that and weighs multiple kilos.

wkat4242 3y ago

For me it was really the keyboard. It was just literally unusable for me. The non-existent travel and awful feedback, it was just something I would not use. If my work would buy me one I'd literally refuse it :) It wasn't the reliability issues even, just the horrible feel.