Ask HN: Do you maintain two laptops for work and life?

I use my work laptop because I have an iMac with a huge screen at home where I do most of my personal stuff (personal dev, licensed software I use outside of work, accounting, storage, etc)... I end up having to synch both machines anyway when I'm on the go since I only have one laptop. Most of that synch comes from the cloud anyway. The benefit of having one single laptop is that you can switch contexts when you're traveling, etc. You can connect with work while doing your personal stuff. The iMac is where I store all my personal files like photos, etc.

If you need a second machine for personal stuff I'd highly recommend a larger screen. A desktop machine seems to be a great add-on to your life.

One thing to keep in mind if you use one laptop/phone, if there is ever a case / investigation against your employer your personal device might be called in.

I think it is highly dependent on the work you do.

If your two lifestyles are developer (work), and gamer (leisure), then purchasing 2 workstations to accommodate that could be prohibitively expensive.

However, if you're a developer by day, and say, love to work on your house at night, having a decent development workstation, and a simpler pc for browsing ideas and sketching things out, I would imagine that could be beneficial.

It's all about reviewing the situation that you're in, and seeing what fits your income and organizational needs.

Personally, I switched to a single laptop for everything. I purchased a laptop powerful enough to run WoW in the most vigorous situations, and something that maintains a semi-regular keyboard layout and proper specs to build small to medium sized applications.

Separate. On my personal laptop(s) I can do whatever I want. On my work laptop, things are somewhat locked down. Even if it was not locked down, keeping things separate is just a good idea. It's cleaner.

Here too, all on ultraportable laptop docked to large screen.