Ask HN: Will I *need* a powerful laptop?

I'm a CS undergrad currently working (from home, yay coronavirus) on my thesis project. My laptop is four years old and in perfect condition, I upgraded it to an SSD about a year ago when I could not bear the boot times anymore. However, it has no GPU, a less-than optimal CPU, and a 720p screen.

I noticed that, while most of the heavy lifting (model fitting and any serious benchmarks) is carried out by my uni's computers, I spend a lot of time waiting for code to compile or simulations to start up and run (slowly); it also gets annoying to have to edit code to only use the CPU when compiling on my computer, iron out all the cracks then turn the GPU flags back on when moving to the uni's servers and hope it works without additional hacking.

My screen being low-res also causes issues when some GUI tool was developed in-house by somebody with a bigger screen and it does not fit on mine and can't be resized so I have to move it around.

These are all minor annoyances I can tolerate, but I'm only an undergrad. Will I need a more powerful laptop in the future or can I assume that during my career I will always have access to compute time to do the heavy lifting on? And if I can assume this, on the other hand, what's the point of having a powerful laptop if you work in CS and don't play video games or do video production on your laptop?

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).

So it basically comes down to "minor annoyances" all the way, and the question is whether they pile up enough?

Thinkpads are amazing. I also currently run a T420 from 2011, and it just works rock solid. Thanks to it's great connectivity, I use it right now with two monitors (under Linux) where my much newer 2019 Thinkpad X1 yoga is powered off somewhere in the shelf. I bought it only to have a more lightweight and mobile notebook.

"Newer Tech" is not progressing rapidly. Sure there is improvement, but it's not at an exceptional rate. Which is why a 'good' laptop holds its usability for quite a few years.

If you have an urgent need for a new laptop now, then go out and buy the best one you can afford and 'get your feet on the ladder', so to speak.

Then keep that machine for as long as possible while building up a cash balance that will get you a machine in the future that is 5-10 times as good. Don't buy a replacement just because it is just a little bit newer and better, and you can afford it, but only buy a replacement machine that is a whole lot better.

It may be that it takes you 10 years or more for a replacement machine to reach that level. Hence my reasons for keeping my 10-year old ThinkPad T410s. I keep looking for a replacement these days (Lenovo keeps emailing me teaser ads), but I haven't yet found one that is leaps and bounds better than that old T410S.

EDIT. Did I mention the great connectivity of the T410S? It has all these connectors built-in (4x USBs, RJ-45 Ethernet, Express card, Firewire, eSATA, SD Card, DisplayPort, RJ-11 Phone/Modem) with a removable battery pack and a DVD writer as icing on the cake. All the newer machines don't have those. They expect you to plug in a whole bunch of USB adapters, instead. ... Now do you understand why I'm having so much trouble finding a replacement that's better?