It also seems that once you festoon the laptop with replacements for its components - monitor, keyboard, mouse, disk drives, camera, mike, etc., what have you got? An expensive desktop that performs poorly. > repairs I've replaced a couple screens on laptops. It's a fair amount of work, and in the meantime your laptop is dead while you await the arrival of the new screen. I keep a spare monitor around, and when a mon…
It's all a matter of use cases, sounds like you need a desktop. As for me, I have a ninth GEN Intel laptop that weighs less than 6 pounds connected to a docking station that easily let me use my audio interface, all my peripherals, external hard drive's and dual monitor set up. I often have to take the laptop with me to do work in other locations which completely rules out how cumbersome it would be to do this with a…
The only thing you really need to move between laptop and desktop is an external USB disk drive. You can use it directly, or sync the files. I wrote a program a long time ago to sync file systems.
Commuting to work with just a disk drive worked fine for me when I worked in an office.
I'm just not attracted to the idea of having everything on my laptop, because of the significant risk of having it lost or stolen. When I use a laptop, I just put on it what I'll need, never any personal things.
It's all a matter of use cases, sounds like you need a desktop. As for me, I have a ninth GEN Intel laptop that weighs less than 6 pounds connected to a docking station that easily let me use my audio interface, all my peripherals, external hard drive's and dual monitor set up. I often have to take the laptop with me to do work in other locations which completely rules out how cumbersome it would be to do this with a…
The only thing you really need to move between laptop and desktop is an external USB disk drive. You can use it directly, or sync the files. I wrote a program a long time ago to sync file systems. Commuting to work with just a disk drive worked fine for me when I worked in an office. I'm just not attracted to the idea of having everything on my laptop, because of the significant risk of having it lost or stolen. When…
I'm intimately familiar with syncing, but many of the programs I use have more than just the external assets, they also have internal cache files that represent the states of various projects at any given time. It would be very difficult for me to synchronize these in a safe way especially considering that they're scattered across various hardcoded relative folder structures. And honestly it'll be more of a pain to have to worry about.
I've never felt like my laptop was under significant risk of being stolen, even when I'm traveling overseas. But I'm very careful with it and I keep track of it at all times - putting all of your personal data on a single external hard drive just means that that's the thing that is at risk of being stolen instead.
I also use a combination of automated encrypted back ups via crash plan and bit locker on my laptop. Even in the extremely unlikely event that my laptop was stolen, it's highly unlikely they be able to get access to my actual data.
Having a single laptop lends itself well toward my nomadic lifestyle. It's easily powerful enough even with a mobile CPU and of course there is less heat and power usage associated as well. And I'm pretty sure that I am immeasurably more of a power user than 99% of the general populace (virtual machines, 3D modeling, music recording, video rendering, backend dev work, VR, hell even the occasional triple A game). So if the processor/gpu meet my needs I'm pretty sure that everyone else will be fine too.
It just seems like in this instance our use cases are very different, which is fine.
So you don't share confidences with a trusted friend? I'm sad for you.
What the heck are you people saying that could end your career? I say things that would get me fired but not things that would prevent me from ever getting hired again.
The goalposts of what is considered career ending is always moving. Something you say today could not be career ending, but it could be career ending when somebody digs up dirt on you in 10 years.
Just look at the whole wokeness movement which has taken root in the last few years and compare what was acceptable to say in 2010 vs what is acceptable to say in 2020.
I worked for a while at ISI. They let people choose their hardware for a desktop and laptop with a generous budget. One of the guys on the team had some monster gaming laptop as his laptop—I think it was a 20" screen or something on that beast.
Wow! I didn't know they made laptops that big!
They haven't for a while. I did a google search to see if I was misremembering and found that 17" screens are the high end for most (if not all) contemporary manufacturers.