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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was going to be about usability not user freedoms.

I dont understand people who work on a tiny 15” screen when they can have multiple large monitors. Yes, you can use externals with your laptop but then you need to invest in a squid (commonly called dock?) that will link your stuff to the laptop. And disconnect/reconnect your stuff when you go away.

Also let’s not forget the full size keyboard. I suppose that’s why no code coding initiatives come out once in a while, those people can’t stand typing on their laptop :)

My solution is one serious desktop with everything and one mid range laptop that I can work on if needed, but avoid like the plague.

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Laptops create freedom from a fixed position, desktops do not. Sometimes I want to work in the living room. Sometimes I want to work at the coffee shop. Sometimes I want to go into the office. I cannot achieve any of that with a desktop, while I can achieve a desktop-like at any point by plugging in a monitor and using a bluetooth keyboard.

A Mac Mini is smaller and lighter than a MacBook Pro. I could carry one between my home and office easily. It even simplifies hot desking in the office in a WFH-first world.

I never work from the living room. When the weather is nice I sometimes work from the park but to be honest I rarely achieve anything, it's just an excuse to go outside. Same for coffee shops, I can but almost never do.

Notably, the Mac Mini does not have a stupid external power adapter, but just uses a standard cable that costs like $1. I did carry mine around for a while, and it was glorious! I'm not sure why Apple's competitors insist on including a brick that's almost as large as the PC itself.

It would have been really cool if the portable profile concept caught on with iPods. Then we could just have a room full of Mac Minis and plug in our iPhones for (literally!) roaming profiles. But then the company would have to provide me with a iPhone/iPad. Sadly we got iCloud instead, which is radioactive from a corporate infosec perspective.

> I'm not sure why Apple's competitors insist on including a brick that's almost as large as the PC itself.

It's more expensive to design an internal PSU than source a random power brick. Oh wait, i thought it was called "an Apple tax"...

But you're required to bring a power cable, keyboard, mouse, and monitor wherever you want to work, and sit near a power outlet.

With a laptop you just bring a single slab-shaped piece of hardware.

I have all that at home. And a hot desk can provide the same. 14 years ago at my business school we were hot desking with standardized ThinkPads.

A mac mini is not a usable piece of hardware on its own; it's an unpowered box with no means of input or output. A brick. To make it viable you must connect all the elements that are integrated natively to a laptop: keyboard, mouse, screen, and power. If you showed up to a completely empty desk with just a mac mini, you'd get very little done.

Right but I already bring my laptop to a desk with a keyboard, mouse, monitor and dock. So the practical difference is nothing. In fact the Mac Mini is actually less duplication of capability.

My MacBook Pro has been out of clamshell mode less than 25 times in a year. Almost all of them to wake up after an OS update.

What you're describing is two desktops with a shared piece of hardware between them. If that works for you, great! However it does ignore my original point of "freedom from a fixed position", and why I made it in the first place. If you don't need to move around, then by all means use a Mac Mini. I personally find myself in a lot of places where there are no traditional workspaces, hence I use a laptop.

I addressed why this would work for me in my initial reply. I don't need to work from any point. It is enough for me to work from one or two fixed points. The difference between two desktops and carrying a Mac Mini between two workstations is that the computer itself is the same in both locations so all data is still local. It's all the benefits of a laptop that I actually use. I do not use the screen or keyboard on my MacBook, but I suffer the compromised thermals and bulky form factor anyway.

Chromebooks/low power laptops can basically act as terminals for a beefier machine at a comparatively small cost (Can you do a gaming pc for less than 1k?). The first time I saw this being done was a game changer, running modern AAA games on a surface tablet, nintendo switch before its time. Your local internet needs to be fast enough but I think that's still a decent population of HN.

> I dont understand people who work on a tiny 15” screen when they can have multiple large monitors.

You can have it either way. When I'm away from my desktop, I attach a portable external monitor to the laptop via USB-C. It has an identical screen, and works really well. I do prefer desktops, but I have to move around a lot.

Not all work requires massive computing power locally. I find the "squid" much less of a hassle than having to sync stuff between two computers. Especially with "newer" computers that can be charged over USB-C. You only plug that one cable, and you've got your screens, keyboard, wired network up and running.

I used to the two PCs for a while, but a single computer is so much easier to deal with.

> I find the "squid" much less of a hassle than having to sync stuff between two computers.

Hmm the only thing I need to sync is done via git pull. Mail is imap and docs are online.

Depending on the monitor/laptop combination and their support for USB-C that's not too much of a hassle.

For reference, I am using an XPS 13 and a Lenovo P24h. All of the peripherals are plugged into the monitor, and when I unpack my laptop, I just plug in a single USB-C cable and I am on my way.

Multiple monitors can (supposedly) be daisy-chained as well, although I have not tried this.

I've been using a 13" MacBook Pro for years. No issues to report. I'm not sure what type of programming you people are doing. Multiple monitors is nice but it really does not improve my productivity.

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