a laptop provides portability. of course, it has less power because you cannot have as much ventilation as a fixed pc. the laptop lets me work from home. use it while going to work on the train. working at work with it. as the machine goes around with me, i dont need to have synchronization, data moving between several machines. the company only buys one laptop used everywhere, and not one fixed pc at work, another one at home, and perhaps a third one, weak laptop, while i work while having my ass moved by the train.

that ergonomics part is bullshit. at home laptop is plugged into a huge-ass screen and very, very good keyboard and mouse. at work ? the same. the only place i use the laptop screen is while on train. usually, i just read code, a stuff i want to learn, i don't really do high-concentration work. i will read emails, answer a few, talk with coworkers, check the news... and real work starts seated laptop pluggued either at work or at home. if you use a laptop in laptop-mode at those two places, you're stupid.

laptops bring ease of use, and keeping one machine instead of 2 or 3. i can go to meetings with my laptop, show something on screen to my coworkers. i'm not going to do that with a stupid fixed pc.

i had a fixed pc at work years ago. we replaced those with laptops. and each desk at work offers a dock, two huge screens, and we got keyboard and mouses. when im not at work, the laptop is not there. it cant be damaged (fire ? water damage ?) or stolen where it's sleeping. at home, i have an even better setup to work. in the train, the time i spend checking emails and menials tasks, it works fine. a fixed pc would have me spend time at work to do those things, which i want to get rid of as soon as possible as a dev. the confort i get from using a laptop is huge as a dev.

i also have rotating weeks where i'm on call. so i can grab the laptop and be anywhere and still be able to do that work. with a fixed pc ? can't leave home while i'm on call. thanks, but no thanks.

the benefits HUGELY outweight the negative parts.

my laptop has my code. it also has a ssh key that gives me access to a very, very secure machine which, itself, lets me jump anywhere including production. that machine follows me whereever i go, even the bathroom. it never leaves my sight, and it turned off and encrypted most of the time unless at work. at home, plugged to a keyboard, mouse and display. there is no way i will let that kind of content in a fixed pc, even encrypted.i keep the device safe, at all times. i treat her (yes, it's a her) like a nuclear football. i have no problemy with my laptop.

machine are amazingly powerful now. my machine is 1100 euro. what did i get for that price ? 16 inches of screen, low-power low blue light. 7840U AMD CPU with a 780M GPU. 64 Gb of LDDR5 very-fast, low power use memory. a nice samsung 980 1 Tb SSD. i mean seriously. all that memory and power for barely 1k ? a few years ago for a powerful intel based machine i had to drop 3k...

our machines are monsters. and modern GPUs have processing cores that let you do massive parallel and even AI stuff. insane. those machines are so powerful and good we don't even care for fixed machines for work.

portable machines is the future. we'll move them around, and plug them into screens and peripherals as needed. and in more future, those machine will just disappear into objects and you won't even see those. decades ahead, it will look like magic to kids. they won't see the machines, just our interactions with them.

knowing this, talking of laptop vs non-laptop is just nonsense. the only good part of a fixed pc is more ventilation and heat dissipation, and the extra power is just the consequence of it, but after a few years, laptops go around circles around those fixed-format machines, with newer ones going ahead.

we should only use fixed when we want the maximum power possible, for work. the mainframes, the huge data centers. everywhere else, we should go portable, and wireless.

i like the video. it's interesting content. but saying it cannot be fixed ? have you seen how much processing power PER WATT we get from those modern machines ? especially that insane M-series of processors from Apple ? Have you see how much power you get from 6 or 7 Watt of injected electrical power ? It's insane.

we are getting much, much computing power today using less, far less Watts than before. and this is not going to stop.