I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I don't have a coherent response, but I do have a whole bunch of comments!
I think that way more often than it being the machine's fault, it's the fault of the build systems or bloated software used.
I spend more of my time waiting around for remote builds for demo or production environments than I do my local ones, and I can generally continue working while kicking off a build.
I appreciate that not all developers have the same chores - most of my work doesn't require a recompilation step, because I don't work with those sort of languages very often and I don't need to import half a gig of dependencies to run a hello-world app. I change something in-place and see what it does, or I run my module in isolation.
I know you titled this "laptop performance matters" but I generally offload the processing to whatever machine I have around that's fastest, and sometimes that's a desktop. Desktops will always perform better than laptops with the same numbers.
There are other blockers, such as using Docker on a Mac with mounted file systems. That still makes things one or two orders of magnitude slower than running them natively or on Linux.
Having to deal with awkward window management, clumsy key bindings, not-very-ergonomic input devices, monitors with crappy colour profiles, that sort of thing makes everything feel a bit like a grind, and it makes you want to "upgrade your machine".
I waste more time during the day context-switching between real keyboard layouts and Apple's halfway-between-ISO-and-ANSI thing. I close windows when I expect to delete a word. That sort of thing. I'm faster in the office because I have one keyboard that I share between two machines, and I don't accidentally my work.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's my overall experience that's the problem, not the computer.
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I don't have a coherent response, but I do have a whole bunch of comments!
I think that way more often than it being the machine's fault, it's the fault of the build systems or bloated software used.
I spend more of my time waiting around for remote builds for demo or production environments than I do my local ones, and I can generally continue working while kicking off a build.
I appreciate that not all developers have the same chores - most of my work doesn't require a recompilation step, because I don't work with those sort of languages very often and I don't need to import half a gig of dependencies to run a hello-world app. I change something in-place and see what it does, or I run my module in isolation.
I know you titled this "laptop performance matters" but I generally offload the processing to whatever machine I have around that's fastest, and sometimes that's a desktop. Desktops will always perform better than laptops with the same numbers.
There are other blockers, such as using Docker on a Mac with mounted file systems. That still makes things one or two orders of magnitude slower than running them natively or on Linux.
Having to deal with awkward window management, clumsy key bindings, not-very-ergonomic input devices, monitors with crappy colour profiles, that sort of thing makes everything feel a bit like a grind, and it makes you want to "upgrade your machine".
I waste more time during the day context-switching between real keyboard layouts and Apple's halfway-between-ISO-and-ANSI thing. I close windows when I expect to delete a word. That sort of thing. I'm faster in the office because I have one keyboard that I share between two machines, and I don't accidentally my work.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's my overall experience that's the problem, not the computer.