If you’re a serious developer then you’re going to have a machine that has more horsepower than one suited for everyday tasks.
Heck, when I brought my M1 Air years ago I made it a 16GB simply because I knew I was going to do some light development on it and needed to ensure it could run the IDEs and apps I was fritzing with simultaneously - including the need to run Docker (now Podman).
Personally I’d much rather Apple have a 16GB baseline as a matter of course, but this article is simple ragebait.
Why?
I'm quite serious, and I use an 11 year old ThinkPad with 8GB of RAM.
I don't do LLMs. I don't develop Flash or its JS replacements. I rarely edit video. Frankly, surfing YouTube uses far more RAM than anything serious development I do.
It comes with the added benefit that everything I need is accessible on any computer with a connection to the internet (AKA everywhere). Not to mention it saves power on your laptop!
My primary machine is a laptop and it’s very powerful without me having compromised on its portability to any meaningful degree. I don’t have a need to use any other machine, because it’s a laptop, and I can just bring it with me. I enjoy the myriad benefits of not doing remote development, such as not requiring a stable internet connection at all times.
In 2024, the benefits you propose are vanishingly irrelevant.
We’re an on prem shop and I’m not running stuff in the cloud for a reason.
