In this article, I’ll be sharing my personal experiences, insights, and thoughts on the evolution of laptops over the past five to seven years, and how it has impacted my work.
The good news or bad news is that there haven’t been any significant achievements in CPU performance increases. For instance, an Intel i5 running at 3300 GHz with 4 cores is still relevant in 2023 and will continue to serve many tasks.
However, revolutionary changes have taken place in other areas:
- Getting rid of HDD in favor of SSD.
- The emergence of USB-C.
- Enhanced capabilities of graphics cards to handle higher resolutions such as 4K at 60GHz+ on external displays.
- Development moving to the cloud, reducing the demand for high hardware performance compared to 2015.
By eliminating mechanical components like HDDs and DVDs, laptops have become more compact and power-efficient, significantly increasing their autonomy.
With USB-C, we now have a single port that can handle video, power, and USB-connected devices like keyboards, mice, and even Ethernet. Essentially, any USB device you want to connect to your laptop will fit USB-C. Say goodbye to docking stations; they are no longer relevant.
The third significant change is in displays and graphics cards. This includes making screens frameless, allowing for larger displays within the same laptop size. People now seek laptops with either 4K resolution displays or, more importantly, support for 4K resolution external monitors at 60GHz or higher.
Surprisingly, older laptop models from 2015 often have limited support for high resolutions at lower frequencies. For example, the HP ProBook 640 G1 is limited to a maximum resolution of 3840×2160 pixels at 30Hz, while the MacBook Air 2015 with integrated Intel HD Graphics 6000 GPU is limited to a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 pixels.
If you are accustomed to working on a 15.4” laptop display with Full HD (1920×1080) resolution, you might want a higher resolution for a 27” external monitor. Otherwise, you may notice individual pixels becoming more noticeable, resulting in reduced clarity and sharpness compared to your laptop’s display. Higher pixel density leads to crisper and more detailed images, where fine details, text, and graphics appear sharper and more defined.
I recommend using the Dell S2722QC model as a starting point for selecting a suitable 4K monitor. With this model, you’ll experience the same level of clarity and sharpness as on the Retina display of your MacBook Pro. Additionally, it offers the convenience of a single USB-C cable that provides Power Delivery, video transmission, and the ability to use a USB-A Hub on your monitor. This seamless integration simplifies connectivity and enhances your overall user experience.
Now, let’s talk about tasks. Recent trends involve shifting towards cloud-native services development, with everything running in the cloud and controlled by Kubernetes. While developers may still need to run some code locally on their laptops for unit testing and debugging, these activities shouldn’t impose significant performance requirements on the device.
Based on my experience working on cloud-native services, the most performance-consuming part turned out to be running… MS Teams for video conference calls! Since it often involves screen sharing and video, it became a primary reason to upgrade my laptop to at least the 10th generation of Intel processors with 4+ cores and a minimum of 16GB of RAM.
In my recent project, where I’m working on cloud-native services, first weeks everything worked fine for me on my MacBook Air (Early 2015), which had a 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5 and 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3. However, during MS Teams meetings with video and screen sharing, everything started to hang dramatically.
So, here’s what worked for me: Dell Latitude 5510 with Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10210U CPU @ 1.60GHz 2.11 GHz 16.0 GB, and MacBook Pro 2020 with a 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 and 32GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X.
Regarding the operating system, in the past, enterprise desktop applications were primarily developed for MS Windows, while server-side business logic was on UNIX platforms. However, with everything running in the cloud, development is now predominantly done on the Linux platform. Developers can choose to develop on MS Windows using Virtual Box or WSL2, native Linux, or macOS. However, as your technology stack grows, you might face situations where your company prefers one platform as the primary one, with full documentation coverage, while others might have limited documentation, relying on volunteers.
Based on my observations, MacOS has become more widespread as the default platform, while MS Windows or Linux still appear in projects where developers need to work on virtual machines due to security reasons. In my experience, I’ve worked on two projects that used Amazon Workspace with Linux Ubuntu and MS Remote Desktop with MS Windows.
Summarizing all above let’s select the winner: without surprise it is MacBook Pro 2020 in conjunction with a 27” 4K monitor like the Dell S2722QC.
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