If you add external monitors, keyboard and mouse you just recreated non-mobile work environment that costs more money and has worse performance than workstation.

A non-mobile work environment, but unplug one cord and you can take the laptop part to meetings, including offsite, you can travel with it, work from the coffee shop or roof or park, keep working if there's work being done on your office (painting or whatever) so you can't be in there at the moment, if you usually work in a corporate office but WFH some days you still have the same machine, can take it to co-workers' desks to show them stuff without having to screen-share and having both workstations together at once, which can be nice in some situations. Built in UPS is sometimes handy, too—no power-offs because you kicked a cord.

I'm not arguing against desktops for people who like them but this "I don't understand laptops" stuff (several posts, not just this one) is bizarre.

This site is just becoming ridiculous. You understand what a portable device is right? That you can UNPLUG the laptop from the external monitor and still use it.

But you do understand that owning a desktop does not preclude also owning a laptop, right?

I have a desktop, and a laptop used as a thin client. The laptop can be inexpensive or have nice features (like a touchscreen), while the real power, storage, etc, is on the desktop.

Not often you see someone use their own argument against themselves. Why buy a desktop with a thin client laptop (that are not in anyway cheap) when you could just buy a standalone laptop.

This isn't even an argument, the decades of the laptops continued popularity say enough.

My machine is way too valuable to risk traveling with is the primary reason. Another is that laptops are noisy due to fans.

My desktop is just a host for several VMs. If I actually need to travel with one of those "computers", I just shut down the VM and copy it's image from my NAS to my laptop.

If you are still buying a laptop for your stated reason, then you haven't embraced virtualization as a developer.

Your personal sensitivities about travelling with a laptop are not shared by the majority. Laptop fans are in no way noisy enough to cause a distraction for yourself or others.

Making a VM copy from a NAS every time I decided to step outside and work say on the back deck in a different environment with trees and some sun is anything but convenient.

There seems to be a perpetuation falsehood in these discussions that the only time you would need to use a laptop is when travelling a substantial distance from home, which can not be anymore further from the truth than is possible.

Lastly, laptops are not the sole domain of developers and you don’t need to ‘embrace virtualization’ simply because it exists.

From my experience it's better to use both laptop and workstation. When I'm normally working I use the comfort/performance of the workstation, when I'm on the move I can use the portability of the laptop.

Basically all developers I know have "hybrid work arrangement", working some days from home/travels and some from office. They all remotely connect to their workstation at work either from their home computer of from laptop when traveling.

Maybe it depends on type of development or age of developers, but I'm not 20 anymore and laptop is an ergonomic nightmare. If you want to use it for a longer period of time and avoid health issues you should get an external keyboard/mouse/screens anyway. Which means you just recreated workstation, but it costs more money, has worse performance and all kinds of issues while connecting so much stuff to it.

We all had external keyboards, mice, and multiple monitors on our desks. The only time we were ergonomically constrained was when we were mobile. But we could be mobile at a moment's notice, and with all our stuff still running.

Now what I really would like is a high quality, low latency complete remote system. I got pretty close to this with a recent experiment, but it took a good bit of effort (and I still had some weird issues). It was great in that I could go to any computer with enough power to drive a browser, remote into my server "desktop", and continue right where I left off.

If that could get perfected, I would probably switch to an iPad Pro with optional keyboard.