I have a rack in my basement with a combined 96 cores and 192gb of ram (proxmox cluster), and a 13900k/64gb desktop workstation for most dev work. I usually will offload workloads to those before leveraging one of these old laptops that is usually dead battery. If I need something for "browser tasks" (I am interpreting this as cross-browser testing?) I have dedicated VMs for that. For just browsing the web, my M2 is still king as it has zero fan, makes no noise, and will last for days without charging if you are just browsing the web or writing documentation.
I would rather have a ton of beefy compute that is remotely accessible and one single lightweight super portable laptop, personally.
I should probably donate these mac laptops to someone who is less fortunate. I would love to do that, actually.
Indeed. I keep around a 2015 MBP with 16GB (asked my old job's IT if I could just keep it when I left since it had already been replaced and wouldn't ever be redeployed) to supplement my Mac Mini which is my personal main computer. I sometimes use screen sharing, but mostly when I use the 2015 it's just a web browsing task. With adblocking enabled, it's 100% up to the task even with a bunch of tabs.
Given probably 80% of people probably use webapps for nearly everything, there's a huge amount of life left in a late-stage Intel Mac for people who will never engage in the types of tasks I used to find sluggish on my 2015 (very large Excel sheet calculations and various kinds of frontend code transpilation). Heck, even that stuff ran amazingly better on my 16" 2019 Intel MBP, so I'd assume for web browsing your old Macs will be amazing for someone in need, assuming they don't have bad keyboards.
My 2018 has a brand new keyboard and battery that I replaced myself. It's certainly still a good computer all things considered... but for a software developer, someone with means to afford a more modern box, I would def go Apple Silicon.
My 2015 Retina is running Arch linux as an experiment. That was kinda fun. I used it as a main dev rig for a few weeks years ago when the 2018 battery finally kicked the bucket.
I went the complete opposite of you. I enjoy being able run everything on my laptop, be it at home, at a cafe, at work or on the train. So I’ve maxed out a MacBook Pro instead. It doesn’t have 96 cores, but it’ll go head to head with your dev workstation and even let me play around with LLMs locally. Fans as usually silent, except when using the GPU for LLMs.
One thing that I could do with your rig though would be to start benchmarks to check for performance regressions, and then just put my laptop in my backpack.
Tailscale helps here. I run all my stuff remotely and just reconnect my shell with tmux, and vscode reconnects automatically. The only area this hurts is on an airplane. I was in Germany recently and still developed remotely using my workstation as the compute. It was super quick with no discernible latency. My laptop is essentially a dumb terminal. It could get stolen or run over by a truck and I’d be back in business after installing tmux and Tailscale.
I’ve replayed this pattern with other targets, too. For instance a system I maintain relies on a whitelisted IP in our VPC to interact with certain API’s at a vendor. I could proxy to that node and use that IP, but I’ve found it much easier to hack on that project (running on a dedicated EC2 node) by just vscode attaching there, using it live, and committing the changes from the end server running the system.
Being able to kill my laptop and know everything is still running remotely is nice. I rely on tmux heavily.
I don’t do much development but I have a fast Apple Silicon laptop in my office for mostly multimedia editing and some local LLM—though that’s also where I do development when I do. An old iMac in my office for video calls and a lot of web app work and and old MacBook in my kitchen for looking up stuff and when I want a change of scenery for web app work.
I would rather have a ton of beefy compute that is remotely accessible and one single lightweight super portable laptop, personally.
I should probably donate these mac laptops to someone who is less fortunate. I would love to do that, actually.