Will I *need* a powerful laptop?

Question

I'm a CS undergrad currently working (from home, yay coronavirus) on my thesis project. My laptop is four years old and in perfect condition, I upgraded it to an SSD about a year ago when I could not bear the boot times anymore. However, it has no GPU, a less-than optimal CPU, and a 720p screen.I noticed that, while most of the heavy lifting (model fitting and any serious benchmarks) is carried out by my uni's computers, I spend a lot of time waiting for code to compile or simulations to start up and run (slowly); it also gets annoying to have to edit code to only use the CPU when compiling on my computer, iron out all the cracks then turn the GPU flags back on when moving to the uni's servers and hope it works without additional hacking.My screen being low-res also causes issues when some GUI tool was developed in-house by somebody with a bigger screen and it does not fit on mine and can't be resized so I have to move it around.These are all minor annoyances I can tolerate, but I'm only an undergrad. Will I need a more powerful laptop in the future or can I assume that during my career I will always have access to compute time to do the heavy lifting on? And if I can assume this, on the other hand, what's the point of having a powerful laptop if you work in CS and don't play video games or do video production on your laptop?

simonblack · Accepted Answer

I'm probably different from most laptop users but my policy is to buy as good a machine as I can afford and then keep it for years. Maybe I will do minor upgrades but that's about it. My purchasing policy is generally along the lines of the old adage "Buy twice as good, and buy half as many."
Normally I use a good Desktop, and the laptop is for travelling and other 'out of the office' use.
My current laptop is a ThinkPad T410S which I bought at 'high cost for the time' (= $2500) back in late 2010, just before I went to France for 8 months. So it's now about 10 years old, but still very usable, and has roughly cost me only $250 bucks a year. (pretty much - a bit more, actually, because I decided to upgrade the hard drive.)
It had a good screen resolution for back then (1440 x 900) which is still very usable for my developing, though it's now starting to feel a bit cramped. The CPU was 'upmarket for the era' and is an i5, 2 core. My only upgrade has been to increase my hdd from 500 megabytes to 2000 megabytes.
Compile times for my work are still good. But, mind you, I can still remember compile times of 30-40 minutes for the Linux kernel way back in the past, so everything is relative.

ktpsns · Answer

I have a quite similar story to tell. During my time (PhD) at academia, I always had access to plenty of computing resources. What's the point of having a powerful laptop? Mostly the possibility to do some heavy lifting also offline (during travel, in hotels with bad WiFi, at conferences, etc) and especially without latency (doing visualization with remote GPU rendering over VNC is fine, but annoyingly slow if you have a slow WiFi).Having said that: being equipped with a decent work station can really feel much better. Maybe you can manage your university to pay for it (sometimes your advisor/professor has some money left).

saltcod · Answer

It really comes down to what you can live with. Does the desire to have a new computer really weigh on you? Then just work towards getting it. Does saving the money matter more? Then don't get it. My wife works happily away on her 2011 MBP &mdash; not compiling code, but still working happily away. I work fine on my 2014 MBP. SSDs really make it tolerable these days.