> Why are you comparing a top of the line workstation with an average laptop?
Because it's something you can absolutely do to improve your computing life with a simple, rational calculation, which I will outline now for expensive (relative to US hardware prices) Germany.
PC dev box parts, prices sourced from geizhals.de:
It's missing other stuff, but those can be quite cheap and don't need upgrading as often, and you maybe don't need the fanciest motherboard. (Going with Intel at this point is a complicated topic due to security issues and mitigation performance hits, to be balanced against having the most obscenely fast performance possible for a bit more money.)
Anyway, let's call it ~2k euros for a truly badass 12c24t 32GB memory dev box.
Compare this to, say, the common and much-loved Macbook Pro: that's 1.5k to 3.2k euros (just checked). The former for a super weak computer, the latter is 2.3 GHz 8c(16t?), 16 GB 2666 MHz memory. That's really weak computing power for the amount you're spending (yes, I understand you're not buying pure performance, but that's what's being compared here), and you don't even really "want to do better" with higher clocks etc because, speaking in purely physical terms, you need more volume and cooling to get the higher throughput. Laptops also start to throttle way sooner than computers with big coolers (that needn't cost much- I'm using a 15 euro cooler on my i7 8700k at 4.7 GHz which is passive without significant load).
So that's it really; for about the price of a weak Macbook Pro, you could have an ultra powerful dev or build box. You can get some really amazing screens for little money these days, and re-use it between upgrades, along with several other components; how much of your laptop do you usually re-use when upgrading?
I've now spent a truly excessive amount of time justifying my point of view, in the hope that I don't sound completely delusional. 1.5-2k euros once every few years for your developers to have peak dev performance is IMO an easy sell; if your laptop is a thin client you can have it additionally and it won't need upgrading for ages, because it doesn't need to do any heavy lifting.
> They're different markets.
False dichotomy, they can be (and usually are) additive, because you can rdesktop and use remote CI. What I'm questioning is the relevance of laptops as primary build computers.
The fastest laptop chips are extremely fast at executing lightly threaded programs. I'd own a workstation if it sped up my tools. But it won't.