I get it.
Back in the day, we scraped together as much memory as we could afford. Then later, as much as we could fit (the maximum—or more!). If we still needed more, we swiveled or waited until we could use desktop or deskside machines. We used to be clever and work around limitations, which honestly included software itself more often than the hardware we used. We were still pretty productive!
But now, you can basically buy a pro laptop and max it out, and that’s going to be good enough for almost everything. Now, if you need to run a yuuuge character matrix to produce a cladogram based on all known taxa, you can probably start with a laptop, finish on a cluster (I’m actually just guessing this example would actually eat RAM like there’s no tomorrow).
I can literally fire up two linux virtual boxes, Illustrator/Photoshop Creative Cloud, LW3D (all I have are small scenes), be logged into two accounts and bunch of other stuff and barely notice it (well, maybe a little more than barely). On a Mac laptop. And still get maybe a bit less than four hours of battery life. I’m not saying that’s typical, I’m just saying I can.
And an SSD makes the time it takes to get in and out of large apps nearly moot (although I think that Photoshop 4.0 on my PowerBook 1400c is still faster to load than Photoshop 2016.5, but I grumbly digress).
Crazy. Yesterday’s big iron is today’s portable aluminum.
