Thanks for taking the stand here; generally new laptops are fast and especially the M10 max seems like a nice rig that beats some desktops for some programmer workloads. Maybe even many desktops for most programmer workloads, IDK. But besides not all programmer workloads being equal, desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different.
Also, I'd like to add memory constraints as an example of workload inequality: The M10 max only seems to support 64GB. Good for many, but would be a huge draw back at my last dev job. The problem could inherently use huge amounts of memory, and exact memory usage was not always predictable. Especially for those colleagues which did a lot of work for customers, changing one parameter could mean coming back to a OOM after the program run for a night (or longer). Thanks to 128GB this became much rarer, but the for the type of program at some point the only viable option to safe memory is to accept a worse result.
> Also, I'd like to add memory constraints as an example of workload inequality: The M10 max only seems to support 64GB
That's a really good point. In my last job, our machines had 256GB of memory to fully utilise the 3990x cores.
> desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different.
They're a little bit different, but they're still mainstream, readily available desktop envioronments. You can go on Scan here in the UK and order one of those systems just like you can order any other intel or AMD system.
My 2010 Mac Pro has 48 GB of RAM, this 2021 M1 Max has 32 GB. So not much has changed on that respect either. Except on 2010 I imagine it was struggle to get even 16 GB on a laptop.
Also, I'd like to add memory constraints as an example of workload inequality: The M10 max only seems to support 64GB. Good for many, but would be a huge draw back at my last dev job. The problem could inherently use huge amounts of memory, and exact memory usage was not always predictable. Especially for those colleagues which did a lot of work for customers, changing one parameter could mean coming back to a OOM after the program run for a night (or longer). Thanks to 128GB this became much rarer, but the for the type of program at some point the only viable option to safe memory is to accept a worse result.