Hardware considerations for development

Me too. Unless you go to an office where they already have idle Apple monitors and good keyboards/mice then the whole thing “get a stand and carry your peripherals” never really did appeal to me. I practiced it several times and wasn’t bad but as you said the experience is subpar and makes you wonder what are you doing there and why aren’t you working on your PC in the first place.

Ryzen, EPYC, Threadripper are all very good. I have a few colleagues that lately jumped on AMD laptops and they are very happy. They say their compilation speeds improved by factors of 4 or more. Crazy stuff. I feel that AMD is catching up to Intel on all fronts (except maybe gaming) very quickly.

As an aside, one of the things that makes the MBPs so good is that they choose CPUs where the single-core Turbo performance is solid. Truthfully though, for like 99% of your desktop work it’s not needed. Only when your machine needs to crunch something right now, and fast. But IMO one can live well enough without it as well.