Yes, for devs with vms for compiling and testing like my team does, 16gb is not enough. Thus we are moving off macbooks. You can argue that you shouldn't do that on a laptop, you should have a desktop that you always connect to, but that's not how we prefer to do it. If there was no laptop with more than say 8 gig we'd probably have gone that way. 16gb is almost enough.
Because people wanted to take them around. At first, I think the dev system fit in 16 gig macbook pro without any trouble and it was a startup, so it was just natural to say that's all you need. Then the dev env started getting a little bit bigger.
I showed up at the company and noticed you couldn't run the vm for a test and compile separately at the same time. Next I found out I couldn't have a bunch of tabs open while doing dev. So that was painful, and I got a desktop. The existing people who were used to how things worked said you shouldn't have a bunch of tabs open, don't do that and it works fine (oh and don't run any tests while compiling).
Then as memory use kept up even the at most 4 tabs people found they kept running out of memory and they bought a few 32 gig laptops and suddenly things worked again.
A few of us have desktops, most people are struggling with 16 gig notebooks and they started buying 32 gig notebooks for people that want them.
"wanted to take them around" but did they "need" to carry them around.
Where they using them for their own use out side of working hours? not usually a good idea you want to keep your personal device use separate from work equipment.
We all have laptops because:
- most devs are in the on call roster for their team’s systems.
- it’s really handy to be able to bring a machine to a meeting, or to go and sit with people from the team that make the API you’re trying to use.
Some of us work for companies that don't require us to be in the office when we work, so we end up working at coffeeshops, at the beach, home, etc, despite having an office.
