I mean that I am a real developer still (and have been one of the world's relatively best paid), and 13" works fine for me to get stuff done. Here I am 200 miles from home in a hotel right now with all my tools. No monitor lugging required.
Yes, laptop ergonomics aren't ideal, but neither is life. There are always trade-offs. And I have some colourful language memories from earlier sysadmin jobs getting horrific shocks while lugging other users' colour CTRs around for them...
I'd suggest that anyone who thinks that they "need" a huge monitor as opposed to "prefers" should considers needs vs wants.
If I was living in a van, and I'm a tiny house fan BTW, a large monitor would NOT be on MY 'needs' list.
Another commenter made a good point about more screen space being more distraction, and debuggers being a big part of that as an example of not solving the real problem. Given that you only have a few cm^2 of full-definition vision anyway, you have to manage that one way or another. More pixels is not necessary that way.
I regularly work with only my laptop and I get a lot done. I find that even while wearing glasses, I crane my neck more with a big monitor. With modern window managers I don’t really need all that space anyway. The only time it gets slightly cramped is while debugging, but on a 16 inch screen it’s not too bad.
I am uncomfortable buying them because I find working at a desk with a large monitor uncomfortable and I don't see any personal advantage to the extra real estate for coding. I have plenty of space on a 16" laptop for three vertical terminal panes: One for editing, one for docs and one for shell commands. If I need to search something on the web, I can cmd-H to switch spaces and cmd-L back to the terminal. Since my workflow works on my laptop, it works _anywhere_ I go.
Obviously, my workflow is not for everyone, but I pretty strongly doubt that large monitors are the future for most people and am almost positive that they aren't the future for me.
I think for a lot of developers, it's a style thing.
Coding hunched over a laptop looks cool and hackery, coding with a big 27-inch monitor (maybe a couple) looks businessey.
I know a guy who does a lot of Excel work on a Macbook Air (1366x768 IIRC), and it just looks painful. When I suggest investing in a decent size/screen resolution monitor, he looks at me like I have two heads.
Looking like Mr Robot is more important for a lot of people than being practical, even if they end up with back problems in later life!
Same here. Might have something to do with age, as popular deskop/external monitor sizes these days just seem _enormous_ to me -- back in the day a 21" monitor was considered large (24" and 27" seem very common today). You almost have to turn your head back and forth just to see the entire screen!
I don't mean to criticize anything about your line of thinking because it sounds like you're doing what makes sense to you and you're happy. So who am I to tell you you're wrong?
However, I do feel that your description hints at the essence of what I was saying earlier: that avoiding a large monitor is somewhat like self-deprivation. You don't want to get spoiled by becoming accustomed to the increased productivity yielded by a large monitor with a large virtual desktop. You're a mobile worker, so that makes a lot of sense. I do most of my work at either my office or at home. So I have two modestly-powerful workstations with lots of monitors at each location (in total, I've spent about twice as much as I would have to buy a high-end laptop).
Because I am not a mobile worker, I have a particularly small laptop (a Surface Pro). I feel crippled when I try to do serious work on my laptop because the screen is so tiny and there's so much context hidden by windows stacked on one another.
In a further-out future, I hope that laptops (or whatever portable device we carry) can one day project a very large, very high-DPI display of their own, giving you and me the best of both worlds.
If I read you correctly, you'd love to have the increased productivity of a larger virtual workspace, but today's technology and your need to be mobile keep you thinking it's best to focus on mobility first. That makes a lot of sense.
I totally agree that the current batch of 30" displays are disappointingly low-resolution. So much agreement on that! Primitive, stale technology, stagnant for 8 years. But I think I've already said enough about that in this thread. :)
Big and powerful dev setups are great, but that’s what my 42” 4K Dell monitor is for — and there’s no way that’s going to be portable.
So the reality is that there’s no such thing a no-compromise dev setup: Either you optimize for a desktop setup, or for portability, or somewhere in between. If you have the ability to have both a desktop and portable setup, such a pair I almost always going to be superior to just one medium sized laptop: Your desktop experience will be better with massive high resolution monitors, and your mobile experience will be better with a lighter, slimmer device and longer battery life etc.
It doesn't make a big difference to work in front of a 13' inch laptop than to work in front of a 27' inch monitor. The problem is the same: too much screen time.
I have a mix of ages in hardware, so it's not all old. The linux laptops I have sit on a desk more often, so those have 17" screens and I pair them with a 21" monitor. So, I do use big monitors.
But, that's not the point. I can also code just fine in a 80x25 ssh connections using vim and screen. I agree you should probably do most of your work using the best visual setup possible, but if you simply can't function without 3 apple thunderbolt 29" displays then you've got to rethink how you do things.
That doesn't allow 2 windows comfortably though which is what shoots dev productivity through the roof. Higher res big screen 16:9 would be better, but then you reach the weight limit.
I can tolerate using a laptop if the screens big, but otherwise I don't want to program on it.
I have a 23" (1920x1080) monitor and a "20.5" (1600x900) monitor that I use both at one time to code on. I have a high-dpi mouse which once you get used to the sensitivty, is awesome with large monitors. Coding this way is great because I can use one large monitor for coding or UI design and the other monitor for looking up the documentation, reading a tutorial, or watching/listening to a lecture/talk (I tend to need background noise as I code).
I don't really know if my productivity has increased since purchasing a larger monitor, but I know it's much more convenient now.
Although I have programmed on a large laptop before and it was very helpful to code in a quiet place without distractions
I am a minority opinion here. I don’t like turning my head and I like just having everything I need for a 2 hour sprint visible at once on the screen.
At home I use a MacBook with a 22” retina I bought at the Apple store, the external monitor place directly above the laptop. I rarely do video or photo editing, but I spend a lot of time writing books and also programming. This is plenty of space for me. This is not a matter of money: 6 months after I bought this monitor for my home use, I started working at a large financial services company; I could choose any monitor(s) I wanted and I chose exactly what I have at home.
I don’t multi-task, especially in my home office. I like having just what I need for my current task visible.
I bought a System76 Oryx Pro last fall with a 16” 4K display and I find the screen size so adequate to my development needs (I use that laptop just for machine learning, it has a 1070 GPU) that I don’t even bother hooking it up to an external monitor.
I have spent so many years working on remote servers in a few SSH shell windows. This might affect the setup I chose for all-local development and writing.
Honestly I think more, smaller, monitors are better than fewer big ones. Given my choice I'd happily take 3 22" monitors or even 2 21" monitors + 1 19" monitor if push came to shove. I can usually see all the code I need in one 21" monitor just fine, but usually need another one for reference of some kind: docs or watching debug output, etc. The 3rd would be for collaboration: chat windows & email. If you can isolate distractions to their own monitor, they're easier to ignore while busy and require less window management and never cover up your real work.
Also in general it's more helpful to talk about monitors in terms of resolution rather than size; it's entirely possible to end up with a 27" monitor that is the same resolution as a 24" monitor, which means it doesn't actually have any more usable space, everything is just bigger, and that isn't very useful unless your devs are visually impaired.
I code on a 13" laptop screen, regardless of where I am. I have a 27" monitor on my desk at work that I never use. I find the lack of extra screen real-estate helps me focus.
(I used to code quite happily on an 11" MacBook Air, but Apple seems to have stopped caring about that line, so I abandoned them.)
For me, portability trumps pixel count at the moment.
I haven’t used a multiple monitor setup for about 10 years now, and that works just fine - adding another monitor adds only the ability to keep an eye on things out of the corner of my immediate focus.
If I had to keep track of dashboards visually, or did 3-d modeling, or video editing or something like that, it’s possible I’d need more real estate visible at once, but since I’m programming, I only really care about the function I’m working on at the moment, which doesn’t need much :)
It’s possible they do other things as well, but is it _really_ true that a Dev is more productive with a second monitor that’s 24” as opposed to 19”? I used to be a huge fan of multi monitor setups but have gone through years of having 2 4K 27”, as single 4K, or just plain old MacBook screen only. I can definitely attest that a laptop screen alone is not good, but am honestly not sure about the added benefit of a second large monitor, leave alone due to its size. If anything I probably was less productive when I had two large screens! Furthermore the most prolific engineers I know of rarely has more than one large monitor if even that.
However, does having two large monitors make me feel good? Heck yes! So in terms of engineer morale it might help but I doubt you were measurably less productive due to this handicap on actual non emotional basis.
I hear what you're saying, but I'd personally rather work more quickly than experience my users' pain. Most of my users won't have a 24" monitor either, but it's worth every penny.
A big monitor everywhere you go isn’t a solution to any real problem. It comes from the same line of thinking that describes work as people sitting at a computer typing for 8 hours straight. It’s just not realistic.
Multi monitor setups are overrated anyway. I work entirely off a laptop screen and only a portion of that screen is where my focus is most of the time. Having multiple monitors at my desk is mostly for decoration and looking like you’re a big deal. Switching a virtual desktop isn’t hard.
Some creative types could legitimately use multiple monitors to lay out a lot of content, but I also don’t think those creatives will necessarily prefer an Apple Vision Pro over their existing tools, unless they’re doing something truly spatial like sculpting out a life size car or something. But that’s definitely not the norm. Most people are just going to browse web sites and stare at spreadsheets.
I cannot do any serious coding on a laptop, it's just too small. It's fine if I am traveling and have to debug something but otherwise no way, I've always needed large screens to get things done.
Some of my coworkers code in 80x40 windows and are totally fine with a single 25" 1080p screen, I have no idea how they manage honestly: I've run dual monitors since forever (running two physical video cards, before dualhead was available) and lately I find myself more productive on 3 screens at home rather than 2 at work.
Yes, laptop ergonomics aren't ideal, but neither is life. There are always trade-offs. And I have some colourful language memories from earlier sysadmin jobs getting horrific shocks while lugging other users' colour CTRs around for them...
I'd suggest that anyone who thinks that they "need" a huge monitor as opposed to "prefers" should considers needs vs wants.
If I was living in a van, and I'm a tiny house fan BTW, a large monitor would NOT be on MY 'needs' list.
Another commenter made a good point about more screen space being more distraction, and debuggers being a big part of that as an example of not solving the real problem. Given that you only have a few cm^2 of full-definition vision anyway, you have to manage that one way or another. More pixels is not necessary that way.
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