I have a windows 7 system configured with an Intel i5 and 16 gigs of ram as my main work horse, and a macbook Pro as my secondary portable system for lighter work. The macbook is very underpowered for some tasks I need out of a computer, but does well enough for lighter work on the go.

Personally I could never stand to have just one system, and so the desktop will continue to receive updates every few years as required. I really don't see the point in paying out the nose for high performance laptops either. They are hot, cost several times that of similar specs in a home built desktop system, and high horsepower systems tend to have crap all for battery life.

Unless you normally find yourself on the move most of the time and need to work anywhere, then I would say focus your funds towards a solid desktop system, and pair it with a low cost laptop. I would Not suggest apple unless you are planning to work with developing for that platform. The only way I justified the Macbook Pro was because I needed a portable system for photography and astronomy work, and was planning to pick up the cheapest option for a mac that I could to get more experience on the platform. Given that I already have a vastly superior desktop that would be used for anything I needed while sitting at my desk, buying a mac mini and a 800-900 laptop did not make sense.

I have a windows 7 system configured with an Intel i5 and 16 gigs of ram as my main work horse, and a macbook Pro as my secondary portable system for lighter work. The macbook is very underpowered for some tasks I need out of a computer, but does well enough for lighter work on the go.

i7 2.6Ghz

16GB RAM

512GB SSD

Seems enough to replace a desktop to me. Hardly underpowered except on the GPU front, but even that is more than enough for most purposes. The battery life is also excellent. But I travel a lot for work and I need to be mobile which justified the cost for me.

I use a Dell Precision M6700. It will run up to 3 external monitors simultaneously--at work I have two 1920x1200 and one 2560x1440 monitor attached to it, plus its own 1920x1080 screen. You can get a little more maximum horsepower with desktops than laptops, but a laptop i7 with 16GB of RAM is quite good even for very heavy development work. If you have the budget (approximately $2000 for a nice one, $1500 on the cheap, $5000 fully loaded), a mobile workstation from Dell, HP, or Lenovo is the way to go. Just be ready for a heavy brick of a laptop :-)

My previous experience developing on laptops has been pretty painful to say the least; built in keyboards are generally quite difficult to use and if you don't have an external mouse then it gets extremely tedious

At the same time I wan't something that is portable and that I can take to work etc.

What setup do you have at home? and if you use a laptop are there any tricks to ease the pain of development?
Do you find it easier or more difficult?

My home office desk is below right (desktop), my collaborator's desk is below left (laptop). From a usability point of view, they're both the same. Big main screen, decent keyboard and mouse... The main difference is that he can easily unplug his from the peripherals and take it home if needed

If you get a laptop, just get an external keyboard/mouse/monitor to go with it!

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I used a desktop for 10 years and had been trying different laptops:

* Acer Ferrari, $1900

* Some Lenovo model, $600

* Some HP model, $700

I was so disappointed by the Acer which ran hot so fast, and the other two were a bit slow when compiling and testing games.

But I got persuaded to buy a ASUS G74SX and now I'm never going back to a desktop again. It's so fast and never runs hot. The only downside is that it's huge, which I guess is why they call it a desktop replacement. So it's quite bulky to carry around.

I'm also perfectly fine using my laptop for almost anything (with external monitor/keyboard if available... external mouse is implied anyway). Heck I even did quite some coding on my crummy netbook. But then again, peoples tolerances for slightly suboptimal screen sizes/keyboards etc. seem to vary a lot... So I guess you have to know yourself where you are on that scale.

Another issue I'd like at least bring your attention to is the GPU situation if you want to use linux on a laptop. When my old laptop died recently I had a really hard time figuring out which laptops with discrete GPU are reasonably usable under linux. The whole switchable graphics trend resulted in linux support once again being all over the place. You can always use the builtin intel IGPs but that has you stuck with open source drivers and OpenGL 3.1 or so at this point. To use the OpenGL 4.2/4.3 capabilites of the discrete GPUs you have to really figure out what is possible with a specific model. From what I gathered with Nvidia Optimus there are two cases. In some cases you can switch to the discrete GPU hard in the bios. Not all laptops allow that though and I found it borderline impossible to find info on which ones do or don't. The alternative is to use the Bumblebee stuff which apparently comes at a significant performance drop (since it pretty much renders on the discrete GPU and then copies over the result to the IGB framebuffer).

As a result I for the first time went for a laptop with an AMD GPU. There I'm now stuck with the discrete GPU when running Linux (at the cost of battery life) but at least i can use the full OpenGL features set supported by the hardware (well the part that isn't buggy in the driver ).

I find doing development fine on my Clevo Vortex laptop, which I recently switched to from a laptop. Also I happily code on my Samsung ultra-portable. You do have to pay more than a desktop, but it's worth it to sit on the sofa And I don't find heat a problem.

I don't think laptop keyboards or touchpads are worse than desktop keyboards or mice, but the problem is it's a lot harder to change if you don't like it. Ideally try out before you buy.

And as someone said for monitors - the same applies to keyboard and mouse, you can easily plug them in if you're using a laptop at a desk, getting the best of both worlds.

The main problem for me is that there isn't a nice compromise between "power" and "portability" - to get a high performance laptop competing with desktops

• means something big and heavy, with a brick of a power supply (albeit, still more portable than a desktop - I could take my Clevo to work if I wanted), that has poor battery life. Meanwhile, I still love having an ultra-portable laptop when travelling - I barely notice my 10" Samsung, where as 15" laptops (let alone 4Kg 17" ones) feel big and heavy by comparison. And the 8 hour battery life is nice.
• I'm talking things like decent GPU, 2 hard disks, 17" screen.

That's true, my G74SX hardly lasts 2 hours. But I don't use it on battery too often, so for me it's not a problem.

I prefer desktops or workstations, I generally hate the way the keyboard feels on a laptop or that touch pad crap (if im going to use an external keyboard, mouse and monitor then what is the point of using a laptop ). Also hardware upgrades aren't as fun on a laptop. Besides if I ever used a laptop at home the cat would just sit on it and try to pull out all the keys