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.

Yeah, except that isn't the macbook I own. They make more than one model you know... The only one with that option costs about double what I (over) paid for with my 13 inch system. Which I love for portability and does all I can ask for it while I'm in the field. And it costs nearly triple what I paid for my desktop. Price wise the comparison gets better if you include the large calibrated dual screen setup, but then the laptop falls short on display space and quality. The desktop is also two years out of date, so those numbers get a little screwy. 16 gigs is bare minimum for a few of my projects. Without it disk thrashing stretches what is a weekend long computing job out to about three months.

If you absolutely Need the mobility, then you have few options but to go a quality laptop. However you are going to be paying more for less if the system spends 99% of its time sitting on your desk anyway, and isn't really needed to be moved.

If you absolutely Need the mobility, then you have few options but to go a quality laptop. However you are going to be paying more for less if the system spends 99% of its time sitting on your desk anyway, and isn't really needed to be moved.

Agreed. I commute on a motorcycle 4 days a week and I work out of at least three different locations each week (sometimes three in one day!). The premium was worth it for my use case. I could have saved about $1,000 and went with a Clevo laptop with equivalent SDD, CPU and RAM but a much faster GPU. However I have owned one before and they run much louder / warmer, they have a fraction of the battery life and they weigh literally twice as much when you factor in the massive power supply as well.

That being said, the only reason I need 16GB of RAM is to run Parallels without and hickups, and I would happily switch to one of the new i7 ultrabooks (Asus or Lenovo) if PC laptop manufacturers could come even close to the MacBook trackpad experience.

I've never really got on with laptops - they're not really small or light enough to be practically portable (unless you lug them around in a large bag) but they are still small enough to suffer lousy ergonomics (dodgy keyboard and mouse). That's why I prefer to have a desktop as my work machine and use a tablet (effectively throwing away the dead weight of an awful keyboard and mouse) when I need to be mobile.

You laptop people are crazy.

I work often on my Macbook Pro, primarily because it's the only Mac I have at hand. Was thinking of buying a Mac Pro once it's refreshed, but that plan's not going well. There are two classes of problems with working on a laptop:
* Ergonomics issues
* Technical spec issues

Ergonomics: The key here is to have separate keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Unfortunately my older MBP only supports a single external screen; I guess the newer Thunderbolt ports can chain/multiplex. Whether this is a problem depends on the individual I guess, but I like having three screens. There's a lingering problem that OSX's multimon handling is moronic, but c'est la vie.
Tech specs: Macbook GPUs suck. Other laptops offer GPUs that suck less, but they still suck. We're running machines with a variety of high end GPUs here (7970, GTX 690, GTX Titan, some older ones) and doing high end development. There's simply no laptop in existence that is appropriate for this. My MBP also shipped with 4GB of memory, which is far, far too small. I upgraded to 8 and it's passable. 16GB is reasonably workable, but Apple will charge you dearly for it and I'm not sure if other manufacturers price that fairly or not. The laptop CPUs actually seem fine, and IO performance is fine if you have an SSD. The prices on those have mercifully dropped and 512 GB is easily affordable. Before the SSD thing, 5400rpm drives were a real buzzkill.

In general I prefer to have a powerful desktop and a lightweight ultrabook style laptop, and it will cost you the same or less as one of those ridiculous desktop replacement laptops. Naturally, we just ordered one of those ridiculous desktop replacement laptops at work: an Alienware comfortably north of $3,000.

I don't find the keyboard on my 13" MBP-9.2 all that bad. The only thing more I really want from it is a proper delete key. A toggle-able thin-film keypad in the lower right beside the track pad would also be sweet, or even just have a toggle on the trackpad itself that turns it into a basic usage keypad. Key repeat doesn't go up as high as I would like, which can make backspace and the arrow keys a little slower to use than I'm accustomed to, but it is close enough to not be a complete deal breaker. The physical key shape and texture is something that I just learned to ignore after awhile.

Really looking forward to swapping the super drive for an internal storage device, but of course that is just upping the cost even more for the benefit of working on the go.

I really don't like the retina bodies for removing the optical drive way. I used both a 13" retina and non-retina for at least a week or more at work before I noticed they had a different thickness. Even if you're not going to use the bay for an optical drive, they could have at least kept the negligible amount of extra thickness to offer users the option of a SSD+HD secondary, and I'm not at all a fan of the apparent inability to upgrade the factory ram in the retina bodies.

It really depends on your working habits -- certainly if you only work from a fixed location, you can build or buy a desktop at lower cost/performance, but you're giving up the ability to move around easily -- to go work on your couch, outside, at a coffee shop, or to easily make presentations if it comes to that.

Similarly, it also depends on what you intend to do -- If you're doing 2D games, and aren't doing extensive 3D modeling, just about any laptop or desktop will do. If you plan on doing low-moderately-intensive 3D, you need good integrated (AMD A10, Intel's HD4000 or higher) or low-mid-tier discrete graphics, do more an you'll need mid-high-end mobile discreet GPU or performance-level desktop graphics. More still, and a workstation is what you need (or 17"+ notebook with SLI/Crossfire, giving up convenient portability).

For me I decided that all of my real "work" was going to be done on my laptop, but that I wanted a good, fixed workspace with multiple monitors, so a good docking solution became a requirement. I chose a Lenovo W530, upgrading the baseline model to 1920x1080 display, NVidia K2000m GPU and Intel i7 (4c/8t) @ 2.6Ghz baseline clock speed. I also ordered a dock that supports 2x Displayport/DVI dual-link + 1 VGA so that I can drive 3 monitors. After it arrived, I swapped in 32GB of RAM (it supports 4 modules) and a 256GB Samsung SSD. Currently (although I'm admittedly overdue for a desktop upgrade) this laptop is more powerful than my desktop in all bug raw GPU speed. Still, it plays games like L4D2 and Borderlands at 1920x1200 with settings maxed out with frame rate to spare. Cost-wise, I've got about two grand into it (about $400 of which is the dock), so its not a cheap option, but for me its the best balance of portability, power, and achieving a good workspace at home that I could ask for. I still plan to have a desktop that I can call into action if I ever needed it to, but starting with my next upgrade I'm going to build smaller systems aimed at gaming -- a small case with as powerful a CPU and GPU as I can fit inside, rather than the behemoth, do-all workstations I've built in the past.

If you do choose a laptop, don't just get the cheapest hunk of plastic you can find. Spend some time and find what's comfortable for you and has good build quality, a comfortable keyboard, decent pointing device, and wifi/Bluetooth built in. You'll also want a display with a resolution that gives you enough workspace, but is still comfortable for your eyes -- I like 1920x1080 (or better yet, by 1200) at 14-15.6" diagonal size. Any smaller and the DPI is too high, any larger a screen and you sacrifice portability. Retina or other very high resolution displays are nice, but Windows doesn't play as well with high-DPI displays yet as OSX does, so keep that in mind. I like my Lenovo, I've heard good things about HP's portable workstations (although they look like a brick), and I've also really liked my MacBook. On the Mac side, a Retina machine with a 27" thunderbolt display is a pretty nice docking solution, and at least on the larger Retina machine you could add another large monitor too.

I always use desktops when I have the choice. But I'll eventually buy a notebook for light work.

I use a desktop mostly because I do not need the mobility at the moment and also like many previous posters I generally dislike laptop keyboards (though some are ok, in fact it's not too bad for 15''+ laptops but any smaller and it's just a pain using it). I can see the appeal of using a laptop for development though, in fact I was considering getting one some day (nothing fancy, just a fairly cheap replaceable notebook with a small SSD + HDD and the rest stock) for when I will need to work from different places.

My IBM ThinkPad keyboard is absolutely excellent, and I have no complaints. My pointing devices are great, too, and I have an ATI Mobility FireGL V5200, which is my most powerful card and was excellent for its time. Newer ThinkPads are exponentially more powerful, and I'm considering getting one of the newer T series machines. I have absolutely zero complaints about ThinkPads for work.

My main machine is a Lenovo T410 notebook with discrete nVidia graphics. At home I have a docking station with external monitors, full keyboard, and mouse. Performance is just fine for graphics-intensive software development. On the road, I just disconnect and go. I travel 4 or 5 times a year for work. I can get by for those weeks with the miserable laptop keyboard and touchpad and the smaller screen, but at least it;s a real keyboard and not one of those toy chicket things all the notebooks come with these days.

A good notebook with docking station and external inputs and displays is all you need.