I am using 15" laptop but never laptop screen really . It's too small for working comfortably . Prefer Samsung 22'screens because with detachable leg they fit a suitcase and survive airports just fine when wrapped by a winter jacket. Takes 5 min to assemble in any hotel or bnb place. Laptop keyboards are super inconvenient either.
Wonder how MAc mini M4pro doing currently vs typical i7, i9 GF4080 laptop in typical content creation soft: Blender,Painter/Designer,Octane render etc?
2-3 years ago Win laptop looked like a big champion notwithstanding a huge power unite. Anything have changed since? Anyone can compare from a personal experience of a digital nomad ?
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https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/alienware-x14-r2-gaming-laptop/spd/alienware-x14-r2-laptop
Very lightweight & sleek. Good GPU for a mobile. Small screen, but easy to hook up to any hotel TV with HDMI. Keyboard is typical laptop flat chiclet, but workable.
You can invent a benchmark that proves anything you want and I believe that is what you are seeing.
The arm/apple architecture is Incredibly efficient but that does not equate to Incredibly powerful.
If arm based chips offered the same ultimate compute capacity as intel/amd chips the world would be running on arm servers because they use less power to do the same work and that makes them cheaper to run .
Arm shines in power limited scenarios and we're mostly not thinking about that for the sort of work that we need to do.
That said though - I don't think most of us use more than about 20% of our machine's capabilities for the vast majority of the time so it may actually be completely fine to have something with a much lower ceiling in terms of ultimate power - it'll depend a lot on how much rendering/baking etc you do I expect
I think thomasp raises the most pertinent points though - a machine is useless unless the tools you need work properly on it.
On the other hand though - how different is that really from a mini-itx machine in a small case? some of them really aren't much bigger than what's pictured there and come with the benefit of a box protecting the GPU. They're expensive compared to a normal PC but they're not a mac money.
The minipc you've linked appears to have some sort of dedicated connection so presumably it'll run at full speed (i'd still check that quite carefully) but if you're looking at other models it's worth looking into the connection used and making sure it can cope with the GPU you're throwing at it - usb3/thunderbolt afaik cannot handle 16x PCIE speeds so you have a performance ceiling
I have a much less fancy beelink mini pc, it's really nice, surprisingly well built and did not come with mcaffee or norton installed. Now I want one of those
gnoop - you know the case is there in part to stop ESD wiping your machine out right ?