I've been thinking about this a fair bit recently.

We make a lot of price/performance compromises for having an attached screen and keyboard on our computer. That was what got me started.

Then I remembered the days of having to go to a special corner of the house to use a computer, vs now when I have a computer with me all the time. In my bag, on the sofa, on the train. Hell, I'm writing this on the work MBP while waiting for an appointment.

And you know what, I think I got more done when I went and sat in a corner of the house all those years ago. I set up an area for "computer work", and it worked really well.

I have a home office, but it's a jumble of cables going into docking stations and all sorts of weird stuff. I think if I streamline it and turn it into a proper "computer room", I might get some of that mojo back. I might even convince my partner that surrendering the home office and having a corner of the den might be good - she can watch TV while I tinker. And I won't be balancing a laptop on my knee and trying to do two things at once.

And the price/performance thing comes back in. Hmm.

I have exactly this setup and use a Macbook Air with Tailscale to just connect via High Performance Screen Sharing both at home and on the go (when not sitting at my desk, I move around a lot around the house after 3pm or so while I keep my workflow identical)

HPSS works well via 5G, and Tailscale is incredible for the setup as much as the hardware.

Edit: I ended up getting a 15" M5 Air but honestly trying it on a 13" M4 Air was actually superior because when all you care is mobility (since the Studio does the heavy work) its nice just going around with almost no weight / bulk.

Having replaced my MacBook with a Mac Mini, I would reconsider. The MacBook is just such a _complete_ package. Great speakers, great keyboard, fantastic screen, the fingerprint sensor thingy.. Takes a lot of gear to match that

Why not a non-mac cheaper desktop/workstation and a Mac laptop for use?

E.g. what most major tech companies have - a laptop that is for VSCode via ssh/web browsing, and a beefy Linux dev box you ssh into for everything else?

It's way cheaper, and what I use at home too - a lot cheaper than a Mac studio for everything, especially with RAM and storage.

Yes, and..

Just Tailscale into the Studio from iPad Pro 13" with magic keyboard and Kit Knox's rootshell:

https://github.com/kitknox/rootshell

Note that the iPad Pro can also drive a 4K second screen if you like, and most anything else a Macbook with a single port could drive.

Why not Macbook Air? Because the iPad Pro is also a tablet, touch screen, and 5G...

Slightly off-topic: I decided to go with a Mac Mini to start playing with AI. My daily driver is a Linux laptop (with a negligible GPU). I also have a few Raspberry Pi machines for backup, and a low-end AWS server.

I was always cobbling together ad hoc network access, to get from one machine to another. Access to my Mac Mini while traveling was a pain. Bringing it with me is ridiculous, and network access was a PITA.

Tailscale is wonderful magic. Free (for my usage), so easy to set up, and now no matter where my various computers are, they are all accessible trivially via a single ssh connection.

So get a beefed up desktop Mac, set up Tailscale, and then use any random laptop, anywhere, to use it headless.

My goto. Even ignoring speed, it's nice to have a remote machine that keeps doing whatever it's doing while your laptop is closed. And the ARM Macs idle at such low power that it's not wasteful like my MacPro4,1 was haha. My UPS's ammeter doesn't even display the Mac mini's draw.

They gave me a nice MBP for my new job. I tried doing heavy work on it locally, it was fine for that, and yet it still ended up being a light terminal into an EC2 instance, partially because their stuff is on AWS and latency is way lower within that. My personal mini is running too.

> not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages

Funny that after the price started to increase last year (I think October/November), there was a window of a few months where Apple prices stayed the same as they were before, thus making apple prices actually good when compared to the rest of the market.

It was a unique opportunity to have acquired a 512G M3 ultra for $10k.

I dusted of my lightest computer with an M1 chip and use Tailscale to make my network virtual from anywhere. Been running a. Pi5 as a main house hub and an M1 Pro as an always on Mac. It would be nice to go all out and make a Studio a hub I can just screen share into for major compute.

I had the same thought, I grabbed a studio two years ago for this reason and it’s been great. 99% of the time lack of portability isn’t a concern. Every now and then (e.g. travel) I notice the limitation, but it’s not much of an inconvenience to just not do some work for a bit.

I have a Mac Studio M2 Max as my main driver. It's fantastic. I will get the best M5 Studio I can afford when the higher RAM options come out because I am very involved with local inference. I find that with Tailscale I can either use screen sharing if I've got a good enough internet connection or just SSH and Mosh if it's a little bit laggy. That has been good enough for me. A Mac Studio and a Neo as a companion is a really good combination. My laptop is an Apple M4 Air but it basically does nothing except for running ScreenShare and a terminal.

Another option is a 'maxed out' mini e.g M5 Pro/64GB. Mini is super easy to travel with if you know there'll be a 'dock' at the far end e.g office<>home or whatever.

I've been using the free version of TailScale to use macOS's built-in screen sharing app to use my home Mac mini from my work MacBook Pro. Works great! That combined with ChatGPT/Codex's "remote" feature is an amazing combination. I think you'd be totally fine with a Mac Studio + Neo.

I would not use Neo, Air with 24 GB ram should be your minimum because you will want to do some work locally even when you're running a VPN/SSH thin client setup.

I'm currently SSH-ing into my workstation from my M4 Air with 24 gb ram and it's ideal for this flow. Slack/editors/clients/browsers/etc. easily gobble up over 16 GB. I have no more dev tools/compilers/source on my client machines, everything is dockered up on remote workstation in isolated VMs (too much supply-chaining).

My only downside to using a pro is not having 120/4k HDMI port on air and my dock won't support it with Apple (it does with windows)

I've been holding out, because I think my next purchase will be a Studio with an Ultra Chip in it. I'm wanting it to be a "forever" server, so I'm holding out while I can.

>I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked.

Having owned 3 MacBook Pros since 2008, the decision to make my next computer be a Mac Studio came down to (1) MacBook thermal throttling that slows down CPUs when it starts to overheat and (2) easier upgrade of Mac Studio SSD with after-market storage module whereas the MacBook requires more complicated disassembly and hot air gun to dislodge the surface mounted SSDs.

I have a brand new M5 Pro MacBook Pro I don't like it when the fans turn on. The Mac Studio will be faster and quieter for the same workloads.

M4 Max Studio + Macbook Air. I've been running this for several years. Mac is a really poor server environment and none of the apple ecosystem makes up for it. So, I still prefer my linux server, but the M4 Max is much more suited for inference tasks so here it is. I wouldn't say it's much better than a MBP except the sustained throughput is much higher and the fan noise is barely noticeable. I'd get a linux equivalent if there was one.

YMMV, but when I got my iPad I realized that my "mobile" needs were only contempt consumption and my MBP was used as a desktop computer connected to a 32'' monitor. So every time I renewed my laptop the expensive screen went with it, and I had to pay for another one that I would be using as a second screen!

Thus, my current workhorse is a Studio.

I wonder if apple could or would offer a subscription for a OSX VM that you could remote into? That plus a neo would be an excellent combo for me

I used laptops for years.

However, after retiring, I realized I never undocked my MBP.

So I got an M4Pro Mini, and I've been thrilled. If I ever get to where I travel a lot, again, I'll get a laptop, but I don't see a need, right now.

I got an M1 Max studio w/ 64gb when they first came out and I love it. Price was obviously a lot more reasonable at the time. I’m fortunate to have dedicated office space, and there is definitely a nice psychological effect to having a desktop in a specific spot and “going to the office”. I’ve since purchased an m3 MacBook Air as my thin client and for lightweight travel use, and when my wife needs to take a call in the office or whatever I pop out to the living room and either hop on Remote Desktop or SSH into my Studio. Highly recommend this setup. If you’re primarily doing thin client on a local network, a neo should be fine for that (and to use as a media player/communicator around the house). That said, I have been eyeballing Omarchy…

I’ve debated Mac Studio or MBP at each generation. For equal spec machines the price premium to get a MBP over the Studio is always smaller than I expected, so I pay the extra amount and get the MBP.

This changes when you get into connotations that aren’t available in the laptop form factor, but with RAM prices the way they are those configurations are more than I want to spend on a local machine right now.

For running local LLMs the high memory Mac options always look appealing, but the processing speed (prefill) is so much slower than GPUs that it hurts. For situations where you have no rush and can let something work in the background for 24 hours it can some times be ignored, but the speeds I get from a real GPU setup are so much faster that I never use the larger models on a high memory Mac any more.

This is my setup (except I have an Air because the Neo didn't exist yet). And it's great. Tailscale makes it trivial.

I can't really imagine buying a new computer in this market. But I also wonder how long it will be before prices drop again, if ever.

I've been running a desktop Mac in addition to MacBook and iPad for the past decade (currently a first gen Studio still holding quite strong). It's primarily a focus thing, secondarily it's a way to keep work happening locally while I'm elsewhere, and never have the frustrations of docking and screen geometries all re-arranging, etc. The iPad is at the opposite extreme, it's for recreation, burn out management. The MacBook exists for when I actually need to do "real work" outside of the house.

At my current job, one of my biggest blunders was thinking "Let me just order the same hardware as most of my teammates to avoid unnecessary complications".

Most, if not all, of our current work happens on remote cloud vms. Now I'm stuck with carrying a 3KG monstrosity to work.Every day.

Absolutely no positives compared to my ThinkPad that weighed less than half in my previous job.

Remote development is "good enough" these days. With VS Code, Development containers etc... Having a light weight, portable laptop is so much nicer than a laptop that you can't even rest on your lap for long duration.

The only thing you need to be mindful of using light weight laptops is not having enough RAM to fit all your browser tabs..

I’m in the same camp as you. I’ve just decided that the M5 Ultra is gonna be my next machine. Plus an Air for the few times when I need a computer on the go. I’m invested in Tailscale already so an ubiquitous Studio Ultra seems like a sweet idea

I have been thinking a lot about buying a very fast desktop and a cheap laptop that uses remote desktop to connect to the fast computer.

But in the end I ended op buying a Lenovo Legion and put Linux on it.

Laptops are so fast these days that I didn't want to be bothered with setting up connectivity to a remote desktop.

But if your laptop never leaves your desk I think a desktop computer is a great option. Relatively cheaper and easier to maintain and upgrade.

Recently took a Minisforum 7840hs PC out of rotation as a media PC and made it a full time coding workstation with Proxmox. I do a VM per project due to the nature of agentic editors.

I was using a VM setup on my MBP but it felt like a huge waste, having to leave a laptop on 24/7 when all it did was run Claude Code inside VMs.

I likely will stick with a Macbook Air 15" for next purchase, and beef up my "Claude Server" down the road.

Yeah, I have an MBP for Reasons, but it sits docked 90% of the time. I'd rather spend the engineering budget on better thermals and more ports; I always have it plugged into a fixed monitor and other peripherals.

If all you want to do is remote into your desktop, Neo seems like overkill. Why not just get a $200 Chromebook and save yourself $500?

I used to have a high-powered laptop, but just use a combination of ssh and NFS to my machine at home from a low powered laptop for travel these days. It works well.

Makes managing both backups and handling failure scenarios involving loss or unauthorised access to the laptop less of a hassle as well.

Yep, this is my exact thought. The pendulum has swung back toward a desktop making more sense for me than a laptop. It all depends on whether there is anything useful to do with an amount of computation that can't be fit into a laptop package. For a long time there wasn't, now there is.

I had the same view recently. For the past year I’ve been using my iPad to remote into both my MacBook Pro M1 Max and my racked Linux workstation at home using Jump and moonlight/sunshine, respectively. Never looked back

That’s nearly what I do but on a smaller scale. My iPad Pro serves as my laptop 90% of the time, and the 10% of the time I need to actually code and test in a chromium browser I remote into a mini.

I’ve wanted the idea of a home server or even home “mainframe” and some terminals for me and family forever but the idea never takes off….

> I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio

Would you get away with a Mini?

How about business where you send in all your old devices and get back a SSD using using their memories

Im writing this from a MacBook Air.

Everything is a container or VM now, and none of it runs locally for me.

I have a desktop (older intel) with giant monitors and a keyboard for when I sit at the desk. I have the laptop for when I travel, go out or just want to work from the couch.

When I do my next upgrade to "better hardware" I'm not migrating a machine, rather I'm migrating the containers. My workflow is such that if I loose one of the boxes I sit at to a cup of coffee I really wont care other than the financial loss of a new laptop or keyboard.

The biggest win in all this was dumping the off the shelf firewall/router and moving to Opnsense. Wireguard vpn lets me route all my traffic through home for all my devices (and what is now a growing home lab).

There are scopes of work that this setup would not work for. I would not want to be a video editor with this set up, it's not ideal if you want to play AAA games. But for what I do, it is pretty ideal.

Cheap Linux laptop with Tailscale back into the Studio when traveling?

If it's your remote-in laptop, I'd suggest getting a used MacBook Pro or Air with an M series processor in your preferred 13/15" size and memory/storage configuration. You can get a used MacBook Air M3 with 16GB of RAM for about the same price as a MacBook Neo. It'll have similar single core, GPU, and NPU performance as the Neo and about 38% better multi-core performance. Plus you'll have 16GB of RAM for future-proofing and apps. And you can spend a bit less if you want or a bit more depending on what you need. You could get a used MacBook Air M1 8GB for under $400.

Oh yeah. Throw it behind tailscale. Herdr multiplexer in terminal is cool, it’ll remember your session if you open it in ssh from the neo

Happy with M4 Mini, although I recommend using a well ventilated M.2 enclosure instead of the integrated docks as I just had a 2TB Kingston die which I'm pretty sure was caused by "zero thermal forks given (chopsticks only)" UGreen hub design. Also can use as a laptop and replace screen/keyboard/whatever when failed/unsuitable. Higher resulting device longevity, especially with Asahi Linux making such great progress. https://github.com/vk2diy/hackbook-m4-mini

Yes, except that the only way to get a fancy screen is also to put the fancy cpu in it. If there would be an Air with the screen of the pro I would buy it. Maybe even a Neo with that screen.

I’m doing essentially this, and got a MacBook Neo.

Fir kinda the first time in my life I don’t really have development tools on my personal laptop. I ghostty and openvpn client installed.

I have a large remote linux workstation (2x 8c/16t xeon cpus, 256gb ram, 2x8tb spinning rust disk) and i have my tools over there (along with some VMs).

It works surprisingly well.

Also, the macbook neo is a surprisingly capable little machine.

For a desktop you may find yourself better on a Linux or Windows machine price/performance wise.

I personally own an M3 ultra, an M1 max as laptops, but my desktop is a Ryzen desktop I built in 2022 and it was a third in price of the ultra for more power.

Do it! I went with the Mini/Neo combo. I don't need MBP power when out and about. When at home, the Mini is all I use.

I was in the same situation, I used maxed out 15'' M3 Max MacBook Pro docked to Studio Display closed on vertical stand behind the screen. It was fine for office work, but running local LLMs would definitely overheat it. The battery started degrading purely due to heat issues. And it was audible as well.

I decided to get Mac Studio M4 Max, also all maxed out config and the cooling is so much better that I can run local LLMs like Gemma 3/4, gpt-oss 120b all day long without any heat issues or any audible fan noise. So for my use case it was the right decision. I subsequently added 15'' M5 Max MacBook Pro all maxed out to my collection and even though it is slightly faster on LLM inference (I get 100 tokens/s with Gemma 4 27b model), you just can't run LLMs longer than a few minutes. It starts overheating and gets really loud.

That’s what I have been doing for years, it remains in the house secured while I ssh into it from an old thinkpad. You can get air to pair it with it if you really wanna have that seamless flow, otherwise, ssh works well.