> Each laptop needs at least 256G,
And yet Apple's most popular notebook, the MacBook Air comes with 128 GB with 256 GB as an option while the Surface Pro 3 starts at 64 GB of flash. Apple really worked on their Cloud products to support lower storage options for their laptops. It also worked for their mobile products as Apple is traditionally been stingy with Flash storage. Your typical laptops with HDDs don't really offer all that much more (if any) compared to five years ago.
> I would prefer 512G - as that would allow the comfortable
> use of HyperV setups within the laptop (it would be easier to
> separate a business environment from that of a personal one
> within the hyper V, and it would make migrating between laptops
> easier. I would also like 16G of RAM - but usually only 8G is
> available in most ultrabooks currently.
What percentage of users need to run this kind of setup? I'm in the Mac OS X ecosystem and migrating systems is easy, primarily because there are no license checks on the Operating System. If you bought a Mac, you can run the OSX. If I lost my system today, I could go to the local Apple Store, buy a variety of models, hook it up to my Time Machine disk and be back up and running in a few hours.
My MBP comes with 16 GB of RAM. That's their only configuration. Most of it is unused as you might imagine.
My work environment is one of hosted servers. I remote desktop into my development environment. You don't need much in the way of CPU, graphics, RAM or storage with that model. It means that I can use a variety of clients in a variety of places to get to my development environment. The back-end machine has a ton of Intel cores and virtual machines so that machine utilization is efficient.
> Workstations need at least 800G of SSD for speed - not only
> boot, but any local operations as well (CAD, Visual studio -
> they all work better with faster local storage).
Visual Studio? You may get your build done faster with an SSD but a multithreaded build should be pretty fast with lots of RAM. If you need to build 50 million lines of code, you probably have everything built once and then just do local code rebuilds. Far more efficient than buying a lot of SSD storage. Sure SSDs are nice but my 2008 Nehalem desktop runs fine. A 200 ms response time instead of a 100 ms response time is something that I can live with.
> Any large server environment, doing a lot of DB work, or
> multiple virtual servers etc would not be able to do this
> without SSDs.
I work in a huge server environment doing a lot of DB work and we use SSDs but we use a lot of HDDs too.
But we were talking about consumer products.
