Re: I'm reminded of...
I'm quite definitely an old curmudgeon.
But
I've had a succession of "mobile workstations", I had the HP equivalents of your IBM, I loved by 8730 and even more so the 8740 that followed it (a laptop display you could comfortable read in the mid day sun in a coffee bar on the med, oh with 12bit per colour and 1920x1200 ). I spent years flying around the world with two of these buggers in my laptop bag, fortunately no airline ever asked to weight my laptop bag!
When my much loved box started to play up I bought the replacement system, a ZBook or some such, which I loath, partly as the display is crap and partly because it is so damn heavy I just can't be arsed to carry the thing around, consequently it has hardly ever left my desk.
So I've added an a super slim EliteBook 1040 (not an Apple, but they're all based on an Intel reference design which was shown here on El'Reg years back) laptop which is easy to carry round. It's light, it's slim, the display is light years ahead of the damn ZBook and it's fine for 90% of what I do when I'm not at my desk. OK, it's not upgradable, well it's got a 1TB M.2 SSD(OK that was an upgrade it's a standard slot), I really can't remember when I last wanted a cd when I wasn't at my desk. Extra disks, again normally only when I'm at a desk, my a multi TB USB device is easy enough, other than that I can access storage over the network. It would be nice if there was a low profile rj45 plug so I didn't need a dongle for wired network access, but most of the time WiFi lets me do what I want.
Oh and the battery life of 1040 is way better than that of the big buggers I had before.
As to heat, mostly it runs pretty cool. The only time it gets hot is due to MS arrogance. They think it's OK to load updated and reboot my laptop when it's in sleep mode. Except the stupid ****s don't understand that it's locked with pre-boot encryption, so it can't reboot till unlocked and HP's damn FW does not do the power management stuff before the OS is running, so if you've dumped the laptop on the bed when exiting the bog you can come back and find that it's damn hot. The workstations did the same and got just as hot.
PS, why isn't there an standard for a micro Ethernet connector, or at least more micro than the RJ45.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
