We still haven't figured out how to parallelize most software without unreasonable effort though. Servers happen to be the happy case for it beacuse they can just run many copies of the same single threaded code that we haven't figured out how to parallelize.

In my life that matters less than you'd think, it's not about speeding up a particular program, it's more about been able to run a particulary program at full speed on one core and not drag the rest of them to a halt.

If I have an IDE, 2-3 VM's, a couple of browsers, continuous integration running in the background, webpack/ts-loader with off thread hinting I can easily have 4-5 processes running that all benefit from having a full core to play with.

It's for that reason when I had to build a new desktop for the new job I went with the Ryzen 1700, each core isn't that important (as long as it's comparable with the core in my current jobs i5-3570K which it broadly is), it's having eight of them.

It's interesting that this use case of running many different programs continuously is probably quite different from the rest of the high-end desktop world, where you might be exclusively in Autocad, Photoshop, Maya or some complex engineering software.

For developers I think more cores is still better (I'd add Spotify and Slack to your list of things that are always running) and yet we still prefer shiny laptops to powerful desktops.

Not me, I develop on desktops 99% of the time.

Laptops have horrible postural positions unless you use desktop monitors at which point why not just use an actual desktop which will annihilate the laptop on performance anyway.

My laptop gets switched on maybe once a month.

They clearly never looked at the task manager or something similar. I'm running ~900 threads on my CPU which has only 6 cores and 12 threads. Magic! ;o)