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Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

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Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#291

Post by datenarsch »

kasabali wrote: post #159
a-dub wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dunno. honestly it looks like a regular intel laptop made to look like an old macbook with bays for inverted usb-c dongles. the whole "it's modular! here's your screwdriver! you can service your laptop by yourself and replace the ram! don't forget your coveralls, you're a hardware technician now!" thing seems a bit.. theatrical? but who knows, i've never owned a laptop with fixed storage and ram so maybe i'm not in…

> honestly it looks like a regular intel laptop That'd be true for laptops from 3-4 years ago. That's also what I thought about framework until I saw the recent crap Lenovo etc. are pushing in consumer segment. They have basically tablet motherboards. Everything else is soldered. No ram slots, no sata, no connectivity, only a single M.2. If you're lucky it'll have 1 ram slot. This'll only get worse and spread to all…

But that is only true for the consumer product line, isn't it? I have a Thinkpad T series and you can replace virtually everything and you can buy replacement parts super cheap on eBay because Thinkpads are so common.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#292

Post by jiggawatts »

My #1 requirement is a 4K OLED HDR screen, ideally 16" or larger.

The #2 requirement is a decent keyboard with full-sized arrow keys and dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Ins/Del and arrow keys. (Why $5000 laptops skimp on $0.01 keys just boggles the mind.)

Everything else is a nicety, or can be compromised on. But I look at the screen and I touch the keyboard for 8 hours a day. If they're not good enough, I'm not buying, end of story.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#293

Post by gsich »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #216
tomp wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get critical Windows Updates So you mean Microsoft can force your laptop to restart and lose all your work even when it's "off"? Amazing.

No, not when it’s actually off. If you’ve shut down, then it won’t do this, but if you put it to sleep it can. That being said, I hate this, with my old laptop I could close the lid and pop it in the bag and it would lose maybe 5-10% battery per day, with new laptop it happily unsleeps itself in the bag which has zero ventilation. So for safety reasons I have to shut my laptop down before putting it in my bag, then h…

Try Hibernate.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#295

Post by jonwinstanley »

massysett wrote: post #238
jonathanlydall wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not when it’s actually off. If you’ve shut down, then it won’t do this, but if you put it to sleep it can. That being said, I hate this, with my old laptop I could close the lid and pop it in the bag and it would lose maybe 5-10% battery per day, with new laptop it happily unsleeps itself in the bag which has zero ventilation. So for safety reasons I have to shut my laptop down before putting it in my bag, then h…

I’ve been using Macs for over five years now and before that I was all Linux. From reading this it looks like Windows has actually reverted to where Linux was over five years ago: having to fiddle with the machine to get sleep to work. That’s just sad.

Windows wasn't good at this in the past either. Didn't they used to have sleep, hibernate and a load of other options too?

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#297

Post by katbyte »

crooked-v wrote: post #132
foobarbaz33 wrote: post #119

> if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015 Yes, you missed something huge. Apple Silicon M1 or nothing. It's just too good. Low power consumption allows the laptop to actually be used as a laptop. The power use-to-performance ratio is unmatched by anything on the market. Apple is breaking us free from decades of stagnation on the hardware front. Nothing else on the market comes close. I expect this to change…

Also, the M1X laptops (probably) release Monday and will be even more ridiculous.

I’ve been waiting for years, finally time to replace my 2015!

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#298

Post by peakaboo »

hiisukun wrote: post #27

1. S3 Standby/suspend support. If your laptop supports that, you can close the lid and it will power ~everything except the RAM down (sometimes a USB port still charges). In 'new' laptops, including almost everything Tiger lake and Intel, S3 is being phased out for Microsoft's "Modern Standby", known as S0ix (or sometimes InstantGo). This is much more like a mobile phone, where it stays on but attempts to use as litt…

Yep. The thinkpads I've had running Linux has supported s3 sleep but it feels like it's going away more and more.

You start with a laptop at 80% charged if you use Microsofts stupid system. The more I use Linux, the more annoyed I get at Microsoft and how they keep worsening the entire pc experience every year.

Users are not users, they are cattle to be managed by Microsoft.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#299

Post by can16358p »

michalf6 wrote: post #76
michalf6 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-consumer behaviour. Multiple hardware design faults in macbooks. Actively working against repair, against software freedom, against the user (see recent CSAM fiasco). Non-removable storage. Preference of thin&light vs upgradeability/cooling. I wouldn't mind that as I'm not their customer, but all the crap they introduce gets mindlessly copied by all their competition.

Adding to that, I'm afraid of the world moving away from the PC as a standard. Through a lucky set of circumstances, we were able to enjoy a relatively open and universal compatibility standard of computers for the last several decades. I'm afraid of the computing world fragmenting again into several walled gardens in the likes of Amiga/Atari of old, nothing being compatible with each other, unable to run code not si…

The real problem is that there is no competition.

Not a fan of Apple here but I use (and admittedly like) their products: I develop apps and iOS is solid on the app landscape, currently we don't even care about Android versions of our apps in almost any project that we use because most people who are "serious" about their apps are on iPhones and iPads. In addition, even though I have the hacker mindset of many out here, at the end of the day I need something reliable and good-looking, and well supported, which Apple has and others don't.

I don't like Apple's user-hostile behavior and would happily love to see some competition. For me:

Apple is bad, Microsoft/Google is worse. So Apple is relatively good.

Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

#300

Post by ayushnix »

Smithalicious wrote: post #166

0. Linux compatibility, I am not super picky about getting everything to work perfectly but I should be able to trust that the software I prefer to use will run and my laptop will connect to wifi and play audio properly and so on. 1. IPS screen (mostly a given nowadays, but this wasn't always so) 2. Trackpoint, I hate trackpads. Pretty rare option so I could possibly be convinced otherwise if the trackpad is particul…

> I did look into the Framework laptop recently but while it's probably the closet things in a long time the keyboard doesn't look good and there's no trackpoint (nor even physical mouse buttons)

It also has a screen that needs fractional scaling which makes Framework a deal breaker for me, no second thoughts about it. I'm not buying anything with a fractionally scaled display if I can help it.

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