A good keyboard. This is surprisingly hard to find.
Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
341–350 of 731 posts
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you can always claim it didn't overheat in a bag but I still think that storing a turned on laptop in a bag or sealing somehow its ventilation it's a misuse and it shouldn't be covered by the warranty.
I agree, but shouldn't any computer's bios power everything off if temperatures get too high?
My laptop from 2013 does. Found that out the "oh, shit" way more than one time.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Let's hope AMD mobile processors will work better, and that we'll be able to find decent laptops using them. It doesn't have anything to do with the processor does it? Surely neither intel nor amd have removed S3 support? AFAIK it's integrators (motivated by Microsoft's push of "modern standby"?) which make it unavailable in their bioses: S3 needs bios integration, modern standby is just S0. Or do you mean "hopeful…
Intel 11th gen CPUs are 100% Modern Standby and DO NOT have S3 sleep. I don't know about AMDs support.
Lenovo still puts it back on some of the laptops, like the X1 Carbon 9th Gen. So, I suppose this is not strictly dependent on the CPU.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#3441. 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…
Was going to post the same thing (albeit far more poorly explained). Isn't Microsoft embarrassed about this? This has been an issue for my last two laptops over the last 5 years. How is it acceptable for this problem to still exist? My Lenovo supports S3 sleep, but I didn't discover it until probably a year into having bought it, so at that point my battery's ability to hold charge had already been sufficiently degra…
I actually just want them to fix connected standby and properly be able to do these things with low power.
My phone (a oneplus 6) can be on standby for nearly a week. That windows laptops attempt at this mode drains the battery by the end of a workday is just pathetic. Instant resume should be available with no practical compromises.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was going to post the same thing (albeit far more poorly explained). Isn't Microsoft embarrassed about this? This has been an issue for my last two laptops over the last 5 years. How is it acceptable for this problem to still exist? My Lenovo supports S3 sleep, but I didn't discover it until probably a year into having bought it, so at that point my battery's ability to hold charge had already been sufficiently degra…
Your battery is likely worn from keeping it charged at 100% constantly, lenovo have an option to limit max charge to something like 80% which will greatly reduce battery wear, you just have to turn it off if you are actually planning to run it without AC for as long as possible.
This is really a poor software solution to an old hardware solution that disappeared for the sake of thinness: removable batteries. In the past with easily removable battery packs you could simply pop them out once they're fully charged and pop them in when you wanted to make sure they were charged up. When manufacturers started touting long life cycle batteries to justify internalizing them and making them difficult to replace and impossible to quickly pop out, software manufacturers added this in to attempt or extend battery life.
Before, I simply removed my battery when plugged in all day and significantly extended my battery life. If I needed it, it was mostly charged. It would of course dissipate over time so if I had any plans of using my laptop in an actual mobile fashion or wanted to move my laptop from one long term power source to the next, I'd pop it in, make the move and pop it back out. I of course lost the UPS feature having a laptop with a battery pack also served but I could assess when I thought my power source was/wasn't stable and pop the battery in under those conditions (not very often).
Most people I know use laptops as portable workstations. If you frequently operate in situations where you desire battery alone then the OS charge management works quite well. I don't and most people I know don't. In today's world, mos the use cases I operate under those conditions are better served by my smartphone.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#346Maybe it goes without saying but
- fingerprint sign in
- at least 16 gb ram, up to at least 32
- VG+ screen. It's the only thing you use 100% of the time. Even the KB and touchpad isn't as often. Don't skimp on the screen.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#3470. 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…
My tastes are fairly similar to yours. I'm curious which boxes aren't ticked by the more recent X200 series Thinkpads since the X230 in your view? I recently purchased one, and I did a bunch of research before deciding which to get. I settled on an X270 because it's user upgradeable, supports two SSDs, has two batteries, has hardware VP9 encoding/decoding, includes a USB C port, and is hopefully much closer to the ru…
The X270 has a 6th or 7th gen dual core CPU. If you get an 11th gen i5 like you'll find in the sub-$1000 laptop range you'll get something that is literally twice as fast as even the highest end 7th gen i7. That is a lot of performance to leave on the table.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asus Vivobook 16X OLED? 1) 94 Wh battery 2) R7 5800h / R9 5800hx 3) 4K OLED screen that goes to 550
Or for something not quite as good but more likely to be available, their Zephyrus G15: 90Wh, 5800HS or so, 2560×1440.
I have one and can confirm it has a great battery and is snappy. They're a little hard to find in certain configurations but for a "gaming" laptop it's a pretty decent daily driver.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#349As for the laptops built-in screen 1920×1080 resolution is the only I want, also reasonable colors and preferably anti-glare screen. For external displays it must support 4K unless very cheap.
What is the reason you want resolution that low? I find high dpi and high refresh rates to be just so nice. I prefer smaller text and UI elements, but even when text is large it just looks so much better.
For me, higher resolutions add little for what I do. If I needed to look at super tiny text for whatever reason, like in images, I can use them, but that rarely happens.
My work computer has a 2K screen, BTW. I lower the resolution instead of scaling.
I have a colleague that scaled his monitors up a lot to something that looks hard to use, but he works fine with it.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you can always claim it didn't overheat in a bag but I still think that storing a turned on laptop in a bag or sealing somehow its ventilation it's a misuse and it shouldn't be covered by the warranty.
I agree, but shouldn't any computer's bios power everything off if temperatures get too high?
Yes, but I guess in a sealed bag everything gets hotter and hotter, not only the CPU/GPU.