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

I miss not having desktop 16:10s. I would love to replace my Dell U2412m monitors with a 3840x2400 24” DCI p3 display. But those don’t exist in the consumer market.

What apple has for sale, newest, more ram/ssd and that's it.

It sounds obtuse, but, I enjoy selling my macbooks at 60-75% of purchase price 3-4 years later, and if needbe, applecare - which itself, is outrageous but it's nice.

Alternative would be Surface, but for the money, eh.

XPS 13 too, they're great but there have been some defects but for me they're perfect.

1. Linux support

2. Upgradeable RAM/storage

3. Preferably AMD GPU and CPU

In roughly that order. Sadly I couldn't really find that recently ): Searching for upgradeable RAM is a pain, and current GPU shortage prevents me from being picky about GPUs as well ):

Also consider warranty, repair, and accidental damage protection: My Surface Pro 3 had extended warranty, and there used to be stores to drop into. I had many problems with the machine, but the horrible part was that they could only be swapped out, so I had to restore my data (easy) and setup windows all over again (kill me now). This has been addressed with their ‘for business’ series with removable SSD.

My mother, never drops her laptop, works in dusty environments, uses the same computer for years. No ADP, no extended warranty, I just replaced her Asus laptop she has been using since 2013 without any hardware issues. Remarkable.

My friend, who is careless, has endless problems with his HP, and requires ADP. His last machine lasted barely 3 years and has been into the depot at least twice. He wants on-site this time as he was without a machine for a week at a time.

I had a Lenovo with full extended on-site warranty. Machine was a damned nightmare for problems, but I was never without a working machine. I am careful with it, it hasn’t been abused, and I believe it was a product design problem. Lenovo sent out many parts and technicians and finally contacted me to apologize and address the obvious satisfaction issue. They replaced it with a completely different model that I am happy with.

My Gigabyte gaming laptop is an older beast. 4 years old, no extended warranty. From a computing perspective and hack ability, I generally love it, but there have been problems and not one of them is resolved. Their support is through a terrible web portal that takes days to respond, and after weeks of back and forth, they will offer to let you ship the device to them for a repair estimate.

Connection breaks regularly (less often with more expensive headphones). Even when using an expensive Creative Bluetooth audio dongle. Samsung Android phone built-in breaks less often but in many cases the whole BlueTooth stack crashes.

Untolerable sound distortions start occuring every now and then. Even under Windows on a new EliteBook with reasonably expensive earphones. Often also with the smartphone when I jog in the woods (tried with different headphones and earphones).

With a cheap full-featured dongle I use on the office PC the sound quality is often untolerable (I mean distortions, not the bitrate, some days it would work Ok whole day, some days it just doesn't).

Built in BlueTooth in my old Dell Latitude only worked with Windows and occasionally with Ubuntu, other distros thought the device was a trackpad (could be fixed with some hacling but was not worth it because still worked unreliably so I used the Creative dongle instead).

Even with Apple (but non-apple headphones of the middle price segment) the connection breaks occasionally although not very often.