Define "Good GPU". What do you want to do with it?
Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
411–420 of 731 posts
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because some sliver (OK, large sliver) of their consumer base is satisfied with this shit doesn't mean that they didn't live a sizeable amount of people stranded for both hardware and software options. Because they did. I used to be able to slam an MBP down on the woodworking table, open it up and start typing. Now there is no slamming, because they flimsy. No typing near dust, because they get stuck in the keyb…
Flimsy? MacBooks? Are we in different universes? Keyboard is/was a valid concern. But flimsy, I’m not seeing. Pretty sure I could murder someone with my M1 MacBook Air, clean it, and then write code.
Or poke a hole in the screen by leaving a single speck of sand on the keyboard before closing the lid.
There used to be a thick glass panel in front of it, but no more.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#413Good keyboard and a good touchpad with discrete buttons. No buttons, no buy. The other vital thing is a non-touch matte/anti-glare screen. I want to look at my code, not myself. Of course there's heaps more I'll be comparing when choosing a machine, but if the above aren't met I won't be looking at that machine.
It's super annoying when I accidentally move the cursor when clicking the touchpad buttons that are not physically separate. Why has this become the standard?
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've looked at those. They are glossy. But that's not even the thing that turned me off. The keyboards did. One speck of dust and that thing gets stuck. The keys have no travel, that's no good. And having typed on it a bit, I can attest there is not much difference between those keyboards and typing on straight up glass, feeling-wise. I love what they are doing with the CPU, GPU, no significant interconnect overhead…
None of the M1s have the infamous glass keyboard; they switched back to the old style. (Which is still relatively low-travel, but much better than the glass one, and does not have dust issues.)
I've seen those and touched them. One speck of sand is all it takes, keyboard or screen. Bust.
No thanks.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#415A high resolution screen. Meaning 200% scale — nothing else looks good. This is also a rarity these days, even though my 5-year-old Samsung ATIV Book 9 has it. In the Windows world, sadly, things are a mess. Most new laptops including Microsoft's newest Surface Studio have fractional scaling, i.e., scaling set to a number other than 100% or 200%. As Steve Jobs said when he originally introduced retina screens on the…
All Macs have fractional scaling and AFAICT most people seem to have it on. For example my Macbook Pro has a native resolution of 2880x1800. The default OS resolution is 1440x900 (so 2x) but I have it set to 1680x1050 or 1.714
It looks fine and I see none of the issues you mention.
A big difference with Window though is that this scaling happens at a very low-level. The OS tells apps they are on a 2x display at 1680x1050, the OS then scales that 2x display (3368x2100) to 2880x1400. The DPI told to apps does't change on Mac.
The DPI does on Windows and because of various other poor? choices has some of the issues you mention
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#416> 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…
What are you doing on your laptop where you can see such a big difference? My x86 laptop (Purism Librem 14) has an all-day battery and plenty more performance than I need. But I don't do things like compile code all day. If I were running a really big compute task I'd use a desktop or cluster.
This is what I don't get about high performance laptops.
Low end Ryzen 3 laptops have four cores, single thread performance within a few percent of the fastest processors in existence and will do something like render a web page at a speed indistinguishable from instantaneous.
The fastest laptops have twice that many cores. And if you actually try to use them, either half of them are low performance cores or they all clock down to a speed that makes them equivalent to a quad core desktop.
Whereas for the same price as a high end laptop, you get a desktop with 12 or 16 high performance cores and >16GB memory which is so much faster for intensive tasks that the laptop should be embarrassed to show up.
Why should I do anything other than buy an inexpensive laptop with a good screen and keyboard and a fast desktop I can access remotely for any kind of intensive workload?
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you about Apple breaking things. But we disagree on the keyboard. I'd say that all their mobile keyboards past 2015 are utter crap, and I'd wager that this can technically be measured in breakage, dust sensitivity, typing comfort and typing performance.
Since they switched back from the awful butterfly mechanism to scissors, their keyboards have been perfectly fine for me.
Yes, they are better for going back.
No, that's not going to do. I don't even live in a town. There are literally rafts (barns) all over where I live.
I can not escape sand. And a single speck is all it takes.
To poke a hole in the screen. To disable a key.
That's not good design.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#418Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They should just install a physical off switch for the battery, along with physical switches for the camera and networking.
What's wrong with the current solution of having a software switch, aside from lack of use/knowledge about it? What's the advantage to making it physical?
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#420There must be a better way to conduct this "survey"