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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?

#431

Post by frosted-flakes »

formerly_proven wrote: post #315
yread wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can mitigate it by configuring the power settings so that after 30 minutes the laptop hibernates. You lose your connected standby of course

That's hibernation though, so it takes way longer to wake up and also does a lot of I/O on the probably not replaceable SSD. (Also, why does your post show as being made on the 2021-10-14 when this "Ask HN" is from today? Wat)

Sometimes posts get put on the "try again" queue by the moderator, where they are floated to the bottom of the home page to see if they will attract attention the second go-around. I don't know if that's the case here.

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

#432

Post by smoldesu »

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…

Lol

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

#433

Post by godDLL »

sgc wrote: post #383
Frost1x wrote: post #345

Earlier 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.

Or externalize the camera and networking modules, so that one can pop them in and out like a battery. Yes.

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

#434

Post by godDLL »

hutzlibu wrote: post #261
nikau wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most batteries on laptops are worn out by heat. They really do not like heat, but will take lots of it, when placed and used in unfavorable conditions, which most laptops probably are.

Heat mostly matters when charging or discharging rapidly, if wear is concerned. So might be less significant than you'd think.

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

#435

Post by mustache_kimono »

harshitaneja wrote: post #322
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…

Agreed. I hate that M1 is so good. I got an M1 macbook pro when my older laptop broke and I needed to temporarily deal with some iOS work. I bought it thinking I would regret it and have to replace it with another machine especially being used to 15inch devices. But it turned out to be such a great experience using this device without ever worrying about charging and rosetta2 worked so much better than expected. I ha…

What do you feel like you're missing in userspace?

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

#436

Post by eertami »

microtonal wrote: post #409
mdp2021 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts: I use one third of that with Intel... Crunching some numbers, some benchmarks seem to place the M1 as three times faster. Through raw numbers, the M1 seems not much more "performant per watt" than the Pentium Silver - only slightly better. And, for a laptop, the importance is (in general) more on energy efficiency than in speed. Edit: danieldk rightly noted below that TDP…

The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts That's the TDP. For light daily tasks (casual web browsing, e-mail, etc.) the M1 primarily relies on the energy-efficient Icestorm cores. While typing this comment and having some applications in the background (like Slack), package power use hovers between 40 and 300mW (roughly 100mW on average). The energy efficiency of M1 MacBook is remarkable. My wife had an M1 before…

>I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining.

Really? I feel like that's just having any 2021 laptop. I have a 13" Linux laptop with the i7-1185g. I'm not going to pretend it matches the performance/watt of an M1, but a few hours of video calling makes a completely negligible difference to battery life for me. 20% for a few hours of video calls just feels baseline.

I've never been in a situation where I needed to get back to a charger, and can happily go the whole day of development and meetings with charge left over to spare.

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

#437

Post by smoldesu »

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.

They better bring some "pro" memory and IO along with it, they won't be replacing my Thinkpad unless I've got 64 gigs of ram in my backpack.

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

#438

Post by smoldesu »

bradleyjg wrote: post #337
siva7 wrote: post #226

That it doesn't get in the way of my work and life. Let me phrase it this way: A laptop is good when i don't have to think about it. Super quiet, exceptional battery performance, lightweight, sturdy, excellent design, super fast, doesn't crash, doesn't reboot when it wants, does what it should do when i close the lid and never lets me down. Basically the M1, the first laptop that does fit my requirements. I like Linu…

I never used a mac until my current job starting three years ago. I don’t think I could go back to random problems requiring me to reinstall driver or futz around with registry keys (never mind recompile the kernel). I have better things to do with my time at this point in my life.

I feel like I spend more time making MacOS like Linux than I do making Linux like MacOS. Certainly wastes plenty of company time, but my boss doesn't need to know that :)

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

#439

Post by pca006132 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #192
pca006132 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering, can we really feel the difference between 2k and 4k on a small screen?

Very easily on text. Get a proper high-resolution display and you’ll never want to go back. That 16″ 3840×2400 display means 283ppi; 1920×1200 would be only 142ppi. (Even a 13.3″ 1920×1080 is still only 166ppi.) I went down from a Surface Book’s 13.5″ 3000×2000 (267ppi) to a Zephyrus G15’s 15.6″ 2560×1440 (188ppi) and although it’s definitely better than 1920×1080 it’s still definitely not as good as the Surface Book…

Sorry, 2k is a typo. I want to ask about the difference between 2880x1080 and 4k resolution (as I'm using a 2880x1080 display and I know the crispness is indeed a lot better than 1920x1200). I thought a 2880x1080 is already very good and further increase in resolution would be barely noticeable.

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

#440

Post by tootie »

uxp100 wrote: post #395

I don’t see many mentions of weight, and that’s my number one. There are some incredibly light laptops available now, and that’s my number one criteria, how light can you get with a 13 inch screen. I’ve currently got a monster “workstation” laptop at work and having a haul a 6 lb laptop around is particularly irritating, but once I felt 2.5 lbs, any more than that was irritating. In practical fact I have a 12 year ol…

I had a very low spec and cheap 11" Chromebook and found it was quickly my favorite because it was very portable.
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