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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?

#441

Post by smoldesu »

mrweasel wrote: post #141
michalf6 wrote: post #71

1) Maxed-out battery (90-100WH) 2) Low-TDP modern CPU, ideally Ryzen 3) Bright, hi-res screen There is nothing on the market that offers this. M1 mac is the closest option, but Apple shouldn't be given money. I'm currently on a Thinkpad T480.

You’re on a ThinkPad, I’d rather not give Lenovo any money until they sort out the slave labour problems.

...which is so obviously not a problem Apple faces?

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428899/apple-suppliers-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/29/lens-te...

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

#442

Post by eertami »

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.

Anecdotal counterpoint, but as someone who had to use a MBP for work, OSX has given me way more random problems. Installing a system update on an MBP still gives me anxiety and I would avoid it for as long as possible, since I never managed to do one without _something_ inexplicably breaking.

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

#443

Post by Joeri »

greggman3 wrote: post #415
flowerlad wrote: post #391

A 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 1680x…

Actually, on windows apps that implement the DPI awareness API's aren't scaled by the OS at all, and if they implement them properly they even rescale when dragged between monitors of different DPI. So, that is arguably better than the way macOS does it, but only for apps that do the right thing, which isn't all of them. And when they don't implement it correctly, the outcome of OS-level scaling is often worse than on macOS.

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

#444

Post by petilon »

salamandersauce wrote: post #422
flowerlad wrote: post #391

A 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…

Apple doesn't even do 200% scaling on most of their laptops by default. My 2018 15" MBP has a native resolution of 2280x1800 but the default is looks like 1680x1050 not looks like 1440x900. Do you have difficulty viewing 1080p at 15" at 100% scaling? I found that very viewable on my old laptop so 4K at 200% should be fine. You can adjust the scaling if you're really bothered by fractional scaling. It's improved a lot…

> You can adjust the scaling if you're really bothered by fractional scaling.

Yes you can, but if you change it from the default then the fonts are either too big or too small.

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

#445

Post by JadeNB »

grandpoobah wrote: post #46
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…

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…

> really hate the placement of the Ctrl key

Macs used to be really customiseable, and they haven't got around to ripping all of that out yet.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys

You can control how the various keys behave.

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

#446

Post by godDLL »

tentacleuno wrote: post #254
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 could possibly be convinced otherwise if the trackpad is particularly good. Genuine question: what about Macbook trackpads? We have a MBP 2013, and it runs leaps and bounds over my Windows laptop which came out in the same year. I'm not sure if other laptops have caught up with Apple yet, but Macbook trackpads are commonly referred to as the best in the business.

They are basically an iPhone digitizer in landscape mode, so yeah, they are very much OK. Trackpoint is still preferable for when editing text.

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

#447

Post by [deleted] »

flowerlad wrote: post #391

A 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…

[deleted]

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

#448

Post by godDLL »

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…

That was a significant development, six years late to the table my personal count. So yes, I'm aware.

If only it did not come packaged in a sissy mirror powder-box I'd love it. They flimsy keyboard with no travel, and the fragile glossy screen with no touch/stylus are deal-breakers for me. I did try use those at the store, no good.

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

#449

Post by miki123211 »

If my laptop must break, I want it to break in well-understood ways.

I have a Dell Inspiron with some pretty decent specs but a lot of weird issues. The Wi-Fi card behaves strangely, the audio driver causes hard-to-debug unpaged memory leaks when used in certain ways, the emulated home/end keys (with fn+arrows) cause key down events but not key up events, and so on. I spend hours trying to make that Laptop do what I wanted it to, and I never managed to get Linux working right.

I bought an M1 MacBook Air in may and I couldn't be any happier. It's not that it doesn't have issues, but if I ever encounter one, I know a few people in pretty much the same situation as me, so figuring out a fix / workaround is usually trivial.

The same holds for the phone, iPhone-related bugs are usually well-understood and described somewhere. If one particular Android phone sounds terribly on Zoom, but correctly everywhere else, you don't even have an idea where to look.

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

#450

Post by smoldesu »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #435
harshitaneja wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

- A good (not Homebrew and not quite Macports) package manager.

- Ways to permanently disable Gatekeeper

- Some kind of quick setup. On Linux I use a bootstrapping script, MacOS does not offer the same extensibility.

- Real virtualization support like QEMU

- Real container support (if I set up another local Docker host on a Mac I swear to god...)

- Up-to-date coreutils

- A way to install Git without dragging along a few gigs of dependencies

- Ways to monitor my network usage and ensure Apple isn't spying on me

- Real encryption (eg. Apple/NSA isn't holding a master key)

- CUDA support

- 32-bit app execution

- A way to disable the hash that gets sent to Apple every time I open an app

That's just the starter kit, if I sat down with some pen and paper I could probably keep going ad-infinitum.

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