There must be a better way to conduct this "survey"
There is. But is it worth the effort of unfamiliar UX? No.
Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
461–470 of 731 posts
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ah indeed, the Ask HN itself is from the 14th and various comments are from then as well. Seems like it got put through that process which causes HN to "fake" the short timestamps to make everything look like fresh discussion.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is with this knee-jerk defense of Apple every time someone suggests holding them to a higher consumer standard? You can sell good products while still embracing open technologies.
It's protection of one's investment. One doesn't just buy a laptop from Apple but one invests in all the devices, apps, ecosystem and brand. It's why past apple users express so much hurt when the company crosses a line. To leave or even to criticise hurts psychologicaly and financially. Thus it is logical to protect ones investment and defend the brand on social media. This extends to many brands of course for examp…
Yes. We live in a world where our only real freedom is our purchasing decisions. I think that leads to people making brands, TV shows, video games, etc. a big enough part of their identity that criticism of that thing feels like criticism of them personally.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#464> 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…
From one point of view, non-x86 efficient laptops have been mainstream for Linux users for a long time in the form of ARM Chromebooks.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#465What I look for:
1. Unfortunately due to eye strain, my bare minimum requirement these days is high DPI displays (around or better than 200 pixels per inch) combined with pixel-perfect integer (2.0x) scaling with no blurring at the OS level.
That means if I want a 13" laptop with a working resolution of 1440x900, the native display resolution needs to be 2880x1800.
2. Good build quality - excellent trackpad, decent keyboard.
3. Battery life - more than 12 hours would be swell!
4. Weight - a light laptop makes life so much better.
5. Performance
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
So which laptops do a good job of reliably supporting S3 standby/suspend? Any idea if the Framework laptop does?
The Framework Laptop does not support S3 suspend. I have it running with S2deep in Linux, which works okay, but it isn’t a fantastic scenario. Hibernation is the way when the processor doesn’t support S3, unfortunately. Even Windows would fall back to it after a short duration.
Yes, this is my only beef with the laptop so far. I really hope we get a firmware update with S3 enabled soon.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#467Dpi
Frame rate
Battery life
Weight
Responsiveness
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#468at least 8 cores, Nvidia GPU, at least 1 tb of storage, the bigger the better as long as the power brick isn't too big. I don't care about battery life since I regularly max out cpu/GPU and will eat through any battery.
I don't care about portability since I lift.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#469I'm personally in the market for an as-close-to-infinitely upgradable laptop. Ideally, I'd like to be able to mod it as much as I can do with my desktop rig, in a format that I can carry around.
- Need a bigger battery? Here's some OEM batteries for you.
- Your chipset is getting old, here's motherboards you can buy
- Need an OLED screen? Here's a couple
- More memory? Sure, there's 4 easy to access slots in there
Ideally in a format that fits in a backpack
Been dreaming about something like this for SO long
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#470A 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…
It depends on the version of MacOS installed, it used to be the integer 2.0x scaling in the "best for display" default.
They moved to a fractional scaling default, and I seriously assume it's for short-sighted marketing reasons. 2x scaling is the sharpest & clearest - best for eyes - setting possible, and it's a shame they hide that option.
Personally I use a third party tool to keep the resolution at the 2x scaled (so 1440x900), as otherwise I get major eye strain.