It needs to boot NixOS without much hassle.
Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
481–490 of 731 posts
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#482I'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 Id…
https://frame.work ?
I have one of these on order, and it looks like the perfect personal laptop to bring along with the MBP I'm saddled with for work.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
It is terrible to limit max battery charge, so max battery charge doesn't decline!!!
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, the M1X laptops (probably) release Monday and will be even more ridiculous.
M1X will be a trade off. Trading battery life for speed. It will still have great battery life relative the dumpster fire of x86 laptops.
If the M1X 16" keeps the battery size of the current model, which is the largest possible battery you can take on an airplane, it will run a bit shorter than the M1 Air at full throttle (but get more done in that time), but significantly longer than the M1 Air for casual use, because it's presumably using the exact same efficiency cores.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#485Earlier 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)
Anecdata but my 5-year ThinkPad and 3-year Dell are doing fine (also a 10-year Asus). I've been always hibernating for the night. 16GB RAM, takes at most few seconds. I don't get this allergy to hibernation, is it such a killer to wait a few seconds when I know I won't be using device for hours/days?
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> - Ways to monitor my network usage and ensure Apple isn't spying on me
This may not be complete monitoring, but Little Snitch (from obdev.at) can monitor outgoing connections, alert you and let you to block or allow those. Last year when macOS Big Sur was released, this didn’t work for a while for Apple’s programs, but that was later changed by Apple.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#487My process is I have a list of things I hate, and if you fail to do any of them, then I love you. But yeah, my preferences are:
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* Don't make the keyboard key placement stupid. Make the arrow-keys and pgup / pgdn a six-key rectangle that all feel the same and you're dead to me.
* Backlit keyboard is a significant plus - yeah yeah you touch type but uncommonly-used shortcut keys in the dark sucks.
* NVMe storage is table stakes at this point, much like wifi and bluetooth. Give me at least 250G, preferably 1T on that NVMe.
* High DPI display, and ideally a 3:2 screen aspect ratio. I didn't know how much I hated 16:9 until I tried 3:2, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
* Easy to open / replace components / etc. Glue anything and you're dead to me. I also hate clips with a passion. If I need to ship my laptop in because RAM is defective, no thanks.
* It's gotta charge via USB-C. Battery life must be at least 5 hours, but more importantly, make it easily replaceable. A 10 hour batter is only a 10 hour battery for like 6 months.
* Ports should include HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, an SD card reader, and a headphone jack. Ethernet is a plus.
* Please put the webcam at the top (lookin at you, Dell XPS...) so people don't have to look at my dirty fingernails and up my nose. Built-in hardware disconnect / cover for the webcam a plus.
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Don't really care about a GPU, I have a desktop for that. Also don't care about fingerprint readers. Touchscreen is actually a minus for me.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#4881. 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…
My bet is that Microsoft and Windows laptop manufacturers aren’t embarrassed by this because approximately no one uses their laptop as a portable device. The laptops just sit on the desk charging 99.9% of the time. People use their smartphones the rest of the time.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#489> 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…
Is ARM really the reason the M1 is so much better than the current x86 CPUs? If you have a look at the competition (Qualcomm), it sounds to me that it's Apple expertise at designing a SoC and using a more advanced node that makes it such a good CPU, not really the architecture. Said another way, I highly doubt we will see a non-Apple ARM CPU outclass the x86 competition in such a way anytime soon, so saying "never x8…
On the competition, like Qualcomm, many Apple engineers (IIRC several tens of them) from the chip design team left and formed a new company called Nuvia, which was then acquired by Qualcomm in the beginning of this year. Apple has had a big lead on SoCs for some years, but I wonder when/if Qualcomm’s acquisition will start beating Apple’s lead here.
Re: Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is ARM really the reason the M1 is so much better than the current x86 CPUs? If you have a look at the competition (Qualcomm), it sounds to me that it's Apple expertise at designing a SoC and using a more advanced node that makes it such a good CPU, not really the architecture. Said another way, I highly doubt we will see a non-Apple ARM CPU outclass the x86 competition in such a way anytime soon, so saying "never x8…
100% agree. A lot of people asking for ARM based machines do not really realize that the reason is not because of ARM, but they just want faster/more efficient machines. I think to make a analogy for HN frontend sw devs, imagine a non-technical marketing person going to a developer and saying "I want this website in AMP, because AMP is fast.". And sure, a lot of sites with AMP framework are fast... but that doesn't m…
It’s true that ARM alone isn’t the reason for the M1’s performance, but it’s definitely a significant factor. x86 is old — modern x86 chips are still backwards-compatible with the original 8086 from 1978 — and it’s stuck with plenty of design decisions that might have been the correct choice sometime within the past 45 years but no longer today. Whereas the M1 only implements AArch64, a complete redesign of the ARM architecture from 2012, so it doesn’t have to deal with legacy architectural baggage. (We’ve known x86 was the wrong design since the 80’s — hence why there’s no Intel chips in smartphones — but it hasn’t been realistic for anybody except Apple to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to make a high-performance non-x86 chip.)
Some examples:
- x86 guarantees strong memory ordering on multi-processor systems, which adds completely unnecessary overhead to every memory access. arm64 uses a weak memory model instead, providing atomic instructions with relaxed or acquire/release semantics (see https://youtu.be/KeLBd2EJLOU?t=28m19s for a more detailed discussion). This significantly improves performance all around the board, but especially with reference counting operations (which are extremely common and often a bottleneck in code written in ObjC/Swift): https://twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238434235568128
> fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1
- x86 instruction decode is pretty awful, a significant bottleneck, and not parallelizable due to the haphazardly-designed variable-length CISC instruction set. arm64’s instruction set is highly regular and easy to decode, so Apple can decode up to 8 instructions per clock (as opposed to 4 for x86 chips). Most sources agree this is why the M1 can have such a big out-of-order-execution window and achieve such high instruction-level parallelism compared to Intel/AMD.
- x86_64 has only 16 architectural registers, compared to 32 for arm64. This means the compiler has a much harder time generating efficient, parallelizable code and must resort to spilling registers much more often.