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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?

#621

Post by emptysongglass »

fsflover wrote: post #604
emptysongglass wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My charger just stopped working one day on the first 13 v2. The touchpad would also just not accept input sometimes. Also, and this one I had forgotten: sometimes it would just experience sudden power loss. Returning the damn thing for a warranty repair was a nightmare. Finally they just shipped me a new 13 v3 which had a broken hinge. You may just be lucky. The failure rates of Librems are well documented across the…

Librems 13 were indeed known to have the hinge problem, not so much Librems 15. Another commenter says Librem 14 is great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28887681

Here's just one of the few reviews lambasting the new 14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRBysG9ap3E

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

#623

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Oddskar wrote: post #605
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mostly because all the flagship laptops are stubbornly (or rather being strong-armed into) sticking with Intel. Intel sold StongARM (and XScale) along time ago. They might be in a much different place now if they didn’t.

Is this being sarcastic?

I thought the parent comment was making an intentional pun given intel’s well known history with strongARM.

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

#625

Post by sgc »

shawnz wrote: post #424
krapp wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software switches can be controlled remotely without your knowledge. A physical switch requires physical access to the device.

I am just talking about the battery. I don't see any privacy issue there.

Sometimes you really need to make sure there is no power flowing through your device, which you can't be sure of using software when you are trying to fix software problems. Of course I should have said recording devices and networking, rather than just cameras.

Also, true power off guarantees nobody is remotely activating eavesdropping on your device.

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

#626

Post by ArtWomb »

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…

>>> Apple Silicon M1 or nothing

I've used ARM based chromebooks. As well as ARM embedded boards running linux as a desktop. But I am intrigued by the Mac Mini M1 with 6K out. I wish I could get a demo of the 6K 32" Pro XDR Display. At $5K its hard to justify, but it looks like the only 6K monitor available right now ;)

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

#627

Post by artificialLimbs »

emacsen wrote: post #305
Darmody wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not exactly like that. Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The laptop will overheat as a result of that action. Why would you put a laptop on a bag if it is still running and expect the warranty to cover any damage if it overheats? What's next? Expect the warranty to cover you taking showers whi…

Hibernate is a tricky term that doesn't mean the same thing to all people. The working definition I use is all state is dumped from memory to disk and then retrieved upon startup. Sadly Hibernate is very complicated and has largely been deprecated from both Windows and Linux in favor of Sleep. Since Hibernate is gone, let's take it off the list. Sleep (S3) has been largely removed from these laptops in favor of a "lo…

Has hibernate been deprecated in Windows 11? Because I couldn’t get sleep to work properly on my less than year old Dell laptop but turning hibernate back on works perfectly. It actually turns the machine off. I’m not sure by what technical means it achieves that (I thought hibernate meant suspend Ram to disk and then turn off) but it works. In windows 10 you can use “Powercfg -h on” to turn it on.

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

#628

Post by artificialLimbs »

fragmede wrote: post #624

Fingerprint reader so I can log in frictionlessly. Laptop locks instantly, but I can swipe my finger to log back in, so the security requirement isn't onerous.

This saves so much time during my day, where I have to be called away regularly and my laptop auto-locks which I leave enabled for paranoia.

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

#629

Post by eatbitseveryday »

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…

> Visual Studio ran on Mac

Visual Studio Code does. Is that the same?

Even has native M1 support.

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

#630

Post by ziml77 »

867-5309 wrote: post #284
can16358p wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that if OP expects anything like the "real" Visual Studio that runs on Windows, this is really nothing compared to it. I'd even go further and actually prefer Vscode with the right extensions compared to this "Visual Studio".

sounds like when we try to run iTunes on Windows - each competitor is intentionally crapping on the other's users

It's more that Visual Studio is a massive project that was built around running on Windows. It would be a huge undertaking to bring it over to another OS and probably not add nearly enough value. The only reason macOS has "Visual Studio" at all is because Microsoft bought out Xamarin and rebranded their Xamarin Studio product.
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