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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?

#661

Post by nikau »

IncRnd wrote: post #483
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.

It is terrible to limit max battery charge, so max battery charge doesn't decline!!!

Its akin to not driving your car in the redline constantly - sure you can do it, but its going to reduce engine life.

Its the same with batteries, you keep them at 100% constantly they will wear out. Its just a limitation of the technology.

Some devices now try and use "machine learning" to determine max charge, for example iphones will maintain a medium charge throughout the night then do a final top up charge to reach 100% just before you wake up.

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

#662

Post by KingMachiavelli »

1. Runs Linux. 2. External Display Support - USB-C 3. Fast storage. 4. 1080p screen. 5. Small. 4. Cheap.

I really dislike using Laptops since they tend to be slower, have worse ergonomics, and are more expensive than a 'equivalent' desktop. I just don't 'like' working if I don't have at least 1 large 4K screen and I prefer 2 (and more probably wouldn't hurt).

Since a laptop is necessary sometimes I just want to have a 13" standard Dell XPS that's small enough I'll actually take it places. If I start traveling more (I am already WFH) then I might start wanting something with a larger screen + a decent portable second screen option. Although at that point I'd probably just put the effort into using a VR type screen system.

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

#663

Post by Oddskar »

pxc wrote: post #637
Oddskar wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends couldn't stop praising the UX but even after a long time trying to get used to it I still am annoyed by the application switching keyboard shortcuts, lack of ability to set system wide shortcuts for launching basic things like terminal. Hammerspoon is the answer to all of these. The common solution is to rebind caps lock (using Karabiner Elements) to be “hyper” (cmd + alt + shift + ctrl) and then bind glob…

If someone were complaining about inability to configure keyboard shortcuts on Linux and you recommended a solution like Hammerspoon, it'd invite an onslaught of ‘this is why Linux is too overcomplicated and annoying for normal people’ comments. Setting global keyboard shortcuts on Linux doesn't require you to learn a whole-ass LUA API. It's just there, for all the popular DEs.

Oh I absolutely agree. MacOS in general is not very good for power users out of the box.

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

#664

Post by culebron21 »

godDLL wrote: post #115

OP here: so, from the amount of comments I surmise that my like-minded crowd is either not hanging around here no more, or aren't really numerous. Thanks everyone for participating in this discussion, I appreciate you all.

What is that crowd that you mention? BTW, what do you use the laptop for?

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

#665

Post by godDLL »

hutzlibu wrote: post #472
godDLL wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, I have a gaming laptop I bought quite new, but second hand, that was almost never used without cabel (I saw the formerly setup) - and the batterie was allmost dead and blown up in size after some months of use. But since it is a gaming laptop - it generated massive amounts of heat under load. I bought a new battery and took care of the heat: and it is still quite good, after roughly the same time and amount of…

Throttling of CPU and GPU should surely account for 90% of what you describe, coupled with an old, uncycled battery that can't move ions no more.

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

#666

Post by godDLL »

culebron21 wrote: post #664
godDLL wrote: post #115

OP here: so, from the amount of comments I surmise that my like-minded crowd is either not hanging around here no more, or aren't really numerous. Thanks everyone for participating in this discussion, I appreciate you all.

What is that crowd that you mention? BTW, what do you use the laptop for?

Not mention, describe. Therein your answer.

I would use the laptop for rendering and modelling, animating and music production, video encoding and massive compiling. Maybe a few virtual machines. If it can handle it.

EDIT: of course a lot of reading, coding and writing.

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

#667

Post by tlavoie »

chx wrote: post #176
gadiyar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which laptops do a good job of reliably supporting S3 standby/suspend? Any idea if the Framework laptop does?

You can check which ThinkPad BIOS has the option at their BIOS emulation site: https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html For mine it's under Config // Power // Sleep State. Windows 10 means useless Modern Standby, Linux means S3. https://i.imgur.com/Y5CchL9.png In this covid helped me because I learned about this before I cooked my expensive new laptop in its bag :(

What does it mean if there is no sleep setting here? I haven't actually rebooted my P50 yet, but the simulator doesn't have this option showing.

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

#668

Post by godDLL »

mwint wrote: post #566
godDLL wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or poke a hole in the screen by leaving a single speck of sand on the keyboard before closing the lid. There used to be a thick glass panel in front of it, but no more.

Again, don’t know where you’re getting this. 2020 MacBook Air has a glass panel. Ctrl-F “glass” on https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/ .

Would you please do something for me?

Open your new MacBook Air, place a single grain of sand smack in the middle of the keyboard between the G and the H. Close the lid.

Turn around and sit on it.

Tell me all about glass then. If you record it I'll have a listen.

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

#669

Post by godDLL »

Oddskar wrote: post #539
microtonal wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they switched back from the awful butterfly mechanism to scissors, their keyboards have been perfectly fine for me.

I still prefer my 2015 MBP keyboard to the 2021 one. It’s honestly crazy that they somehow regressed on this given so much time passed.

Yeah, those were 99% awesome. If they were spill-drained they would be 100% awesome.

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

#670

Post by Lio »

godDLL wrote: post #99
rootsudo wrote: post #43

What apple has for sale, newest, more ram/ssd and that's it. It sounds obtuse, but, I enjoy selling my macbooks at 60-75% of purchase price 3-4 years later, and if needbe, applecare - which itself, is outrageous but it's nice. Alternative would be Surface, but for the money, eh. XPS 13 too, they're great but there have been some defects but for me they're perfect.

Apple has a different kind of customer in mind the last few years, I don't find what the do to their products in any way interesting anymore. Now that they have changed to not having ridiculous amount of interconnect and so sped up things considerably I did walk in to take a look. But the finicky keyboards and glossy displays turned me off of them again. I've looked at the latest crop of Surface, they are very nice.…

Only problem I've had with a Dell XPS13 9370 is with the Killer brand WiFi failing to wake up from sleep.

Unfortunately its soldered in so can't be replaced.

I only use Linux but I'm told it affects Windows users too.

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