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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?

#671

Post by chrismorgan »

pca006132 wrote: post #439
chrismorgan wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very easily on text. Get a proper high-resolution display and you’ll never want to go back. That 16″ 3840×2400 display means 283ppi; 1920×1200 would be only 142ppi. (Even a 13.3″ 1920×1080 is still only 166ppi.) I went down from a Surface Book’s 13.5″ 3000×2000 (267ppi) to a Zephyrus G15’s 15.6″ 2560×1440 (188ppi) and although it’s definitely better than 1920×1080 it’s still definitely not as good as the Surface Book…

Sorry, 2k is a typo. I want to ask about the difference between 2880x1080 and 4k resolution (as I'm using a 2880x1080 display and I know the crispness is indeed a lot better than 1920x1200). I thought a 2880x1080 is already very good and further increase in resolution would be barely noticeable.

2880×1080 is a super widescreen ratio (8:3, or call it 16:6 or 24:9 if you prefer); I don’t know how you intend to compare it to a regular widescreen ratio (16:9) which is only two thirds of the width for a given height.

It also depends on the screen size. Such super-widescreenness is probably only found in fairly large monitors, and at that size I’d say that doubling the resolution (5760×2160) will have a massive effect on perceived text quality. At that size, and depending on how far away from the screen you use it, you could possibly even double it again and still tell and appreciate the difference.

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

#673

Post by a3_nm »

godDLL wrote: post #460
a3_nm wrote: post #307

Probably not what OP had in mind, but under the assumption that you want to buy a new laptop, one thing I would look for is low carbon footprint (many manufacturers publish this information), and low social impact in terms of the conditions in which the laptop is produced (still more difficult to have this information).

And how would you ascertain the veracity of said claim?

Like other claims that cannot be verified as a consumer, e.g., health safety claims: usually trust them and hope that companies have more to lose when making false claims than they have to win by lying.

Something labeled as low-carbon-footprint, local, organic, fair trade, etc., may not be all that it says it is, but in all likelihood is probably better that something with no labels.

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

#674

Post by motoboi »

nikau wrote: post #638
motoboi wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His battery is likely worn by recharging cycles. As the computer is being discharged more often.

Nope, its from charging to 100% constantly which accelerates wear massively. I've had my Lenovo carbon x1 for a few years set to 80% max charge and its battery life is still good. Battery stats report 480 charging cycles, capacity has dropped only 8 percent from rated.

It’s not charging to 100% that wears batteries out. It’s storage at 100% that does that.

If you charge to 50% and keep it there, it basically last years.

If you use your notebook primarily on AC, battery is charged and kept on “storage” until you unplug from AC. Over the years, this is equivalent to a battery stored on a box.

So, time stored on a box with 50% is better than 80%, which is also better than 100%.

But. If your notebook is used primarily unplugged from AC, that 100% is better than 80%, because you’ll have fewer deeper discharges.

Deep discharges is what form dentrites. Dentrities is what kill lithium batteries.

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

#675

Post by klelatti »

NobodyNada wrote: post #650
smoldesu wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue for me is that ARM is also really old now. I mean, just look at the ISA Apple has to use to run their MacOS on it: it's littered with NEON extensions and more cruft than you can shake a stick at. Simply put, Apple's implementation of ARM is decidedly CISC. On top of this, I'm still dumbfounded by the fact that they didn't go for a chiplet design where ARM could truly shine: if Apple had went the chiplet rou…

As far as I understand it, “CISC” doesn’t mean “has a lot of instructions”, it means the individual instructions are themselves complex/composable/expressing more than one hardware operation. For instance, on x86 you can write an instruction like ‘ADD [rax + 0x1234 + 8*rbx], rcx’ that performs a multi-step address calculation with two registers, reads from memory, adds a third register, and writes the result back to…

The only advantage I’ve heard put forward for RISC-V on single threaded applications is the existence of compressed instructions - which could reduce cache misses albeit at the expense of a slightly more complex decoder. I’m a bit sceptical as to whether this is material though as cache sizes increase.

Of course the flexibility of the RISC-V model allows approaches such as that being pursued by Esperanto [1] with lots and lots of simpler cores.

[1] https://www.esperanto.ai/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/HC2021.E...

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

#676

Post by lillecarl »

zeckalpha wrote: post #603
grandpoobah wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

VS for Mac: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-20...

Isn't this the MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio version of VS?

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

#678

Post by IncRnd »

nikau wrote: post #661
IncRnd wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

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

Yes, of course. That's not the issue, though.

> 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.

That's different and even opposite from advertising X max charge and only delivering 80% of X as the max charge. What I referred to is a bait and switch, where the manufacturer advertises one thing but provides another. Your example justification, however, is not a bait and switch but aligns the technical MVPs and marketing promises.

The situation is similar to purchasing a fridge that only operates at 80%. All food spoils more quickly, but the fridge lasts longer. If that had been disclosed, instead of the opposite implication from the marketing, then consumers would have almsot certainly made different purchasing decisions. That is why these sorts of things are generally illegal.

In your car example, if a car is advertised with 400 HP but never goes above 320 HP, that's called false advertising. Sure, the engine can get to 400 HP tested on a bench, but that's not why the car was purchased.

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

#679

Post by da39a3ee »

marianov wrote: post #645
foob wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'll find in the sub-$1000 laptop range you'll get something that is literally twice as fast That's true, but it would require some combination of major compromises on the SSD, RAM, hot swappable battery, build quality, form factor, and keyboard/trackpoint. I'm almost never CPU limited in my day to day workflows, even on a 2nd gen i5, and I have cloud resources available when I need to do something CPU intensive li…

X220 is my primary computer. It never uses more than 4 of the 16GB RAM. I ran the fan almost all the time at full speed tough. The killer app (in a bad sense) is Zoom. It kills the CPU and can't handle virtual backgrounds.

How much RAM is used is determined by you pattern of application usage (and OS), not by your choice of computer.

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

#680

Post by da39a3ee »

harshitaneja wrote: post #529
mustache_kimono wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you feel like you're missing in userspace?

Most of the important ones like package managers, containers, not calling home etc are mentioned by the others. So I will mention things I don't think are discussed enough by linux switchers. The one I didn't think I would yearn for but am really reminded of everyday are- desktop environments and window managers. My friends couldn't stop praising the UX but even after a long time trying to get used to it I still am a…

Use iTerm2 and set the “hotkey”. That gives instant switch to terminal with one key.

Can you give other examples of command line app problems or keyboard driven workflow problems you’re having? I expect people here will be able to show you how to solve them.

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