Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days? • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by godDLL » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

a3_nm wrote: post #673

godDLL wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Understood.

Unless there is a law, a fine, and an enforcing agency in place none of this local, organic, low-carbon stuff will come back to them in any meaningful way. They are safe to lie. And you provide them with a business reason to do so.

Your consumer decision impact might be the reverse of what you're hoping, is what I'm saying. Did you do your research?

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

#692

Post by mindvirus » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

ValentineC wrote: post #614

mindvirus wrote: post #225

Always fun threads, thanks for posting! I've learned a bunch. Truth be had, I'm still loving my 2013 MacBook pro. It's bulky and the battery's not what it used to be, but it's fast and the keyboard is great but after 8 years of hard use, a couple keys are wonky. I'll probably pick up whatever Apple announces on Monday. I've really want to like the XPS series, but I've bought and returned 3 of them in the past several…

> It's bulky and the battery's not what it used to be, but it's fast and the keyboard is great but after 8 years of hard use, a couple keys are wonky. I think the 2013 model's entered Apple's vintage list [1], but if you can find an Apple Store willing to do battery service for it, the battery replacement comes with a full keyboard and trackpad replacement for $199 USD [2]. Hurry, though, because the 2013 model's lik…

Thanks, that's great to know about! Unfortunately it's also experiencing random kernel panics, so I suspect there's more at fault here.

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

#693

Post by godDLL » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

mwint wrote: post #686

godDLL wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Holy crap, now I have to sit on it? That’s a bit different than the original claim…

Only way to make sure.

Alternatively, throw a pinch of sand on the keyboard, close the lid, bag the Mac. Now, with some vigor, take it out blindly by any corner and trow it down on the thick wooden table, slamming it with it's own weight.

A few times.

And tell me how that gentle test went for you. :)

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

#694

Post by godDLL » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

fvv wrote: post #687

In order, Very good screen nits 400+minimum( I think its improving with mini led) , high ram 64gb+ better 128 ( would be good with dd5 I think), efficient sleep and working hibernation, replaceable battery , usb3/4 charging of the battery from a power bank and power supply

That's a reasonable and short list.

But you're in my camp, you want to use the machine, not admire it. Still, I bet you can find something to get excited about this year, while I may not be able to. Again.

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

#695

Post by godDLL » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 3:17 PM UTC

netjiro wrote: post #682

These days I've become a bit picky, with a couple of absolute deal breakers: Today I run an older xps13 which is quite close. My next will probably be a framework (immediately) when they get a matte screen option. !: matte screen, >350nit, >150dpi, >12", !: good keyboard. subjectively of course. !: >10h, full day's work on battery. !: good linux compatibility. I'll run my own and don't need the headache. !: dead sile…

The eye tracking thing I've tried doing at some point, a few years back. Unless you have hardware to support running neural networks it turns out to be way too power-consuming, even if it's push-to-point (you have to depress a key to move the pointer to where your eye is/was).

A4 format would be great, yes.

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

#696

Post by artificialLimbs » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

godDLL wrote: post #654

artificialLimbs wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you under the impression you're worth spying on? Why don't you just Ctrl-Shift-F12 or something to lock it when you actually want that? I had bad experience with fingers as ID. Any spill on the scanner surface will disable it for days. And sometimes my prints change enough by being callous, or not fat enough or whatever. Just change. And then – no dice.

I am worth 'spying on' in my organization by the tens of non-workforce 'clients' that come into our office every day, including when I'm away from my machine. I don't 'just' Ctrl+Shift+F12 because I don't know when I might be called from one end of the office to another building, and I won't necessarily remember to stop and go lock my machine.

I don't drink by my laptop because that doesn't seem to be a worthwhile endeavor based on past experience. If my prints change then I can re-register them in about a minute or less. Enjoy your password/pin/whatever.

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

#697

Post by seanw444 » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

Battery drain a problem? Join the Framework laptop movement. Mac bothers you slightly less than Windows does (and costs more for the same hardware)? Make the jump to Ubuntu and dip your leg into desktop Linux. If you're inseparable from Visual Studio, I'd think Wine could handle it.

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

#698

Post by jimnotgym » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

godDLL wrote: post #622

jimnotgym wrote: post #555

1) availability!

Are you buying them in droves? Shiploads?

I need a few laptops for work. We have lead times into next year or pay 20% premium

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

#699

Post by mustache_kimono » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #450

mustache_kimono wrote: post #435

Earlier 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…

Re: package managers, have really enjoyed pkgsrc. Only wish there were more prebuilt packages.

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

#700

Post by NobodyNada » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #675

NobodyNada wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lot…

ARM had THUMB, which definitely improved performance back in the GameBoy days — but they dropped that with AArch64, so presumably they decided it wasn’t beneficial anymore.