Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#291

Post by hakfoo » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 3:26 AM UTC

xxpor wrote: post #224

davio wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TrackPoint is the Vim of pointing devices. Need a couple thousand hours to get proficient and then everything else is inferior.

I have a trackpoint on my HP EliteBook G7, but they didn't include a middle button. So there's no way to scroll without using the scrollbar. I have to wonder if there's a patent reason or something because it seems like such a huge oversight.

The Dells at my work have a terrible Trackpoint with middle-button scroll, but it sucks badly. You have to hit the middle button, then scroll, or perhaps the other way around. Ultra-frustrating, and probably bad firmware or driver design. I'm sure the Trackpoint is a third-class citizen for Dell.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#292

Post by NikolaNovak » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #233

NikolaNovak wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

T420s, same generation; I have 3 of them now, SSD + 16GB RAM + secondary large HDD: find it hard to get that combo/performance in a modern laptop, let alone the keyboard quality:)

It's not particularly hard. Just get a T480. Mine has 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD with a 1440p screen. (I was sure I'd have complaints about the keyboard until I spent a solid month on one and then I raised that the old style keyboard just hurts my hands. It's a little less proof against spills, though the computer underneath is still fine about them.)

Sorry - when I said 'combo', one of the things I cannot easily replicate in modern laptops is small SSD + large HDD.

The other part is keyboard - I absolutely believe that if I used a T480 for a couple of weeks I could get used to them... as long as they were the ONLY thing I ever used. But that's not my use case. I have client laptop, and a lot of regular keyboards for my desktop and laptops. They all have the standard home row (Insert/Home/PgUp, Del/End/PgDwn). It's not that laptops have changed this pattern - it's that each manufacturer and even model changes it _differently_ (and seemingly needlessly), which makes it hard to have a consistent muscle memory for these keys:<

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#293

Post by eropple » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #292

eropple wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not particularly hard. Just get a T480. Mine has 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD with a 1440p screen. (I was sure I'd have complaints about the keyboard until I spent a solid month on one and then I raised that the old style keyboard just hurts my hands. It's a little less proof against spills, though the computer underneath is still fine about them.)

Sorry - when I said 'combo', one of the things I cannot easily replicate in modern laptops is small SSD + large HDD. The other part is keyboard - I absolutely believe that if I used a T480 for a couple of weeks I could get used to them... as long as they were the ONLY thing I ever used. But that's not my use case. I have client laptop, and a lot of regular keyboards for my desktop and laptops. They all have the stand…

The T480 supports two drives by putting one in the 2242 NVMe slot (where the WLAN card goes if you have one; I just use my phone as a VPN+hotspot). You do need to find an NVMe m.2 2242 drive, but they're fairly easily found today. My personal T480 (I mentioned my work-provided one earlier) is outfitted as such: 1TB NVMe SSD in the 2.5" bay (Lenovo OEM adapter; if you buy the laptop with an HDD instead it comes with a SATA port there), 512GB m.2 2242 SATA SSD. You could put in a 2.5" HDD instead, though given how cheap SSDs are now I think it's probably unnecessary for most use cases.

As for keyboards--that's why I brought my machine to clients when I was a consultant, and specify the same laptop at my new job. ;)

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#294

Post by rotrux » Fri, Mar 01, 2019, 8:49 PM UTC

bgorman wrote: post #164

rotrux wrote: post #138

I don't really understand how we've all been shocked by this. From https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr... : > "Thanks to the limitations of physics and the current transistor material designs, increasing clock speed is not currently the best way to increase computational power." In around 2006, the CPU industry became a commodity industry & innovation has since come in the form of Instruction…

Forms of ILP have been around much longer than 2006 e.g. branch prediction. The main industry "event" that concluded the "frequency wars" was the commercial flop of the Pentium 4. Modern high-performance CPUs are not a commodity industry - due to the requirements for a high IPC, only Intel, Apple, and AMD can really claim to have "industry leading" products.

> "Forms of ILP have been around much longer than 2006"

You're absolutely right, but what I'm trying to get across is that the CPU design problem has largely shifted from being capacity-based to being efficiency-based, and this happened pretty silently in 2006. Sure there is still innovation capacity in the CPU industry, but it's qualitatively not the same kind of approach which evolved the Apple 2 into the iPhone.

Personally I look at the energy efficiency of the human brain and think there's a lot of performance improvement to be done for synthetic processors, I just don't think major developments will be as easy, fast, or predictable as they were before individual CPUs kind of stopped getting faster.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#295

Post by therealmarv » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 9:52 AM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #229

therealmarv wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true for RAW files... the signal processors behaviour made huge steps forward in the recent 10 years in many conditions I would better recommend a good second/third generation Nikon APS-C (which is not that old) and save also money on good/cheaper APS-C lenses this way.

You also get better low light performance, more dynamic range, and video capabilities.

You can have more dynamic range with a Nikon APS-C than with a fullframe Canon. That's not dependent on the optics its a technical thing on the sensor.