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The Perfect Laptop

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Re: The Perfect Laptop

#111

Post by RandallBrown »

post-it wrote: post #101
pico303 wrote: post #84

> another Apple can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else things Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Windows/Linux laptop. I’ve tried…

> can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else Because it doesn't move. When you press down on an Apple touchpad, it doesn't displace at all, it vibrates . This gives you an identical touch response across the entire trackpad, plus nifty things like Force Touch and customizable response intensity. Nobody else has done it, and it makes every other touchpad feel awful.

Even before Apple did that their trackpads were dramatically better.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#112

Post by Darmody »

I want to mention Tuxedo Computers and Slimbook which are great.

After trying a Slimbook I don't think I'll buy another brand unless a company like this one pops up. Of course Tuxedo is an equally good alternative but Slimbook HQ is literally 45 min away from home so that's a plus to me.

They make laptops fully compatible with linux, offer great custom support, their designs are pretty nice in my opinion, good specs, quality build, good battery life (except for the "gaming" laptops), good trackpads, etc.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#113

Post by dhruvmittal »

pico303 wrote: post #84

> another Apple can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else things Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Windows/Linux laptop. I’ve tried…

I've very happily left a Mac touchpad. Not once but twice. While the gesture support in the OS is nice, I don't like how big the touchpads are. I feel like it regularly gets in the way of typing. I'm okay with the size of the trackpad on the Framework laptop, but it could have been smaller. I really miss my old Thinkpad trackpad with the physical buttons between the trackpad and spacebar, which I felt was really usable.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#114

Post by pmontra »

Starting with my ZBook 15 from 2014:

1. Make it 16:10. There is plenty of bezel for that. 1900x1200 or something like that. 1200p was pretty common on good CRT monitors in the 90s.

2. Make the number pad optional. Framework is doing that with their 16" model. I'll bury my number pad and give a party.

3. Keep the three physical buttons on the touchpad. By the way, it can probably do gestures and it definitely register clicks but I use it only to move the pointer and scroll with two fingers. I bought the physical buttons because I want to click with them. The middle one pastes the text selected with the left one (Linux.)

4. Keep it user serviceable. I replaced RAM, disks, keyboards, battery a few months ago, it aged well.

5. Maybe make it 2 kg.

6. Maybe trim some bezel on the sides and make it less wide.

7. Definitely make it work with a much slimmer power unit.

8. It's got USB 3 and 2 ports, DisplayPort, VGA, SD card. Probably add an USB C but I don't know. HDMI? I've got a converter for that.

9. Current year CPU and RAM.

10. Discrete graphic card? Don't know, probably not worth it. I have to watch videos and move my desktop, that's all.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#115

Post by bhauer »

> 2560/1600 = 1.6 (this is a good aspect ratio, the perfect laptop has a ratio ≤ 1.6)

Not just laptops, but monitors in general should be 16:10 or taller. 16:9 only became popular thanks to the computer display industry naively adopting the aspect ratio of televisions. But 16:9 comes from the film industry and has nothing to do with computer productivity. It's a shame that so many monitor manufacturers still focus almost exclusively on 16:9 (or even wider, when width is easily achieved by multiple monitors, side-by-side). I'm fine with the wide options existing, but give me some taller options, too, please.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#117

Post by coufu »

not_alexb wrote: post #105
pico303 wrote: post #84

> another Apple can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else things Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Windows/Linux laptop. I’ve tried…

I have an M1 and several thinkpads and the M1 always feels like such a chore to use, so no, not even remotely in my case.

According to the article, the shortcomings of the M1 Macs is they can’t run any operating system, so there you go.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#118

Post by alexgaribay »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #85
alexgaribay wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the older version with the 6900HS but it’s more or less the same. I’ve run pop_os as well as fedora on it. Everything works great but you’ll have to compile the wifi driver https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89 .

Thank you! Was hoping to learn people are doing it. I’m mainly interested in it having the Nvidia RTX 3050 6GB as mobile GPU for hw encoding and decoding and some CUDA. Have you run into any problems with their fancy power modes or mixing onboard AMD graphics and the NVIDIA card?

Surprisingly it has been smooth. Power modes work as you would expect even across OSes. I always run the graphics mode in hybrid mode to I’m using the integrated chip 90% of the time until something really needs the 3050. In Gnome, you can explicitly launch an application using the dGPU or you can set the environment variables on the application shortcut to always use the dGPU.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#119

Post by jononomo »

The following is my review on Amazon.com of the M1 MacBook Air:

This is a landmark model, a classic, a perfect machine.

I've been using the 2020 M1 MacBook Air base model (8 GB Ram, 256 GB HD) for almost 3 years now as a daily driver. I'm a software engineer and I use it to do web development, often with a single large external monitor. I have the base model and it holds up find to running multiple docker containers and my terminal and a couple dozen browser tabs and my editor and all the basic tools of software development.

The design is particularly sleek and minimalist, even as MacBooks go. It has everything it needs and nothing it doesn't.

And it is solidly built. I dropped my MacBook on a concrete floor at an airport from about shoulder height (I was holding it by squeezing it with my armpit while trying to pack up after going through security and it slipped) and it took a pretty good solid hit directly on the corner -- I have a small dent there in the aluminum that you would have to look pretty close to see, and other than that everything was fine.

The battery lasts for so long that I often go a day or two without even thinking about where my charger is.

It is very light, it has a fingerprint reader that works perfectly, and everything about it just seems functional and elegant.

Also, it's super fast and snappy.

I think this will go down in history as a landmark model. Apple did a particularly good job with this machine and I believe it will stand the test of time. This is a machine that a person could use for a decade. It's really nice and really well put together and well integrated as an overall package.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#120

Post by artificialLimbs »

willio58 wrote: post #106
maximamas wrote: post #46

I'm no die hard apple fan, but you would think I was if you heard me talking about my 16" m1 pro. It's an absolute beast, battery for days, and I've never heard the fan spin up once. It would take a lot for me to even give another machine a chance.

I've been rocking this same device for a while now and it's revived my apple fanboyness just a little. The hardware itself gets an A+ from me. What I really want from Apple at this point is better UX on MacOS. Stage Manager is an interesting idea but, to me, it's not really a fix for any of my problems so I've just disabled it. I've used two 4k external monitors for years on MacOS and the same little annoying bugs pl…

Not affiliated, just a happy customer: https://ubarapp.com/
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