Recently got a 14" mbp m2 Pro for work. So far 3 months in, I "think" it is the perfect work/personal laptop (excluding gaming).
Check out the Anker 737 Power Bank
I love the combo of my 14" M2 + Anker 737
The Perfect Laptop
171–180 of 354 posts
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#172>excellent build quality I keep hearing this, also for phones, and people usually associate it with certain materials. Why? I'd rather have a light plastic laptop/phone that works well, is light, and survives a few hits than an overpriced piece of fashion. Bonus points for phones with cracked backs because glass "feels more valuable". Of course I understand the value of e.g. good hinges, keyboards etc., but pretty su…
I bought my current MacBook Pro, used, in 2016. I drove it 54,000 miles around Africa on the worst roads in the world, using it every day in the heat, humidity, dust and sun. I drove it 30,000+ miles around North America using it heavily. I drove it 36,000 miles around Australia, using it at least 30 hours a week in the dust, heat, sun, etc. It's had many dings and bashes and a few drops. It still works great, and I'…
Since when is "miles driven around" a good indicator of build quality for a laptop? Your laptop isn't a car. There's no odometer on it.
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#173> 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 al…
> or even wider, when width is easily achieved by multiple monitors, side-by-side)
Why would I want that considering I can get a 21:9 or so display which is also sufficiently tall?
I definitely agree on laptops and small display though.
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#174>excellent build quality I keep hearing this, also for phones, and people usually associate it with certain materials. Why? I'd rather have a light plastic laptop/phone that works well, is light, and survives a few hits than an overpriced piece of fashion. Bonus points for phones with cracked backs because glass "feels more valuable". Of course I understand the value of e.g. good hinges, keyboards etc., but pretty su…
One good plastic build that people praise about is Valve's Steamdeck
While the Steamdeck has a plastic shell (which is nice but not a luxury, expected at it's price target) it has a magnesium subframe.
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a bad pointing device, that's the thing. I can use a Mac with a trackpad for pretty much anything, including image editing. It's precise, doesn't do ghost clicks/taps, and it's BIG I never found a non-Mac with a trackpad I could use _at all_. I always need a mouse to use my windows laptop...
Yeah try playing doom
Hopefully you don't mean original doom, because if you do, boy do I have a surprise for you ;-)
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#176For me, the smaller the better. I'm fortunate enough to do most of my real work at a desktop setting, so I'd like the laptop to be as portable as possible. With that in mind, in terms of pure form factor, the Asus Flip Chromebook (2015) was about as close to perfect as possible. Sure, its processor was anemic even at release. I'd want a higher quality screen. But the keyboard was very good by my standards. The 10 inc…
I'm of a different opinion. My current daily driver is a Lenovo Gaming laptop running Pop OS (I was running Fedora on it but due to the redhat drama I'm distro hopping to find a suitable replacement)
I like rugged, beefy laptops with fast screens and discrete graphics. There are downsides, for instance, no linux system I've found yet seem to be able to replicate the battery life optimizations that come by default with Windows, Fedora had issues properly responding to the trackpad, pop OS seems to have stuttering issues playing back youtube videos on Firefox, annoying things like that, but I like having the raw power needed to do things like running stable diffusion or koboldAI or whatever LLM client I want or play some video games or editing images and videos, doing light programming tasks, and just being an all-around do-what-you-want platform that doesn't try to opinionate me out of an option I might want to try.
I will probably give Debian 12 or SUSE a try on the next go round unless I find something better.
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno, my Zenbook S UX393 has a glass touchpad as well (with some mini display underneath) and feels like the one on my MacBook but I can set up three buttons at the bottom, not just one. Moreover, it has 3300x2200 screen with slim bezels and without any insane notch and it can run Linux smoothly without waiting for GPU drivers to be usable.
Glass stopped being the special sauce for the MacBook trackpads a while ago when they introduced Force Touch. Now you can click anywhere on the trackpad with adjustable “click” feedback. I’m sure yours is nice but no one comes close to MacBook trackpads’ usability.
I think xps 13 plus can be pretty close since they have force touch too. Not sure but maybe surface studio also has something similar
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#178I'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.
It's less difficult than I thought to to get an M1 Max chip hot enough to spin up fans. Run CitiesSkylines on a 4K display with all of the graphics maxed out for a few hours. ;) Or do 8 parallel runs of transforming and merging a massive amount of jpgs into less massive pile of pdfs. Just about fully pegged all of the cores for hours. What surprised me was how fast everything still was. Without the fan, I wouldn't ha…
This is a tangent but, I cannot for the life of me get Skylines to run without the cursor offset by approximately the height of the notch, even on an external display. Have you not had this problem?
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought my current MacBook Pro, used, in 2016. I drove it 54,000 miles around Africa on the worst roads in the world, using it every day in the heat, humidity, dust and sun. I drove it 30,000+ miles around North America using it heavily. I drove it 36,000 miles around Australia, using it at least 30 hours a week in the dust, heat, sun, etc. It's had many dings and bashes and a few drops. It still works great, and I'…
Since when is "miles driven around" a good indicator of build quality for a laptop? Your laptop isn't a car. There's no odometer on it.
I was using that to show how beat up it has been, the conditions it has had to endure and the amount of use it has had.
I think it's safe to say a laptop has to be pretty tough to handle what mine has been through, compared to one that sits on a desk, or commutes to/from work in a backpack.
Re: The Perfect Laptop
#180> the body of a 12" laptop I've always owned 15" laptops, and i've never had any trouble fitting them in bags, even in a sleeve. I understand why people might want 7" or 10" netbooks, but a 12" machine just seems like a waste of space to me. I understand that most people feel very differently, though! > webcam that doesn’t make it look like your laptop (or you) are a potato during a videoconference And also doesn't l…
I had one of those XPS machines (though a 13) where the webcam was in the "chin" under the screen, and also not in the center horizontally. I basically never used it.
Their later designs have crammed it in at top-center as is more typical.