Most people look at computers as a commodity that needs to perfectly balance performance and price; most really expensive computers usually are acquired by professionals that do need the specs and within small time, it gets paid off quickly.
I have a 16" Macbook Pro M2 with 96GB of RAM. Costs without VAT around €4k, but a client paid half of it as a one year retainer for my work, so the device ended up costing me €2k. You would say those specs are over the top, but it's been 2 years and I still have an amazing work machine and there's not enough things I can do to make it feel slow; it pays off, because I don't waste my time waiting for my device, it's the other way around. Would my dad buy such a machine for browsing? Absolutely not! Me as a professional? Makes no sense not to!
Most expensive laptops
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Re: Most expensive laptops
#42It seems like a scam that gaming laptops are marketed with the headline, i.e: GeForce RTX 5090, then in the fine print, read: GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU.
Are there any laptops that actually have a desktop GPU built in?
Yes, and their battery life was usually a full one half of ten minutes
Re: Most expensive laptops
#43I'm wondering what would be the use case for a laptop with 24TB storage.
DJs and music producers. I have about 32TB of externally stored samples and have to curate them for my DAW laptop.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#44I didn't realize Amazon was offering payment plans for laptops. I'd only ever seen that for cars and houses.
Which makes me wonder, what do they do when people default on payments? Do they have a kill switch they can throw? Or do they send the repo man to repossess it while you're sleeping?
Re: Most expensive laptops
#45Expensive is relative. I'm the CTO of a small startup and we're leasing our laptops from Apple. We don't have huge budgets. I got my 16" M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB model a few months ago. Costs us 105 euro/month. That includes 3 years of extended warranty. After the lease is over (3 years), we have the option to buy the laptops at a discount typically. The new value of this thing is around 4500 euro, I think. We could have gone cheap and gotten something for 70-80 or so Euro per month. It's not worth the savings. Over 3 years that adds up to about 900 euros saved. That's nothing in the grand scheme of things.
105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.
I get a lot of value out of having a fast laptop. For example, our entire integration test suite (Spring Boot) can run in under 30 seconds making use of all the CPU this thing has and running against docker containers with DB, Valkey, and Elasticsearch. That's a build that takes a lot longer on crappy CI vms or one of my old laptops. Basically, it runs almost like a small unit test suite. I can just invoke that whenever and not be blocked by it. I do this a lot. It helps me catch things early and keeps my feedback cycles short. Which helps me maintain flow state when I'm working. That is priceless.
30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) and CPU and just ran a bit slower. Still reasonable. But a 7x improvement is massive for me. Times 10 or so per day adds up to really significant time savings. If you compile stuff, run expensive test suites, or whatever: you could use a fast laptop.
I used to freelance / consult and charge more per hour than this thing costs me per month. In retrospect, for me the lesson on updating here is to never ever allow myself to penny pinch on laptop cost again.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#46Isn't the GPU throttled anyways? Because it's going to be a mobile version?
But if you're just interested in doing some machine learning on it, then it's all about how much RAM and not really how fast. I used to use my gaming laptop to do a lot of local ML
memory speed is still really important for inference tasks
Re: Most expensive laptops
#47I didn't realize Amazon was offering payment plans for laptops. I'd only ever seen that for cars and houses. Which makes me wonder, what do they do when people default on payments? Do they have a kill switch they can throw? Or do they send the repo man to repossess it while you're sleeping?
Might be region specific, where I live you can't default or do bankruptcy, it just goes to the National Enforcement Authority that haunts you until you pay for the rest of your life. They don't care about any valuables without clear resell value like a newish car or jewelry or a house.
You also lose your credit status, making you unable to get new loans or phone plans, and often making apartment finding really really difficult
Re: Most expensive laptops
#48Outside of some of the fascinating VAIO laptops with their wild and wacky features, I have never loved a super expensive laptop. I like a laptop that can get the job done when I need to and easily be fixed if I need to when I am on the road. At the moment that is Framework, and previously thinkpad, and a while ago, Powerbooks. I have learned as I became older that the device is a tool to getting the work done, not so…
> Outside of some of the fascinating VAIO laptops with their wild and wacky features, I have never loved a super expensive laptop. Sure, if and only if you put in the word "super". Frameworks are expensive, starting around $1000 or $1500 depending on screen size. Perfectly good models are available for 1/3 the price.
I have the base amd and found it perfectly acceptable for everything I have need and it has 32 gb of ram with a 2tb ssd in, and it cost all in around £1000. It can do 3d work, both lab based in Lumerical and Blender plus Cad. I would say considering workstations and comparable macs would cost around double minimum I am not of the view it is particularly expensive.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Outside of some of the fascinating VAIO laptops with their wild and wacky features, I have never loved a super expensive laptop. Sure, if and only if you put in the word "super". Frameworks are expensive, starting around $1000 or $1500 depending on screen size. Perfectly good models are available for 1/3 the price.
I have the base amd and found it perfectly acceptable for everything I have need and it has 32 gb of ram with a 2tb ssd in, and it cost all in around £1000. It can do 3d work, both lab based in Lumerical and Blender plus Cad. I would say considering workstations and comparable macs would cost around double minimum I am not of the view it is particularly expensive.
A mac would be double the cost purely because of order of magnitude ram/ssd markups, so that comparison is tricky.
For the specs you listed, I don't know how much the integrated GPU matters, but I can find laptops with the same ram and storage and a solid ryzen CPU for $650-750. There are probably sacrifices but framework isn't free of sacrifices either.
Re: Most expensive laptops
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the base amd and found it perfectly acceptable for everything I have need and it has 32 gb of ram with a 2tb ssd in, and it cost all in around £1000. It can do 3d work, both lab based in Lumerical and Blender plus Cad. I would say considering workstations and comparable macs would cost around double minimum I am not of the view it is particularly expensive.
A mac would be double the cost purely because of order of magnitude ram/ssd markups, so that comparison is tricky. For the specs you listed, I don't know how much the integrated GPU matters, but I can find laptops with the same ram and storage and a solid ryzen CPU for $650-750. There are probably sacrifices but framework isn't free of sacrifices either.
It is tricky of course, but that is the state of play. I wish it wasn't that way.
As someone that used to travel weekly, I used to go with Thinkpads or a Zenbook as both I was able to fix whilst away (the former had a keyboard issue, and the latter a HDD issue). I am yet convinced on the long term durability of the Framework but I have had it a year and it is pretty good still. No different in issues than any other laptop I have used in recent times. Overall for the quality I am pretty happy as I have used a lower cost laptop for various reasons and found I was always anxious of breaking it.
The big thing I do feel I am missing when doing 3D work is a dedicated GPU for simulations but then that would reduce the battery life too much day to day.