Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't MacBooks also glossy?
Yes; and it's a deal-breaker for some of us unfortunately :-/
My 2015 lost a bit of the gloss when it peeled off.
Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
121–130 of 201 posts
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#122For people interested in ultrabooks with Ryzen 4800U processors, there is also another model, which for some reason doesn't get mentioned much, which is Lenovo S540 13ARE. It has a 13.3", QHD, 16:10 screen. I bought this laptop after buying a Lenovo Ideapad/Yoga Slim 7 and returning it (because of some QA issues and 14" was a bit too big for me after using XPS 13 for a long time). I made a small review of the laptop…
Unfortunately the machine is not available in Europe outside of the Netherlands for some reason. I tried calling a Dutch retailer to ask if they ship to Austria but couldn't even get pass the "Do you speak English please?" phase :( Like WTF, the EU single market is a thing since how many decades now?! So why the hell do we still have region specific SKUs of the same product with different parts and availability betwe…
You found the ONE Dutch that doesn't speak English? I went there about 15 years ago, everybody I met, including old ladies in the street, were speaking much better English than I can (I'm French).
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s hard to change the brightness of desktop monitors. Bafflingly, Windows and macOS don’t support adjusting their brightness the way they do for laptops, despite the existence of DDC/CI to do just that, so you’re left using third-party software if you know about it, or interacting with the awful OSD/buttons on the screen, which you’ll hardly want to do all the time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24316728 is…
I recently discovered MonitorControl[0], which is a Mac app that listens to your default brightness and volume keys and pushes updates to all connected monitors over DDC. Extremely happy with it. [0]: https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl
I'll quote an HN discussion from a few weeks ago on why this isn't more prevalent.
>There is a problem with "cheap" monitors and DDC/CI: some of them use EEPROMs to store brightness settings, and this limits you to about 100,000 writes. Worrying about this is the main reason we don't ship DDC/CI with f.lux. (I know that some more modern monitors use NAND and don't have limitations like this.)
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#124So Intel... Lost their lead in consumer desktop CPUs and said ‘oh we have mobile and server’ But now AMD prove that Intel’s lead in mobile has been squandered. And then the largest buyers of server grade stuff are cloud vendors who are waiting for ARM to come of age.
Don't forget that Apple has pledged to be full Arm on all it's mobile and desktop in 2 years.
I don't think Intel can recover, or at least not before 5 to 10 years from now.
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's more of an argument for reflective/transflective screens. Trying to overcome both sunlight and reflections with a transmissive screen doesn't work very well, and only exacerbates the eye-health problem. Not great for battery life either. That's a lot of problems to be solved before there's even a chance that people would use their computers more outdoors, and even then the odds are slim. Maybe people should ge…
That's like saying that we shouldn't read books on the beach. You have to meet people where they are. A secondary reflective screen on the outside of a laptop might be the better solution, but from what I remember reflective screens usually don't have good colors. The last TFT reflective screen I remember has been hard to find an outdoor picture of although.
> That's like saying that we shouldn't read books on the beach.
It's nothing like that. People do read books outside. They don't use laptops outside. (Statistically speaking.) "Meeting people where they are" means two very different things in those different contexts.
> reflective screens usually don't have good colors
Yes, you have to pick your tradeoffs. If you want an outdoor-viewable screen, that will probably mean some sacrifice in refresh time, resolution and/or color gamut. This is why the only place you do find reflective screens is dedicated e-book readers. Brighter transmissive screens are not a solution in this problem space, so this use case does not justify them.
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately the machine is not available in Europe outside of the Netherlands for some reason. I tried calling a Dutch retailer to ask if they ship to Austria but couldn't even get pass the "Do you speak English please?" phase :( Like WTF, the EU single market is a thing since how many decades now?! So why the hell do we still have region specific SKUs of the same product with different parts and availability betwe…
You found the ONE Dutch that doesn't speak English? I went there about 15 years ago, everybody I met, including old ladies in the street, were speaking much better English than I can (I'm French).
I don't think the guy didn't speak English, I think he was too rude or indifferent to bother offering customer support in English at that moment. You see this in Austria also if you try to get customer support over the phone in English, since lots of employees are stressed from this kind of job so some will just not bother with you with a not my job, I don't get paid to be a translator attitude if you ask in English.
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve heard that macOS fractional scaling seriously is rendering at one size, and then upscaling or downscaling it to the target size. I’m not certain this is true because I haven’t confirmed it myself and it seems such an obviously stupid idea (and though it’s certainly easier, no one else does it that way because it’s such a terrible idea), but I’ve heard people saying this at least three times (twice on the interne…
It is always rendering at integer scale and always downscaling to target size (upscaling would result in blurriness; upscaled apps are only those that support only @1X scale). Just take a screenshot of your desktop and check it's resolution, then compare to physical display resolution. Apple uses output scaler of the final, composited image. It's not stupid; it is a solution that you can implement without support at…
Both upscaling and downscaling result in blurriness, though upscaling will generally yield slightly worse results. But downscaling is still going to yield a result drastically inferior to rendering at the correct size. It totally butchers pixel-perfect lines, for example. It’s the sort of hack that would be awful on low-resolution displays, and only becomes even vaguely tolerable on high-resolution displays because it’s still somewhat better than a low-resolution display for a lot of what people are using their computers for, even if for others it renders it legitimately unusable.
If this really is true, I remain utterly baffled, and I maintain my position that it is an obviously stupid idea. Doing it that way just makes no sense to me. The visual result is way worse, it’s more resource-demanding and thus slows things down a little, and it doesn’t really simplify anything for app developers anyway—the only difference is that you have an integer scaling factor rather than a float scaling factor; but all code is still having to perform scaling mappings, and using floats would change roughly nothing (though the changes required in your APIs may need to propagate through a few levels, and GUI libraries will have to decide how to handle subpixel alignment). Windows and Android have both done it properly, so that supporting fractional scaling is no burden whatsoever for developers. You talk of having to ship assets for arbitrary scales, but that’s not a reasonable argument: GUI libraries should always choose the most suitable version of a resource, and scale it to the desired size themselves if it doesn’t match exactly.
The result of taking the proper approach is that users of fractional scaling may get icons being rendered poorly, but images, text, vector graphics, &c. will be rendered precisely and crisply. Meanwhile, this other behaviour people are saying Apple is doing is just guaranteeing that everything is rendered poorly. Surely they’re not actually doing this? Is it perhaps a case of them having erred in making Retina support integral scaling only, but they’ve since made a better version that supports fractional scaling that each app can opt into, but they just haven’t insisted on everyone fixing their stuff yet? (And remember, Apple’s in an excellent position to do such insisting—they do it regularly.) —But as you say, screenshots are scaled at the next integer, which would suggest that yeah, they’re actually doing this mangling system-wide, and there’s no per-app recourse. Thanks for that explanation.
I just find it hard to believe that Apple would truly butcher things this badly. Even if they’ve been known to do weird things a bit like this before, like killing off their text subpixel rendering with no stated justification, to the clear detriment of low-DPI users (and it may still be worthwhile even for high-DPI users).
I can’t check any of this because I don’t use a Mac. There may even not be a macOS device within a kilometre or two of me.
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#128For people interested in ultrabooks with Ryzen 4800U processors, there is also another model, which for some reason doesn't get mentioned much, which is Lenovo S540 13ARE. It has a 13.3", QHD, 16:10 screen. I bought this laptop after buying a Lenovo Ideapad/Yoga Slim 7 and returning it (because of some QA issues and 14" was a bit too big for me after using XPS 13 for a long time). I made a small review of the laptop…
Unfortunately the machine is not available in Europe outside of the Netherlands for some reason. I tried calling a Dutch retailer to ask if they ship to Austria but couldn't even get pass the "Do you speak English please?" phase :( Like WTF, the EU single market is a thing since how many decades now?! So why the hell do we still have region specific SKUs of the same product with different parts and availability betwe…
Because charging different countries different amounts of money for the same SKU is illegal in the EU, so instead every country gets its own SKU, and they don't ship to other countries.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pri...
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately the machine is not available in Europe outside of the Netherlands for some reason. I tried calling a Dutch retailer to ask if they ship to Austria but couldn't even get pass the "Do you speak English please?" phase :( Like WTF, the EU single market is a thing since how many decades now?! So why the hell do we still have region specific SKUs of the same product with different parts and availability betwe…
Because charging different countries different amounts of money for the same SKU is illegal in the EU, so instead every country gets its own SKU, and they don't ship to other countries. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pri...
Huh, interesting, thanks for that. But then why don't we get different SKUs of PS4/Xbox and others between EU member states? Or do we?
Re: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 is a showcase for AMD’s exceptional new processor
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because charging different countries different amounts of money for the same SKU is illegal in the EU, so instead every country gets its own SKU, and they don't ship to other countries. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pri...
Huh, interesting, thanks for that. But then why don't we get different SKUs of PS4/Xbox and others between EU member states? Or do we?
If the pricing is different its very likely you do, its just minor things changed nobody ever notices.