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How and why I stopped buying new laptops

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Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#201

Post by ohazi »

cetaphil wrote: post #183
ohazi wrote: post #179

The sweet spot for me seems to be last year's thinkpad + all the parts needed for a complete refurbishment + upgrades. eBay thinkpad: $400-$800 ssd: $150 new battery: $100 (As needed) new keyboard: $50 new trackpad: $30 new plastic parts: $140 new hinges: $20 new display: $150 ram: $100 You can spend more on the laptop and skip some/all of the cosmetic refurbishment, or spend less on a junker and replace everything.…

Any specific models that you can suggest?

I like the T480. I have one that I completely refurbished this way, and another one (for work) where I ended up buying and replacing a flaky display cable myself (~$20) even though it was still under warranty because Lenovo's service department couldn't reproduce an intermittent failure and I got tired of shipping it back to them.

Performance is fine, the 1440p display is great, it can idle at 5W, and working on it is easy. The dual-battery system is... weird. I like the concept, but it's been mildly annoying in practice, which I think is why Lenovo ended up dropping it.

This is the last T-series model they made with a hot-swappable battery. There's an internal Li-Po pack and you can choose between another flush-fitting Li-Po or slightly chunkier 6-cell/9-cell cylindrical packs for the external battery.

The charge controller allows you to set charge start/stop thresholds for each battery (e.g. stop charging at 80%, don't top off the cell until it drops below 70%), but it doesn't let you control which battery is discharged first, or when the switchover happens. It always discharges the "healthier" cell first, based on measured capacity / nominal capacity, and it always switches to the other cell at 5% remaining. I think their intent was to allow the two batteries to wear out evenly. But if you want to actually use the full capacity of your cells, you end up putting a lot of stress on the first battery by leaving it at 5% for hours or days. Leave it like this for slightly too long and you'll damage it, and the battery system will start discharging the other battery first, until you damage that one, etc. Hot swapping doesn't work as well as it should, because if the internal battery discharged first, but the switchover was yesterday, it's probably self-discharged to below 5%, and may not be able to provide enough power to survive the hot-swap. It would be nice if you could change the switchover threshold (e.g. to 20%), and nicer still if you could tell it which battery you want it to discharge.

The T490 onwards only have an internal pack. It's connectorized, so you can still buy a fresh one and replace it every few years, but you won't be swapping it on an airplane.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#202

Post by jhoechtl »

bsanr2 wrote: post #159
jhoechtl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm that verschlimmbessern is a perfect fit to describe the situation. Englisch took Angst and Zeitgeist. Take that one too?

Angst and zeitgeist don't decimate the American tongue. If you want us to adopt verschlimmbessern, drop one of the Ms and one of the Ses and get Muppets to sing a song about it.

You made me smile on a foggy cold and way to early morning before coffee. Take that upvote!

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#203

Post by tatami »

aidenn0 wrote: post #136
Const-me wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered a desktop? They are much faster than laptops, who are constrained by thermal issues. It’s hard to dissipate 500W+ of heat from a laptop-sized thing, they simply don’t have enough available surface for air intakes and exhausts. If you want a smaller one to be occasionally portable, there’s Mini-ITX. I currently use a PC I built in this case: https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-2…

500W? That's an absurd amount of heat. I suppose they don't make 75W GPUs anymore (I'll replace my 1050Ti when they do), but still...

You can get the 1650 that runs with 75W. There's even a passive model out there, the Palit KalmX.

I refuse to buy a GPU with extra power connectors.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#204

Post by samatman »

chrisseaton wrote: post #79
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Apparently, you are not the "average" customer. So supposedly the average customer needs USB ports, but only on one side of the computer?

I would guess the average customer rarely needs USB ports. Most people use Bluetooth and WiFi. Needing to plug in a physical device seems pretty niche to me these days? The only exception is the charger and monitors. I guess it helps them reduce costs, which customers appreciate, to only have the bus going to one side of the laptop.

I'm by no means the average customer, which is why I have a Pro model, but every time I setup at the desk I use three ports: one for a dongle to my keyboard and trackball, one for the monitor, and one to charge.

I could in fact run the charging through the dongle as well, but then I'd be SOL when I plugged in a hard drive, which I do at least weekly.

I think the two ports but on one side is an aesthetic disaster, but it does have one upside: there are 'mega-dongles' which plug into one half of a MacBook, and those work with both the 2 port and the 4 port models.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#205

Post by samatman »

foobar1962 wrote: post #92
rsync wrote: post #9

The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side , headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to c…

Funny you mention that machine... I just finished a development contract that I did on an early 2013 MBA 11 inch. That little machine made me about $50K. I'm disappointed it cannot run Big Sur but keeping it anyway.

I gave mine a second life as an Ubuntu machine.

2GB is... tight, for almost anything, and I'm a bit concerned about the wear all that swap puts on the SSD.

Loved the form factor though, and yeah, that machine was my bread and butter for a solid year.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#206

Post by rsync »

sershe wrote: post #146
rsync wrote: post #9

The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side , headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to c…

There is/was a trope that an average Apple user only uses Safari so there's no need for this or that feature (starting from when Jobs was against having an appstore for the first iPhone), that's the only way I can think of that this statement is correct. My laptops serve 2 purposes - first, the actual laptop that I use for travel with no monitor, and can use for work, photo processing, movie watching, gaming or whate…

I think you're missing a very common power-user workflow which is: browser + terminal.

For many people, all serious work happens in a near-zero resource application (the terminal) and the MBA is, of course, just fine for that.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#207

Post by marcandre »

rsync wrote: post #9

The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side , headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to c…

Loved my 11" MBA. I needed more RAM and I could switch to any laptop I wanted for free, so I got a used MB 12" because it's the only Apple laptop with a similar form factor.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#208

Post by ornornor »

istjohn wrote: post #160
bxparks wrote: post #29

I guess I've been doing something similar. I currently use 9 laptops (2 Windows, 5 Linux, 1 MacBookAir, 1 Chromebook). Only the MBA11 and the Chromebook were purchased new. The rest were bought on eBay for $250-$600. After getting them, I max out the RAM, replace the HDD with SSD, or upgrade the SSD. A few of them needed some parts replaced (e.g. fans). The battery almost always needs replacing at some point. Fortuna…

If you don't mind, what are you doing with 9 laptops simultaneously?

One for each finger, duh. The tenth finger is for power then on/off.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#209

Post by ardy42 »

rsync wrote: post #9

The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side , headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to c…

> However, for reasons other than functionality or user-experience, Apple continues to fiddle and fuddle and muck around with laptops - making them weird and unwieldy in the best case, and totally unusable in the worst cases. In the case of USB ports exclusively on one side of the laptop, the only response can be merciless ridicule.

Those reasons are marketing and profit-seeking. Modern society has this false assumption that new = "improved." So even if Apple perfected the laptop form factor, the next model will be regression that's marketed as an improvement and believed to be one by undiscerning users. If they didn't do that, customers wouldn't buy it because it would be an old = "unimproved" design.

Though, a confounding factor here is there's a lot of personal preference with something like a laptop, so there's probably no one "objectively best" design. So some fraction of regressions are just catering to a different preference set.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#210

Post by rsync »

pengaru wrote: post #23
rsync wrote: post #9

The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side , headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to c…

> Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side, headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Welcome to ~2004 in IBM ThinkPad X-series land, IBM "solved the laptop form factor" ~4 years prior to Apple's Air. And even before that Sony's PCG-Z505 delivered most of this in a robust and lightweight magnesium package.

"Welcome to ~2004 in IBM ThinkPad X-series land, IBM "solved the laptop form factor" ~4 years prior to Apple's Air."

No. What goes without saying in my original comment was the fact that the MBA has an aluminum unibody.

Aluminum (or other metal) unibody cases represented a major step forward in aesthetics, substance and durability.

I don't care how interesting the thinkpads are (and they are interesting) - I am not going backwards to plastic.

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