Surely OLED is bad for a productivity device due to poor text rendering. For games or media, sure.
Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
201–210 of 282 posts
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#202I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway
Electronic devices usually get thrown away because nobody wants them anymore because they are obsolete. Having removable RAM will do you little good if you can only fit ddr3.
That's why you'd want to be able to replace the mainboard, screen, keyboard, speakers, trackpad, etc., and not just the RAM. Like https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform, but presumably easier for non-technical people to use.
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#203I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway
The half-life of Apple kit is so high, they are arguably a lot more sustainable than their repairable PC counterparts.
Apple laptops I have that boot include a 2007 iBook (my folks used it until this Summer and then bank websites would stop working with the Chrome browser they could get working on it), which I'll be putting a BSD or Linux distro on over Christmas, a 2012 Intel MBP that has Linux on it and a couple of 2015-2017 era MBPs that I inherited via one means or another.
I'm typing this on an M4 MacBook Air I picked up cheap during Black Friday sales. I fully expect it to still be functional in 10 years.
I don't think I've ever had a PC laptop last close to that.
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#204Surely OLED is bad for a productivity device due to poor text rendering. For games or media, sure.
OLED doesn't support subpixel rendering, but if the resolution is high enough, this doesn't matter (Apple doesn't use it either, and text looks great on their devices, but not if you use external low-dpi monitors).
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#205Add ECC memory to the list. For some reason, laptops with ECC memory support are incredibly difficult to find now, and so are the ECC DDR5 SODIMMs, even before the current price hike. I want to have a rock solid mobile workstation, that isn't necessarily more powerful than a midrange consumer gaming laptop, that would show warnings and errors before corrupting my data.
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with him. My personal laptop is an m1 MacBook Pro, and 5 years on it’s still a better experience than my work laptop which is a high spec dell with an i9 and 32GB ram. I’m more likely to chuck the dell than upgrade it because whatever combination of stuff it’s doing just doesn’t work. Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, ju…
The assumption here is that the MacBook is better because of soldering components rather than because Apple simply made a better chip and has a better OS than Windows. Is there a reason to believe that if Apple didn’t solder memory on, it would make the performance/battery worse, as opposed to making the device slightly heavier/bigger?
Yes, if they did not solder on the memory it would use more power. The longer the lines are to your DRAM, the more impedance there is and you need higher drive power on your memory controller. LPDDR has been soldered forever as far as I know, though with the introduction of CAMM (compression attached memory modules), this has changed. I don’t know but I would bet money CAMM is still higher power for less bandwidth than DRAM packaged on the SoC base die or however apples does it.
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author wants to buy a whole new computer every year or two max, instead of upgrading components That’s an impressive, so to speak, level of consumerism, reminds me of a self-professed minimalist that made the rounds here years ago, he practiced detachment from worldly possessions by throwing away his clothes after use and buying new ones, instead of washing them
I remember that story. I want to say it was the Soylent drink founder, but Google is steering me astray. Who was it?
I can’t find it either. It may have been him, washing machines are the kind of alternating current appliances that he avoided in preparation for living in space
HN was so enamored with him when his deal was about hacking eating into being more productive by not having to chew
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#208I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway
The half-life of Apple kit is so high, they are arguably a lot more sustainable than their repairable PC counterparts. Apple laptops I have that boot include a 2007 iBook (my folks used it until this Summer and then bank websites would stop working with the Chrome browser they could get working on it), which I'll be putting a BSD or Linux distro on over Christmas, a 2012 Intel MBP that has Linux on it and a couple of…
Posting from a Thinkpad X61s laptop (Jan 2008) running Trisquel Linux 11.
(I take your point that I would not be able to participate in this discussion using the original operating system that came with this laptop).
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of their magic is the integration with the operating system in the form of gestures. Their UI for discovering those used to be stellar; every gesture had a little video preview. Right now I'd describe it as just okay. Check the 'trackpad gestures' section in system settings, or this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102482
The gestures are there in KDE already https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ToucheggKDE
I’m sure they manage to hit 120fps smoothly too just like MacOS? …
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
The half-life of Apple kit is so high, they are arguably a lot more sustainable than their repairable PC counterparts. Apple laptops I have that boot include a 2007 iBook (my folks used it until this Summer and then bank websites would stop working with the Chrome browser they could get working on it), which I'll be putting a BSD or Linux distro on over Christmas, a 2012 Intel MBP that has Linux on it and a couple of…
Posting from a Thinkpad X61s laptop (Jan 2008) running Trisquel Linux 11. (I take your point that I would not be able to participate in this discussion using the original operating system that came with this laptop).
Apple’s support for MacOS can been shorter than their laptops longevity (the longevity of their laptops got quite bad when then tried to make them as thin as an usb-c port). So Linux support is also important there imo, and as the original post pointed out because Apple makes it so hard to for Linux to support their hardware, long-term software support may be something to think about before buying a MacBook.