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The Perfect Laptop

blog.brossia.com

281–290 of 354 posts

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#281

I'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.

I've been rocking this same device for a while now and it's revived my apple fanboyness just a little. The hardware itself gets an A+ from me. What I really want from Apple at this point is better UX on MacOS. Stage Manager is an interesting idea but, to me, it's not really a fix for any of my problems so I've just disabled it. I've used two 4k external monitors for years on MacOS and the same little annoying bugs pl…

I have the same complaint about UX. I sorely miss tiling window managers. I miss configurability of window management.

I have baked into my muscle memory the expectation that when I hit the keyboard shortcut to summon virtual desktop number 5, that desktop will show up on the monitor that currently has focus, no matter which monitor(s) it may have appeared on before. This setup is impossible in Mission Control or whatever the multiple-desktop thing MacOS is called. I can choose between:

"Displays have separate spaces" checked: left monitor has desktops 1,2,3, right monitor has desktop 4,5,6, and if I add a new one to left its number is 7. Want to put desktop #4 on the left? You can't except by dragging all the windows one by one, like a cave-man. What happens to the numbering when you add or remove another monitor? It's weird.

"Displays have separate spaces" unchecked: now I have numbered Left+RightMonitorMonstrosity desktops, but if I want to switch the left monitor between "documentation" and "email", while leaving the right monitor on code, I'm out of luck. This setup behaves a bit better about adding and removing monitors, I will admit.

My old Xmonad setup with numbered desktops (which I cloned from my ion3 setup) behaved beautifully when adding and removing monitors. This is to say nothing of having had a Mod4 key solely for my own use, which I ended up using almost exclusively to interact with the window manager.

I can't wrap my head around a film strip of horizontally situated desktops that I swipe through or page through. I can't fathom the idea of making "full screen" change an app from looking like a window to looking like a desktop, and whats more appending the new desktop to the end of the list. I know that MacOS already knows what the windows on that other desktop are going to look like before I switch, so why does it insist on showing some kind of animation when switching (even "reduce motion" changes it from a wipe motion to a useless fade), like iOS does to hide load time? I know about amethyst and rectangle and setting up a "hyper" key with karabiner-elements or qmk or whatever. No amount of it adds up to the same experience that I had with ion3 back in 2006 and I get worked up that I paid into the ecosystem and bought this otherwise-great laptop and I can't make it work the way I want it.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#282
post #84

> another Apple can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else things Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Windows/Linux laptop. I’ve tried…

True fact: I had no idea what the "usability gap" was on touchpads, even 10+ years ago before the physical click was gone, until I was on a biz trip with a Windows-using colleague who'd forgotten his mouse.

He took a cab from the hotel to a Best Buy to buy a mouse, and I teased him about it. Like, are you such a hothouse flower you can't work for 4 days with the touchpad?

He said something to the effect of "oh, like you wouldn't do the same thing if you left YOUR mouse at home," which was when I realized he hadn't ever noticed that I don't travel with a mouse.

"But how do you put up with it? It's SO BAD!"

"It really isn't; I never think about it!"

And we were baffled by each other for a few minutes, and only when we swapped laptops did either of us realize the HUGE gap.

I had no idea Wintel touchpads were so awful in that era (and horribly horribly small), and he had no idea that a touchpad could actually be good.

It was a weird moment.

(It took a while, but Dell at least caught up. The pad on my XPS15 is, while not Mac-level, absolutely usable. I have no experience with other Wintel makes in the last 5 or 10 years, but I assume the same is true of HP and Lenovo.)

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#283

I'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.

The thing that's holding me back from getting one is the memory markups. The base configuration is too low and I can't just change the memory myself because everything is soldered.

Sure. Get over it. I did. You can too.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#284
post #91

I'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.

There's something about being very well constructed with high attention to detail / finishes. Growing up my parents had a new Subaru and a much older Mercedes station wagon. As a teen driving both, you could feel the difference in finishes, and overall solidness of the Mercedes, it felt like driving an adequately powered slab of marble where as the much newer Subaru felt, well plastic and fragile in comparison.

This was my experience moving from Subaru to Volvo as well. That “solidness” feeling is probably the best way to describe the difference between economy and luxury cars generally.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#285
post #227

Gosh, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen1 and Gen2 are awful, dreadful, terrible machines. I can understand having a thermal constraint tied to the thinness of chassis, but you would think it’d maybe throttle instead of shutting off in the middle of work. After blowing through 4 separate nano configurations all with the same fundamental problem and riddled with quality issues and borderline abusive support getting bounc…

Huh I’ve been using a Thinkpad X1 Nano for nearly 2 years now primarily for personal dev work, and it’s by far my favorite laptop I have ever owned. It replaced a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, which replaced a 2016 MacBook Pro, which replaced a 2009 MacBook Pro. This laptop is so good, it will take a really good reason for me to upgrade before a decade. I pair it with a much more powerful desktop, so I wanted a lightweight laptop that’s totally capable, and I have found it absolutely delivers. I’ve been running Arch Linux on it for what it’s worth.

On the other hand, I cannot stand my work M1 MacBook Pro, but that’s primarily because it weighs so much and the keyboard is pretty mediocre, so it’s not fun to travel with. It’s more of a docking laptop, which defeats the purpose of a portable machine for me.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#286
post #70

I’ll be that guy—The Perfect Laptop requires a TrackPoint. ;)

I've tried to use the trackpoint, but I find it much harder to be as quick as I am with a trackpad... is this just a thing that gets better with practice?

It seems to me like overshooting my target (say, a window close button) is much easier with a trackpoint and much slower to recover from vs. using a trackpad.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Was hoping to learn people are doing it. I’m mainly interested in it having the Nvidia RTX 3050 6GB as mobile GPU for hw encoding and decoding and some CUDA. Have you run into any problems with their fancy power modes or mixing onboard AMD graphics and the NVIDIA card?

Surprisingly it has been smooth. Power modes work as you would expect even across OSes. I always run the graphics mode in hybrid mode to I’m using the integrated chip 90% of the time until something really needs the 3050. In Gnome, you can explicitly launch an application using the dGPU or you can set the environment variables on the application shortcut to always use the dGPU.

That’s impressive. Perhaps AMD pushed good power features into the kernel. Great news. Hopefully the new one will work likewise.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it's a good thing no one charges that. I'm all for calling out Apple for bullshit, but their "768 GB more" model is a $200 upsell, not $500. And yes: it's a huge leap from $200 to $500.

Depends on the model. The MBAs and Mac Mini ship with 256GB by default and getting 1TB (768GB more) is an extra $400 USD. The MBPs and Studio/Pro start at 512GB so 1TB is "only" $200.

a mac mini is not a laptop.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? For example as a software dev using Linux as a daily driver (so no gaming), would I not need a mouse at all with a Mac? (considering buying one)

Why do you need a mouse to write software? I didn't use a mouse since at least 2006. Before that I was mandated to use one by the company I was working for but I probably didn't. Why should I lose time to move my hand to grab the mouse when it's already close to the touchpad? I connected a mouse a few times to play some casual game but I'm not playing games anymore on my laptop.

This is going to be extremely off-topic, but I'm just too terribly curious: the company mandated the use of the mouse? Do you mean that figuratively, as in your tasks were a lot harder to do without a mouse or did they actually make you use one for something like RSI concerns?

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the model. The MBAs and Mac Mini ship with 256GB by default and getting 1TB (768GB more) is an extra $400 USD. The MBPs and Studio/Pro start at 512GB so 1TB is "only" $200.

a mac mini is not a laptop.

A MBA (MacBook Air) is?
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