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The Perfect Laptop

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Re: The Perfect Laptop

#291

Post by crossroadsguy »

M1 or M2 MacBook Airs *with 16 GB RAM* (and this is the catch). These are notoriously costlier (and difficult on retailer sites where you get deals) to have compared to their 8GB counter part - Apple already making it difficult for users to keep the laptop around for longer, because that default 8GB RAM is going to run out sooner than you think. And you can not upgrade it once bought.

Anything on Windows (or Linux considering you'd install that) I wouldn't even touch below 24-32GB or 16GB to begin with and then expandable up to at least +16GB.

It is so shocking to see people declare their laptop just works at the soldiered xGB RAM. Well, a year and half later it will start feeling the pinch.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#292

Post by brailsafe »

pwpw wrote: post #285
oktwtf wrote: 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 la…

The 14" MBP is about 3.5lbs compared to just under 2 for the X1 Nano, is your work computer a 16"? I had a 16" for work, but wouldn't get one personally, it's a bit bulky.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#293

Post by brailsafe »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #130
maximamas wrote: post #46

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.

It's less difficult than I thought to to get an M1 Max chip hot enough to spin up fans. Run CitiesSkylines on a 4K display with all of the graphics maxed out for a few hours. ;) Or do 8 parallel runs of transforming and merging a massive amount of jpgs into less massive pile of pdfs. Just about fully pegged all of the cores for hours. What surprised me was how fast everything still was. Without the fan, I wouldn't ha…

Ya, those workloads would do it. My M1 Pro 16" really made my intel mbp feel sluggish, especially if I'm running any containers. Not quite enough to replace it yet, but sometime in the next year if I can do something useful with it.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#295

Post by brailsafe »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #291

M1 or M2 MacBook Airs *with 16 GB RAM* (and this is the catch). These are notoriously costlier (and difficult on retailer sites where you get deals) to have compared to their 8GB counter part - Apple already making it difficult for users to keep the laptop around for longer, because that default 8GB RAM is going to run out sooner than you think. And you can not upgrade it once bought. Anything on Windows (or Linux co…

My intel MBP 13" has only lasted as long as it had because I got the 16gb of ram, and wouldn't consider anything lower these days. The upgrade from 8 to 16 only a few years ago though was about $200 (already too high imo), but now every ram tier is a laughable $500 CAD upgrade. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS for 16g more, and even though I know it's a great computer, it just feels sinister. Considering it's an additional $500, I'd be paying a full grand for the 32gb package. Like it's only priced for idiots who finance a new car every few years and get all the options

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#296

Post by ActorNightly »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #291

M1 or M2 MacBook Airs *with 16 GB RAM* (and this is the catch). These are notoriously costlier (and difficult on retailer sites where you get deals) to have compared to their 8GB counter part - Apple already making it difficult for users to keep the laptop around for longer, because that default 8GB RAM is going to run out sooner than you think. And you can not upgrade it once bought. Anything on Windows (or Linux co…

This all depends on your usecase. My daily driver is an older $300 Dell laptop with 8gb of ram running bunsenlabs with i3wm. All I did is stick a 500gb ssd in it and it works absolutely fine. With standard dev workflow, I can get close to 6 hours of battery life, never run into memory issues. But my development is mostly python and C.

I do agree that Macbook air from a hardware perspective is a very good configuration for a general purpose laptop, but the MacOS absolutely ruins these laptops, at least for me. Having a work issued Mac, its kind of amazing to me with how much bullshit OS things people, especially technical ones, just put up with.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#297

Post by ActorNightly »

wnc3141 wrote: post #91
maximamas wrote: post #46

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.

The chipping sharp edges of the case of my work issued Macbook isn't something I would consider good construction.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#298

Post by jlokier »

philsnow wrote: post #281
willio58 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

I have "Displays have separate spaces" checked, and I can drag a desktop from one display to the other by grabbing the desktop from that "film strip" and dragging it over to the other display. I don't have to drag all the windows individually. They move together with desktop.

The limitation, which you might be bumping into, is you can't drag the current desktop that's visible on a display, which is sometimes annoying but makes sense. Switch to a different desktop first.

I agree with you about the confusing ever-changing number labels on the desktops. I would really like to assign names to desktops, like "Work" and "Project 1". The GUI has room for it, as the full-screen app desktops already have names.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#299

Post by jlokier »

prewett wrote: post #279
matteoraso wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, the memory is overpriced. So are eyeglass frames (rimless are especially overpriced). But as long as you can afford it, a few hundred dollars isn't that much spread over a few years. Or, think about the other option. You can get a not-MBP and have a clunky experience [1] but save some money, or spend a the extra few hundred for a MBP with enough memory to be a great experience. (Assuming you like macOS, of cour…

Few hundred?

When I looked at adding my ideal RAM and storage onto the base MBP M2 Pro model, the RAM upgrade came to $1634.56 (£1250), and the storage upgrade came to $2876.83 (£2200).

That's enough to be a long term purchase, so I decided to wait for the M3 and see if 3nm makes a big difference.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#300

Post by binkHN »

hamandcheese wrote: post #286
binkHN wrote: 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.

Perhaps. Older ThinkPads also used to have very tiny TrackPads, so the TrackPoint was likely preferred by most users, at least in part, due to this.
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