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The Perfect Laptop

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Re: The Perfect Laptop

#311

Post by samuria »

ActorNightly wrote: post #297
wnc3141 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good construction relative to what is available. I will take a Macbook with a sharp edge over a dell laptop where the screen frame is falling apart, the hinge is non existent, and the trackpad is useless. If you go out to find faults in Macbooks, you'll find them, just not as many as the alternative.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#312

Post by johnnyworker »

robgibbons wrote: post #41

HP EliteBooks are pretty solid. I have a few G7's in different sizes and dual boot on all of them. The 840 is probably the perfect size, 14" 16:10 screen, plenty of ports, excellent keyboard, fully upgradable SSD and RAM, and overall great build quality.

I have a super old one (8470p) which I got refurbished, and I love that thing so much. Being from 2012 it's obviously not up for real work these days, but the build quality, how you can just pop open the case and expand and swap all sorts of things, that instantly spoiled me and my next laptop will be something comparable or better.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#313

Post by samuria »

RajT88 wrote: post #125
post-it wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else Because it doesn't move. When you press down on an Apple touchpad, it doesn't displace at all, it vibrates . This gives you an identical touch response across the entire trackpad, plus nifty things like Force Touch and customizable response intensity. Nobody else has done it, and it makes every other touchpad feel awful.

I'm just surprised that people feel so passionately about touchpads/trackpads. Apple can have the best one, sure, I believe it. But they still are bad pointing devices as a type of pointing device. People have gotten used to them, because what else can you really fit into a laptop?

Not sure about the "bad pointing devices" thing.

I have a very nice Logitech mouse and keyboard setup, but still prefer to use the Macbook touchpad while connected to an external display. They're just perfect in every sense.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#315

Post by silon42 »

pmontra wrote: post #114

Starting with my ZBook 15 from 2014: 1. Make it 16:10. There is plenty of bezel for that. 1900x1200 or something like that. 1200p was pretty common on good CRT monitors in the 90s. 2. Make the number pad optional. Framework is doing that with their 16" model. I'll bury my number pad and give a party. 3. Keep the three physical buttons on the touchpad. By the way, it can probably do gestures and it definitely register…

11. Thick enough for an standard ethernet port.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#316

Post by RalfWausE »

JamesLeonis wrote: post #274
RalfWausE wrote: post #87

Personally, i have found my perfect laptop: The Thinkpad R60, though ancient is - for the things I do - simply perfect. It runs really good with various BSD systems (and of course Linux), has an easily changeable battery, a - in my opinion - great keyboard, is repair- service and (modeartely) upgradeable. I have mine now for over a decade and will keep it running as long as spare parts are available. Will i ever buy…

FWIW, there's a move to transplant Framework brains into older Thinkpads [0]. The Framekenpad . I would love a Framework with a Thinkpad keyboard! [0]: https://community.frame.work/t/thinkpad-701c-with-a-framewor...

Whoa, this is great! I really never thought about putting a whole new set of guts into it... Somehow i have now intrusive thoughts about a fast, energy efficient SBC and the Thinkpad...

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#317

Post by solardev »

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…

Out of curiosity, why would you want to combine jpegs into PDFs? And why did that cause such a load? It wasn't just embedding them into PDFs, but somehow recompressing them too?

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#318

Post by anonzzzies »

michaelteter wrote: post #28
twic wrote: post #7

> the body of a 12" laptop I've always owned 15" laptops, and i've never had any trouble fitting them in bags, even in a sleeve. I understand why people might want 7" or 10" netbooks, but a 12" machine just seems like a waste of space to me. I understand that most people feel very differently, though! > webcam that doesn’t make it look like your laptop (or you) are a potato during a videoconference And also doesn't l…

I downsized from a 15" MBP to a 13" M1 Air, and I haven't felt much pain from the smaller screen. My approach to IDE-driven development is about the same on both. The big difference is solo laptop vs laptop+external monitor(s). As someone who travels frequently, the M1 Air has been simply amazing. It's so small and sturdy, and fairly light compared to the bigger/bulkier/heavier 15 I had before... and I'm at far less…

> Toughbook

I bought and old one second hand a few years ago and it is actually nice; bulky but light enough and really unbreakable. So when backpacking it is a good companion that can be used as a little flat table, can be used in the heat, cold and in the rain, you can drop drinks on it, drop it and beat someone’s head it before getting to work. The only real disadvantage is the battery life, so I carry a spare which works for me when on trips.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#319

Post by bpye »

michaelteter wrote: post #28
twic wrote: post #7

> the body of a 12" laptop I've always owned 15" laptops, and i've never had any trouble fitting them in bags, even in a sleeve. I understand why people might want 7" or 10" netbooks, but a 12" machine just seems like a waste of space to me. I understand that most people feel very differently, though! > webcam that doesn’t make it look like your laptop (or you) are a potato during a videoconference And also doesn't l…

I downsized from a 15" MBP to a 13" M1 Air, and I haven't felt much pain from the smaller screen. My approach to IDE-driven development is about the same on both. The big difference is solo laptop vs laptop+external monitor(s). As someone who travels frequently, the M1 Air has been simply amazing. It's so small and sturdy, and fairly light compared to the bigger/bulkier/heavier 15 I had before... and I'm at far less…

My personal laptop is an M1 MacBook Pro 13”, the device I use most frequently for work is a Surface Pro X. I really appreciate having a small, relatively lightweight device that I can easily carry without worrying about it. I don’t really feel hindered by the screen size of either except for some specific cases - code review in Azure DevOps can be a bit cramped for example. If I’m doing serious work for more than a couple hours I almost always have an external monitor to plug into though.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#320

Post by bpye »

qwytw wrote: post #173
bhauer wrote: post #115

> 2560/1600 = 1.6 (this is a good aspect ratio, the perfect laptop has a ratio ≤ 1.6) Not just laptops, but monitors in general should be 16:10 or taller. 16:9 only became popular thanks to the computer display industry naively adopting the aspect ratio of televisions. But 16:9 comes from the film industry and has nothing to do with computer productivity. It's a shame that so many monitor manufacturers still focus al…

> or even wider, when width is easily achieved by multiple monitors, side-by-side) Why would I want that considering I can get a 21:9 or so display which is also sufficiently tall? I definitely agree on laptops and small display though.

I’ve never really been satisfied by how either Windows or macOS handle window tiling - and so having multiple monitors has been easier to make work. It also gives me the option of having one screen for one device, and one screen for another - though that’s maybe more niche.
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