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The Perfect Laptop

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Re: The Perfect Laptop

#341

Post by agloe_dreams »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #93
agloe_dreams wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, unless you are in the > $2,500 headphone space, DAC quality has a hard limit of actual hearable use. Under that point, most external DACs are pure snake oil. If A user has $200 to spend on a pair of over-ear headphones. they should spend $9 on the DAC and $191 on the headphones. Hell, the $9 headphone adaptor vastly outperformed a number of $100+ DACs. The primary limitation of headphone quality onboard…

Sure, most DACs that just use off-the-shelf chips are virtually identical in terms of how they sound, until you get to the really high end, as you said. However, in practice having a cheap external DAC is a massive improvement, even if the hardware is fairly similar. I think a good chunk of it is just being able to give the software exclusive control over the DAC, and passing in the results bit-perfectly, bypassing a…

I would argue this is all the high-point of Apple's desktop hardware. The same drivers that run external DACs is the same they assign to their own internal hardware. This is likely just a holdover from their background of audio production tools in the aughts.

For example, the Pro/Mac Macbook Pro supports 96Khz Audio at 32 Bits according to the same built in midi tool that you would also use to adjust the bitrates of external DACs. Sure my Onyx Artist 1 - 2 supports 24 bit at 192Khz...but the external headphone jack in the latest Macs also adds a fun bonus: A built in Amp for headphones over 300 Ohms. It's a weird add, but a wonderful one. (I do dislike that it is just a resistance detector that enables it though, my Planar HifiMan headphones are just under the cut so I have to drive them with an AMP for better sound.)

Obviously, this all goes out the Window on iOS of course.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#342

Post by solardev »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #338
solardev wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Documents scans. Lots of them. They all needed to get processed so the pages would be the same size. I don't know what imagemagick does when you ask it to merge jpgs into a pdf. :)

Ah, that makes sense

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#343

Post by brailsafe »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #331
brailsafe wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah. Unfortunately high RAM - no strike that; reasonable RAM laptop is hard to find at reasonable prices. And by the time FrameWork or something like that reaches my corner of geography I think it’d have been too late for me to try those things. There was sale recently in my country across online retailers like Amazon. There was decent discount on 8GB one, but the 16GB one? It’s not even available. It is never avail…

Yep, custom order or your shit outta luck. The 8GB is... fine, but not really an upgrade unless I was doing something that didn't tax ram at all. I tried it out when mine was in for repair, and I did notice the increased performance of the M series chip, but it showed it's limit pretty quickly when I spun up the 8 docker containers or w/e I was using regularly.

Furthermore, I want a red one. Sick of this silver stuff.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#344

Post by trashcanman »

jna_sh wrote: post #325
trashcanman wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it’s the only item on the list with a link and really shouldn’t be on the list at all. A laptop with a two hour battery is a long way from perfect. I’ve seen too many of these articles for this to be a coincidence. Pretty sure it’s a PR campaign or paid influencers.

It probably just has a link because it’s a relatively unknown brand, the author doesn’t need to link to Apple for people to know what a MacBook is. This level of paranoia about a niche laptop company is fascinating.

Well it wasn’t paranoia because hours later they released the 16” crowdfund so obviously it was a PR campaign and from the looks of the sales a very successful one. Assuming they aren’t creating false scarcity to feign demand

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#345

Post by fsckboy »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #150
dhruvmittal wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've very happily left a Mac touchpad. Not once but twice. While the gesture support in the OS is nice, I don't like how big the touchpads are. I feel like it regularly gets in the way of typing. I'm okay with the size of the trackpad on the Framework laptop, but it could have been smaller. I really miss my old Thinkpad trackpad with the physical buttons between the trackpad and spacebar, which I felt was really usab…

For me it’s not about how big it is. The MacBook trackpads feel very precise. I rarely mis-click a part of my screen because my cursor drifted too far.

Trackpoint

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#346

Post by user_7832 »

scrlk wrote: post #6

Unconventional choice: Panasonic Let's Note. Sadly JDM exclusive and has soldered RAM, but the latest models come with a 3:2 display, decent I/O (e.g. RJ45, full sized SD card reader, even VGA (!)), magnesium alloy chassis and a removable battery in a sub 1.1 kg package. Can't speak for the quality of the trackpad or keyboard though. https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/

Thanks for the link, this is impressive. They even have thunderbolt 4?!

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#347

Post by fmajid »

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.

I was issued one by my new employer. I'd much rather have a 4th USB-C port than the less versatile HDMI. For myself I'd probably go for a 15" MacBook Air instead, even if maxed out on RAM it's not that much cheaper than a MBP.

Another factor: I live in the UK, where they have a particularly crackpot derivative of the ISO QWERTY layout that well nigh unusable for a programmer. Apple is the only laptop vendor that will allow you to choose your keyboard layout, so when I buy anything else, I order from the US, with all the customs hassles that implies.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#348

Post by fmajid »

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…

Have you tried Magnet or Amethyst?

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#349

Post by fmajid »

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…

I don't mind overpriced as much as the paltry maximum. Every other computer I have has at least 64GN of RAM, including all my laptops, but until recently you needed a Mac Studio to get that in Apple land. Among other things you can't run large LLMs on only 32GB.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#350

Post by brailsafe »

pwpw wrote: post #340
brailsafe wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As seanmcdirmid pointed out below, I'd agree that the Macbook Air would probably be the closest approximation in the mac lineup in terms of weight, but intended to compare the weight between the 14" MBP and the Nano favourably. To me, yes the weight and size of the 16" would be a bit of a pain to carry around for any substantial amount of time, but the added 1.5lbs of the MBP 14" or the 0.8lb difference of the Air do…

Just for clarification, the parent I was originally responding to was expressing their negative view about the Nano and how they love their M1 MacBook Pro, so I wanted to provide my experience with the two laptops that I have used extensively. I did briefly have a 2020 M1 Air for 2 years. It was fine for carrying around. It failed for portability primarily in its inability to dock to a 2 monitor workstation. I still…

I'm always interested to learn about the setups that people eventually find working for them. Right now, I have a MS Sculpt keyboard (which I can toss in my backpack and use at a cafe, a little bulky for travel but doable) on a regular desk, and a somewhat budget 13" 2019 Intel MBP with 16gb of ram and a touch bar; the computer sits on stand next to my Dell 30" Ultrasharp (U3011 that I bought in ~2014) and a Logitech MX Master, as well as an old gaming PC that still provides use and I swap all the peripherals over to when needed. Have never personally owned an air or any other laptop than 13" Macbook Pros of varying specs now that I think of it, but used to develop on Windows when I was starting out, and typically do any server stuff on Debian over ssh or running Docker.

There are two areas that seem like such a miss to me on current macs, one of which you mentioned; cellular connectivity. I don't know if a physical SIM slot would be necessary, but it's just ridiculous that I still need to tether. That and a lack of any other appearance than grey or silver. Let me get a damn red, forest green, or lavender Macbook Pro!

I don't particularly care for the keyboard on the laptop, but my opinion more broadly, hence the Sculpt keyboard, is that any situation where my arms come in from an angle and I have to strain my wrists toward a rectangle of keys isn't really ideal. Went through a series of other external keyboards, apple keyboards, and what tends to be my preference is the key-depth of probably your Lenovo, a manta-ray like shape, wireless, and 10-keyless size; I'd really like backlit keys and a non-proprietary dongle or better wireless and internal battery that charges over usb-c.

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