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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

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Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#451

Post by Dalewyn »

kelnos wrote: post #403
scq wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asus and Acer are Taiwanese, not Chinese, and none of them actually manufacture their own laptops in house, that is outsourced to manufacturing partners. Nearly all laptops on the market, regardless of brand, are manufactured by 6 Taiwanese companies: Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Inventec, Pegatron, and Foxconn. And yes, that includes Framework, who use Compal as their manufacturing partner.

To be fair, Wistron actually used to be the manufacturing division of Acer, until it was spun out ~25 years ago. My first job out of college was at a US-based networking hardware company, and I was really surprised to learn that, even though most of the manufacturing & assembly is done in China, most of the electronics OEMs & ODMs are actually Taiwanese.

TSMC gets a lot of attention being as prominent as they are, but most people don't realize that the entire computing supply chain is Taiwanese. It's not just the silicon, that's just the tip of the Taiwanese iceberg.

Combine that with China having some manufacturing capacity of its own, China stands to lose far less than the west in a hypothetical war over Taiwan as far as computers go.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#452

Post by ornornor »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #356
jaredhallen wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the newer business class laptops I've seen just have a few screws to pull the back panel and replace the battery. It takes about 5-10 minutes.

Right but that's a) compared to 5 seconds with external battery and b) requires certain comfort and skill level and c) as you point only for specific laptops

Regarding c), I personally never get anything but business laptops. The consumer ones are just too crappy, plastic everywhere, won’t last more than 3–4 years, underspecced hinges, and plastic clips.

The business ones are the same price or cheaper past the three years mark when IT departments all get rid of them at the same time and spare parts are plentiful for the next decade.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#453

Post by viraptor »

bodge5000 wrote: post #429
viraptor wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily underpower your better laptop on demand for a specific task. And also you can do it in more controlled ways: what happens if the process gets less memory, fewer cores, lower cpu speed, worse network, etc. Getting an underpowered laptop to do both development and testing is not the only, or even best way to do this.

You can, but you won't. Not regularly anyway, thats not the way you'll run your computer daily. Maybe for a while, but then you'll forget or want the extra power for something and get too used to it. Instead, you'll do it occasionally at specific times. You've just recreated the problems I was talking about with an optimisation step but in a new environment.

You can be more specific. Don't lower the performance globally, just for the app you're developing. It's easy to automate in your ide configuration / run script / app itself when running in debug mode, etc. It's a one-off setup per project you're developing.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#454

Post by rldjbpin »

i think this widely varies between people and what they need their laptop for.

personally my previous laptop (7+ years old; the replacement is over 3) was ample for basic tasks even today, but it did not meet my personal needs (gaming, deep learning on cuda).

but there is something liberating in getting a very cheap but well-built old laptop if you can get away with using it like a thin client. personally, going forward it makes sense to instead invest in a repairable laptop like framework. while the old thinkpads can only be repaired around the core hardware, this way you should be able to get much more mileage.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#455

Post by Klonoar »

mike_hock wrote: post #394
Dalewyn wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Linux is fantastic on older hardware I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds. Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.

I won't take any distro seriously that doesn't support at least i686, amd64, arm and arm64. Compiling for four architectures can't be too much to ask. Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo. We need this pressure on developers if we're to maintain a modicum of code quality.

What a needlessly dismissive and frankly rude take.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#456

Post by rubin55 »

bdavbdav wrote: post #359
chadash wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and companies claim they are doing so to build lighter laptops A framework 13" is 15.9mm thick and weighs 2.9 lbs. A macbook air M1 is 16.1mm thick and weights 2.8 lbs. So it's pretty darn close. I'm sure that thinner and lighter laptops exist, but yeah, the framework is pretty thin. And at a certain point, it stops mattering. Being thinner wouldn't really provide much utility at this point. The fact is that repair…

I’ve got a framework 13, and am in the “I wish I just bought the MacBook Air” camp. The battery life is terrible, the speakers are terrible, the thermals are terrible. It may be thin and light, but the different levels of R&D really show.

FWIW, I'm a recent owner of a Framework Laptop 13, 13th gen 1370p. I am extremely happy with it. w/regards to battery life, I'm doing ~4.5watts idling/text-editing, screen on, wifi on. That is more efficient that I got out of my 5850u I had before this. I get about 9ish hours of battery life. You do need to run things like thermald, tlp and set the lower tdp setting in the bios (max battery setting lowers the tdp afaik). Fan barely turns on. I could probably take it further with ectool tweaks. Edit: to add, powertop is your friend! measure. Anything above 6watts usually means something is doing something (this ball-park 6watts comes from experience, last 3ish devices - anything lower than that whilst doing things == great. I do about 8ish watts when using VA-API to play video for example, which I find very reasonable + similar to my previous 5850u).

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#457

Post by pcdoodle »

kelnos wrote: post #401
noirbot wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tradeoff is that the Framework's battery life is garbage . I had laptops a decade ago with 2x the battery life. I'm lucky to get 3 hours of battery doing web browsing, and standby/hibernate on the Intel processor in it is so bad that it'll fully discharge in less than 12 hours doing literally nothing. I really want to like it, but my Framework is literally a worse user experience than my old 2016 Macbook Air and…

Yeah, I'm with you on the battery life. Though I don't understand where you get the 12-hour figure for a full discharge while in suspend. In that time period I lose about 20%. (If you're running Linux, try changing from 's2idle' to 'deep' sleep; not sure if it's possible to change this on Windows.) The thermals are indeed terrible. My 12th-gen has this issue where it will sometimes overheat, and the firmware will loc…

3:2 is used by microsoft on the surface.

16:9 is plain disgusting for a computer.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#458

Post by Kye »

a1o wrote: post #169
jwcooper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what Framework set out to do (and is pulling it off so far...I'm typing this out on my 12th gen framework). They have an entire marketplace of replacement parts you can buy, including screens. They've even got battery upgrades (increased capacity), better speakers, new screen type (matte) that you can retrofit into your existing Framework. They support upgrading from their first gen laptop (admittedly they ar…

I wish something like Framework could be more popular so it could be easily available on other countries. As is, the impact something like it is small. Hopefully this changes at some point.

It's still very new and working out the kinks in the concept. I wouldn't expect it to take off in the current state. The videos they've done on Linus Tech Tips (Linus is an investor) keep me optimistic about their prospects.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#459

Post by kryptoncalm »

YmiYugy wrote: post #78

I used to think that as long as all you needed to do was some web browsing that older or underspeced machines were fine. But in the last few years websites have become insanely resource intensive. Even using something as seemingly simple as Gmail is a frustrating experience on older laptops (speaking as someone who just upgraded from a 2017 dual core MacBook Pro). I also have a hard time believing that the same hardw…

I have the same problem on my 2015 Macbook Pro, I can do all usual work I want, but website are getting slower and slower burdened by heaps of JavaScript, autoplaying video and what not. Sometimes I even have input lag when typing in a search bar(!). The Ikea website is a good example of bloated website.

Adblock only helps a bit, and most websites don't work without javascript.

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