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The Framework Laptop

frame.work

741–750 of 1001 posts

Re: The Framework Laptop

#741
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Apple did was gave people a solution that looks good on the retail floor, but in practice involved carrying a bunch of dongles, which take up more space, can break more easily, can be easily forgotten and are more finicky while using. In practice it leads to a significantly worse product for the vast majority of users, for the benefit of the minority that falls in the pro crowd and is able to get all their work…

> the vast majority of users The vast majority of users don’t carry a bunch of dongles around. It’s just true. What are most people doing? Zoom, Excel, PowerPoint, Browser, Slack, etc.

There are dongles at home and dongles to carry. For home, I need a DVI adaptor that goes into a separately powered USB 3 hub so I can use a monitor, and I can plug my keyboard and mouse into that. I am not a fan of the extra wiring though, needing to power the hub takes up one more electrical outlet, but it's not mobile and I can hide it, so no biggie.

But that means when I carry the laptop around I have to carry a dongle for the mouse or not use the mouse. It depends. The mouse is ergonomic and easier on my hands than the trackpad, so I prefer to carry it. It's just one dongle, and I'm already carrying the mouse, so not too bad.

I also need USB 2 for my Yubikey, which is USB 2.0.

Before I had USB headsets but that would be 3 USB 2.0 devices and my portable hub only accepts two, so I ditched them and switched to the old wired iphone earbuds since they are light and stateless.

That also means I have to give up my ergonomic keyboard and use the flat keyboard, but usually that's OK unless I am on a long trip. If I'm on a long trip, I'll want that ergonomic keyboard after a lot of typing at which point it's 3 USB 2.0 devices and then I need to bring the powered hub with its own adaptor. I can leave that where I'm staying and just take the mouse to the coffee shop. But this adds complexity.

All in all, it's doable, I'm not complaining that it is an insurmountable obstacle, but I would prefer a computer that was a bit thicker and heavier but had more ports built just to reduce the overall complexity of the setup and not worry if I brought everything with me. When you compare the weight of the usb hub and its adaptor to the extra weight added by adding a few more ports, I'd prefer the laptop to be a bit less demanding in input requirements. To me that would make for a more mobile solution overall.

But honestly these are minor issues.

Re: The Framework Laptop

#743
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason, I've never used a laptop that wasn't a MacBook that has had a trackpad anywhere as amazing as what Apple has done. I don't know if the problem is hardware, software, or both, but as a consumer I don't care. I'll never buy a non-Apple laptop until I can find one that has a trackpad as good or better. That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be…

It's funny that PC and Android can never reach the smoothness of Apple's touch pad and screen scroll when it's really the basic thing of computer usage where it matters. Apple did it right 15 years ago and why do others still suck at it?

they don’t care. i’d love for someone to defend the idea that for all these years, microsoft has really wanted us to have first class touchpad experiences on their laptops, but they just couldn’t figure it out. A problem too hard, a bridge too far, an unattainable moonshot for however many hundreds of thousands of software engineers microsoft has employed over the years. so, once again, the reason it’s only that good on mac is because no one cares in the windows world, from microsoft to their developers and ultimately their customers who don’t value that feature. edit: i spend most of my life in linux but I have a mbp for photoshop and capture one. on many topics I hate my mac with a cold fury but credit where it’s due.

Re: The Framework Laptop

#744
post #739

Just curious, why Intel over AMD? AMD has been dominating the CPU market lately in price for performance.

AMD's competitive mobile chips are bit different; higher TDP, higher core counts. Not ideal for a thin and light machine.

I thought the 4000U series was supposed to be more efficient than Intel but still provide higher core counts?

Re: The Framework Laptop

#747
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool! Did others in the company appreciate the benefits of repairable hardware? Also, $50,000 sounds like a lot of money. Was that price considered giving it away?

$50,000 sounds like a lot of money For a server in the 90's, it sounds pretty cheap to me. Apple's Xserves started at $3,000, and I've read they were considered underpowered. Sun was a premium company for heavy lifting. The company I worked for at the time was into Silicon Graphics, and those machines were five figures a pop just for desktops.

Dud, when I rebuilt Lucas Films into the presidio (I was one of the tech designers on that project) - they had so many SGI systems... they built Keg-arrators out of $150,000 machines in moving.

One small note on SGI - the 02 had a "feature' that cost you ~$2500 extra for access to a particular port - can recall if it was USB or Serial or what not, but you had to pay for this port...

But this port was just blocked by a plastic cover - EVERY machine had this port/ but they were covered by a plastic cover.

The $FEE that you paid was to simply have SGI remove the plastic cover on top of the port.

The 02 was an extremely over priced piece of shit and the only reason it existed was to have Softimage and Maya run on MIPS

Re: The Framework Laptop

#748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've still never seen a PC with a sane touchpad. That's the first issue in a long tail of grievances with the PC laptop ecosystem. EDIT: This isn't a generic "pro-Mac" dig, I want a nice PC laptop because I like dabbling with Linux; however, even the high end trackpads are clunky, even with the pre-installed Windows (never mind the eternal sadness that is Linux trackpad configuration).

Have you used an xps? I really like my trackpad. Haven't use apple's

Have you used an Apple? Really like my trackpad. Haven't used XPS

Re: The Framework Laptop

#749
I upgraded my five year used laptop just last month, and this would have been an ideal one.

However, lack of an AMD CPU is a kind of deal breaker for me, even if it means I wouldn't get USB 4.

Re: The Framework Laptop

#750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just look at the thing you want to click and press F then type the letters that appear on the tag. EDIT: Here's an extremely low quality screencast of me making this comment https://imgur.com/qpppveP

Thanks. This is a much better reply than the OP's. Now what do you do for things that don't get tagged?

Pretty much everything clickable gets tagged. Buttons, text inputs, links, etc. If what you want to click on has a word in it, you can press '/' and type the word then hit enter to click it so that would probably be what I would do if there was ever a missing tag. That's also how you can highlight text. This is for vimium at least.
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