81–90 of 111 posts
I didn't realize Amazon was offering payment plans for laptops. I'd only ever seen that for cars and houses. Which makes me wonder, what do they do when people default on payments? Do they have a kill switch they can throw? Or do they send the repo man to repossess it while you're sleeping?
Expensive is relative. I'm the CTO of a small startup and we're leasing our laptops from Apple. We don't have huge budgets. I got my 16" M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB model a few months ago. Costs us 105 euro/month. That includes 3 years of extended warranty. After the lease is over (3 years), we have the option to buy the laptops at a discount typically. The new value of this thing is around 4500 euro, I think. We could have go…
> 30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) This is why data driven purchasing is key. Running some tests and having some data to show how much time will be saved by a laptop upgrade makes the decision process much easier. The companies that only decide based on prices and budgets set by someone making blanket decisions for the company a…
Many years ago I failed to convince my employer how buying their programmers less expensive computers with 5400rpm hard drives was an overall loss compared to 7200rpm disk drives. My argument was that any programming necessarily entailed reading and writing dozens to hundreds files all the time, especially during compile cycles. Maybe if I'd had data showing the actual time lost waiting? Or maybe I was a dumb kid trying to justify my desire to have a nicer computer for my daily driver.
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Agreed, but the scam is coming from Nvidia, not the laptop manufacturers. I doubt they're even complicit - Nvidia probably forces them to agree on exact marketing phrasing before selling them GPUs.
The laptop manufacturers like marketing an RTX 5090 instead of the more accurate 5070. It's a simple reality that you can't cool 600W in a laptop case, but Nvidia selling laptop 5090 is complicit.
For the average consumer though I highly recommend going on Ebay and finding these hyper expensive laptops used from a few years ago. Mine came with an i9 processor, an RTX 5000 and can support up to 128GB of RAM and even 5 years on those are still wild numbers except that same computer can be found for maybe 10-15% of the original price.
Though I will say one downside of buying one of these is they are customizable to an insane degree so finding the "right" one might take you a while (took me around a month to find mine).
and yet not one of them has a monitor of 17" or more...
The thinkpad is insane, 7k and NOT EVEN A GRAPHICS CARD
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at that point, it's about portability, not battery life
you can pretty easily carry around a small form factor PC at that point. even a tower, where my LAN guys at.
Are Sager laptops still a thing? I used to lust after those many moons ago.
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I don't think they officially support leasing to individuals directly, but it's very easy to setup a leasing/biz account with them as a business. I think any Apple store has a POC there that can help / see: https://www.apple.com/shop/finance/business-financing You can very easily setup an LLC and obtain an EIN. It's been a minute since I've setup an Apple financing account, so I don't recall what they require on the…
locally, last i checked, an LLC costs ~$20/yr ... so yeah. easy.
See the Alienware laptop flagged as 5090 while it's "GeForce RTX 5090 24 GB GDDR7" as laptops can't sustain the TDP and RTX XX90 full power. For AI an external GPU is less costly option.
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The laptop manufacturers like marketing an RTX 5090 instead of the more accurate 5070. It's a simple reality that you can't cool 600W in a laptop case, but Nvidia selling laptop 5090 is complicit.
What are the actual chips? Of course it's not going to run at 600W but I would think you can run a 5090 at 150W and the performance will be better than a 5070 at 150W. Of course, Nvidia may not be binning the chips the way I would expect...