Live data from Hacker News

The Perfect Laptop

blog.brossia.com

91–100 of 354 posts

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#91

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.

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.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#92
My perfect laptop is the M1. The thing I love the most is the screen. I've installed Lunar and can use XDR mode to take the screen to peak brightness. It really makes a big difference watching content or working in a brightly lit area.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#93

>good quality DAC or audio interface (headphone jack), this is also something Apple tends to do a little better than competitors No laptop has a decent DAC. If you want a good dac, just get something external. Don't need to spend a lot either, even a relatively cheap ~$70 product will vastly outperform anything in a laptop, desktop or phone.

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 any mixers in the OS or software. Many integrated setups will do dumb things like resample, convert DSD to PCM, can't handle high bit depths or rates, etc.

In my experience, it's night and day when you have it set up correctly, even with a very cheap external DAC.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#94
post #64

I bought a 12" Macbook last year because my 15" is too heavy to lug around. It's so light that I forget that it's there. I spent months on the road with it. At home I would just plug it into my USB-C monitor and use a keyboard and Magic Trackpad. Unfortunately it's too slow to play YouTube Music in the background, especially if Docker is also running. I would buy an M2 version in a heartbeat if Apple made them. I rec…

Recently took my 12 inch MacBook on a multi day hiking trip (it survived!). Anything heavier would have been a nightmare.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavy though. Coming from an m1 air to a 16” pro is cartoon-eyes-out-on-stalks surprising when you first pick it up. I can’t help wonder if the m2 air 15” is the best on the market currently.

I use a 13” M2 and it’s by far the best laptop I’ve ever used. The only things it doesn’t check off is the HDMI out and other ports issues IMO.

FWIW the 14" and 16" M2 pro/max Macbook Pros have HDMI, SDXC, three usb-c ports, and a headphone jack.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#96
post #21
post #3

I believe this laptop should also be in the list: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14

The screen seem to be low res and the aspect ratio is awful..

Created an account just to comment - what is awful about 16:9, or "low res" about 1920x1080, for a laptop?

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#98
post #84

> another Apple can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else things Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Windows/Linux laptop. I’ve tried…

My current Lenovo laptop comes pretty close. I enjoy it a lot.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#99
I've got a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Nano Gen1. Better than Gen2 IMHO.

The touchpad is the first thing I disable on any laptop. I use the keyboard and the red dot.

Re: The Perfect Laptop

#100
post #84

> another Apple can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else things Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Windows/Linux laptop. I’ve tried…

Personally, I don't like it as it's too large.. and I keep hitting it by mistake... for a while I ran Thinkpads with a touchpad disabled, just using the "nub".
Post reply on HN