Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

I was assigned one of these (the 2015 model) as my office laptop, and I hate the thing for five reasons (two dealbreakers on top):

- It is huge and unwieldy, like a cafeteria tray (and comes with a sizable power brick)

- The touchscreen doesn't have an oleophobic coating, so it becomes a smudgy mess within hours (unlike my iPad, which looks pristine for weeks despite being even more heavily used)

- The screen seems dim or washed out no matter what I try (then again, I have a retina MacBook at home...)

- Battery life is poor(ish) on the i7 model. I can only partially blame all the corporate junk we have installed.

- Wi-Fi seemed flakey at times (and you need a proprietary dongle for Ethernet)

I've seen the 2016 models (which don't improve on the above) and they share the good bits:

- Very decent (if somewhat mushy) keyboard, with lots of travel (perhaps a bit too much)

- Relatively lightweight (considering the size)

- Pretty decent touchpad (not on a par with a MacBook, but good enough for three-finger gestures, although maddeningly imprecise at times)

- Despite the color/brightness issues, the HIDPI screen is sharp and readable under Windows 10

- The fingerprint sensor actually works (but doesn't hold a candle to TouchID)

- DisplayPort or HDMI output (depending on model, mine has both, and I use my Apple dongle for DP->VGA)

I disabled TrackPoint within a month due to RSI (I used original IBM laptops for years and it was a recurring issue for me).

TrackPoint is much more precise than the trackpad for accurate positioning, but I'd rather carry a Bluetooth mouse and retain the use of my fingers (whereas I'm perfectly fine with the Mac trackpad for drawing diagrams and pixel-level positioning).

Edit: Oh, and I run Linux on it through Hyper-V and Docker, since I need to run Windows 10. Had no trouble booting a couple of Ubuntu/Elementary Live USB drives for playing around, most of the hardware seemed to work.

Sorry, being an owner of the 2015 version, I don't know what the fuck are you talking about:

- The brick is tiny. Sure, not as tiny as the 50 gram mac one, but is very small compared to most laptop bricks.

- It's huge? Some peope want more screen real estate, and 14in is good for that.

- Battery life is 6+ hours; less if I spend them watching youtube of course

- Never had a problem with WiFi

The only thing I agree is with the ethernet dongle (which I have only actually used once, when setting up the wifi at a new place).

Well, I have an EU brick (which may well be different from yours) and seldom get more than 4 hours from it running Office and remote sessions (less if I fire up Docker, Visual Studio or heavier apps).

Like I said, we run a fair amount of extra stuff that may be to blame, but my experience carrying it around to customers for over a year is that I always need to sit near a power socket by noon.

Comparatively, my peers toting Surface 4s (who work on the same accounts and whom I travel with) outlast my laptop by a couple of hours.

I own this laptop too, and I agree with you. I would add a few complaints of my own, though:

- The computer sometimes seems to turn on after it's closed and asleep in my bag

- The CPU gets pegged constantly, even on the i7 version (admittedly, this may be due to some background processes that were installed by my employer, but sometimes in task manager it just seems like a generic Windows process it taking up all of the CPU, so it's hard to tell).

- The fn key placement is awful. Seriously, I think Apple started this trend, and I wish other manufacturers would stop following it. Years of muscle memory have trained me to put my pinky in the bottom, left-hand corner of the keyboard for ctrl. At least you can change this in the BIOS on this computer, unlike a Mac, but that's still less than ideal.

On the CPU being pegged, I have bothered my IT department to death over the same thing on my X1 Carbon. If you download Process Explorer, I would bet it's CSCService that's causing the issue. If so, the culprit is likely the Windows "Offline Files" feature which lets your IT department sync your laptop files with the corporate network every so often. My IT department has failed to fix the issue, though, so yours may be unable to find a fix. For a while, I just messed with the power setting on my laptop in order to never allow the CPU to be fully utilized so that the fan noises were not insufferable.

> - The brick is tiny.

I and my family have owned several Thinkpads. I just bought a Thinkpad this past cyber Monday, and the power brick it came with is significantly larger than prior Thinkpad models' bricks. So much so that I was a little disheartened when I saw it. Since you mention you have a slightly older model, I suspect that your adapter is tiny, as you say, on par w/ MBPs'. But the current models from Lenovo have regressed in this respect.

Just so you can see, here's a photo[1]. The smaller brick is from an older T500, and the larger one is from my new T460p. The small Lenovo and the MBP appear to output roughly the same. The larger, newer Lenovo one is capable of pushing more power, but at quite a cost in size.

[1]: http://imgur.com/CQJKyUp

I bought a new X1 Carbon six weeks ago. It came with the smaller brick in your picture.

6+ hours of battery life is _absolutely terrible_ by today's standards.

I bought the 2016 version to replace my Samsung NP900X3C and returned it because:

- The lid was wobbly.

- It's big, thick and just looks mediocre to me. Display rim is too big.

- The coating is susceptible to smudges / fingerprints. Why are they even making those in 2016? Unacceptable.

- Display was way too dim.

- Colors were yellowish but that's probably fixable.

All 5 points are relative to the (few years older) Samsung. It's a shame they don't care much about laptops anymore. I mean, it's 8+ years old and it's hard to find a replacement (which I'm looking for because it has 4 GB of RAM).

I don't know if my requirenments are so unique or if there's a big mismatch between market demand and supply. Which would seem odd to be honest because laptops is a mature and competetive market.

At 300 nits, the display is going to be mediocre at best. Even the P50 4K display which I think is supposed to be 350 nits is dim and really quite awful.

HP and Dell have much nicer screens these days.

Good point. My trouble with the display isn't so much brightness but contrast and color range. I can attribute that partially to the touch layer, but, in all honesty, I just find it an eyesore in general.

I use the same wallpapers on my Mac and Windows machines (a set of coloured trianglify patterns), and EVERYTHING looks so much nicer on the Mac that it's just sad.

>coloured trianglify patterns

I searched for this on Google to have a look and found a neat tool which I think is worth sharing.

https://qrohlf.com/trianglify-generator/

Since you noted Wifi issues and Windows 10 - is it only flaky when you're on battery power? If so, open the Start menu, type "Power Options" for that control panel, edit your plan settings, Advanced settings, and check the Wireless Adapter settings - Windows has a tendency to lower those for power savings, and I've seen having them even down at Medium cause dropouts on a laptop 20 feet from the access point.

The size of the power brick should be less of a concern with the 2016 models since it appears to use regular old USB Type-C Power Delivery. Even if the Lenovo-provided one is not to your liking, you can just use another one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com