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Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities? I hardly ever see them discussed.

IME with large numbers of HP corporate (not consumer) machines, they have by far the best quality of any Windows options. They run for so long that users get frustrated, wanting shiny new equipment but having no reason to replace their old ones. An EliteBook not far away from where I'm sitting even has a tool-less case - you can pop off the cover and service it by moving one lever, no screwdriver required - on a laptop!

However, I don't have data on quality; that is hard to come by.

(I have no relationship w/ HP.)

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> Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities? I hardly ever see them discussed.

Because HP did a LOT of crappy things and produced a lot of crappy hardware and provided a really crappy customer experience.

I know a lot of people who are in the "I will NEVER buy another HP" camp.

That reputation takes time to undo, and you have to stick with it and not screw up during that time or you are back to square one.

> Because HP did a LOT of crappy things and produced a lot of crappy hardware and provided a really crappy customer experience.

In my experience, they still do.

I have a Elite X2 1011 G1 2-in-1 business laptop that cost a fortune when I bought it. It has numerous serious, well-documented issues that HP has done nothing about since release.

A few that I've personally experienced include:

- Touchpad randomly stops working every few weeks until you remove and reinstall drivers

- Severe power leakage during sleep, even with connected standby turned off (I'm talking about 100% to 0% if left unplugged overnight)

- WiFi stops working after wake from sleep until disabled and re-enabled

- Frequent intermittent audio crackling issues that requires a reboot to fix, and an audio "enhancement" suite that's seemingly impossible to disable, and makes anything coming out of the headphone output sound like absolute shit (and this is not just my snobby audiophile side speaking, even my parents can tell something's off with the headphone out on this laptop, and so can everybody else in this 14-page thread http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Audio/DTS-Audio-Contro...), which severely hampers its use even as a media consumption device.

All of which I would consider to be inexcusable issues even for the most basic machines, without factoring in the device's $2000+ price tag.

The only redeeming factor was its WiGig chip and the accompanying WiGig Dock (separate purchase), which is seriously cool tech that I really hope catches on, along with wireless charging. Albeit it has limited utility on a machine with such debilitating defects.

Needless to say I'm now firmly in the "I will _NEVER_ buy another HP" camp.

I used to work for HP, and I'll never buy anything from them after they screwed me in the pay department: -5% pay adjustment on hire/transfer from EDS; also they did not pass on shift differentials of 15% for 3rd shift that they were payed for my work.

Paying your workers may not motivate them (above a certain baseline), but screwing them certainly will!

I can count on two hands the number of printers and consumer-level laptops from HP that have died on me. I'm sure its different in EliteBook land but I am still trying to find out what Windows laptop vendor offers the best build quality and performance.

Buy the corporate line laptops from whatever vendor you use. Speaking generally,

* Consumer products are sold based on cost; when consumers shop, that's all they look at. Corners are cut to keep costs down - that's what consumers demand.

* Corporate products are sold based on availability (reliability), serviceability, and support; that's what IT departments shop for because those line items cost businesses far more than the extra couple hundred in up front cost. Imagine the cost of just a a few hours of downtime over the entire lifetime of the computer - lost productivity, skilled labor to for repairs, parts, distraction and disruption.

Yes, corporate products cost more; if you insist on lower up front cost, the manufacturer is going to give it to you. You get what you pay for. The same goes for support; pay for premium support.

My impression of HP's consumer-level stuff is that it's cheap in every way, but I never use it. I do have a ~12 year old heavily used HP corporate line laptop not far from where I'm sitting; it works perfectly except for the trackpoint (touchpad is fine), and the finish is a bit worn where the user's palms rest.

I have a Skylake Envy 15. In general, I like it as a Linux development machine, but there are a lot of things that I'd change about it if I could. The polish just isn't there...and somehow it manages (with an aluminum body) to feel more rickety than the plastic Lenovo that work issued me.

I'd rather just use it without getting into a discussion about why I'm using an imperfect computer rather than [insert other guy's preferred brand].

edit: I suppose it's not really a business model, but it is supposed to be their premium consumer model, and to supposed be kind of an HP Macbook "replacement".

I don't know about their other lines but I had a Zbook for work that made me never want to own anything made by HP. Huge clunky piece of flimsy plastic with terrible battery life and a worse trackpad. The display had a habit of breaking, meaning I went through several replacements before they finally just gave me a MacBook.

HP has tried to reform themselves with some new premium devices like the Spectre's line (x360), but they really did make some horrible hardware back in the day.

Since my last HP work laptop died, I've just been 'upgraded' to a 1.5 year old 15" ZBook G2, after flat out refusing the 17" version (which weighs about as much as me, and is bloody massive).

It is heavy, has a pretty big screen bezel, and generally feels clunky. The i7-4710MQ is also slightly slower the >3 year old i7 it replaces. Only slight positive is I now get ~3.5 hours of battery life instead of ~2.

Because HP is probably the worst offender when it comes to pre-installed crapware.

Does that really matter with this crowd?

That depends, it's a diverse crowd. If you're going to install linux then it's not an issue. If your leaving the OEM version of windows then it is. IME a fresh install of windows is often hard/impossible to track down all the drivers you need. And those drivers often come with their own crapware.

Windows 8/10 has this feature built in. You can do a fresh install that keeps nothing except the drivers, with a minimum of clicks in the UI.

Is finding drivers really still an issue with Windows 10?

I recently did a complete reinstall of windows 10. I hat to re-download some drivers from dell to get touchpad gestures working but otherwise everything was fine.

Lenovo tried to adress this with driver list in bios and people accused them of doing superfish 2.0

Recently upgraded a zbook from 8.1 to 10 and the audio went awry, and the DTS audio stopped working and that took time to fix. There were some issues with win 10 switching between wi-fi and a cabled connection which should happen automatically but I had to fiddle around to make it work.

ON the plus side: virtual desktops in Windows! Not the best implementation and still not as good as Linux's, but usable.

I don't know, I've never tried with windows 10.

I have an elitebook from 2012, and the build quality is pretty bad compared with my Lenovo (Thinkpad) computers. Everything except the motherboard has broken at least once.

I use it for the i7 processor.

> Why don't HP laptops get more attention

Because I've never seen one with the build quality of a Thinkpad T or X series. Which also have near perfect Linux kernel driver support.

> Thinkpad T or X series. Which also have near perfect Linux kernel driver support.

Isn't that because Linux (and other *nix) devs typically use Thinkpads?

And does anyone know why that is? I'd guess that it's because when these projects started in the 1990s, IBM Thinkpads had a great reputation for quality.

That, and the hardware used by thibkpads is usually very close to the Intel reference design for the northbridge chipset associated with the CPU, and things like Intel or broadcom Ethernet controllers and not shitty ones.

They've had thermal throttling issues in some of their high end ones, so maybe there are reasons why they are ignored.

For a person who is just going to use their laptop as a browser, email, WebEx & MS office machine, that doesn't matter as much.

I was happy with my HP till I moved north of Darwin: 99% humidity, 34C/93F 9 months of the year.

It became impossible to use unless I wanted to cool my workspace to the point where stepping in and out of the workspace all day could shock my system.

I switched to a Thinkpad. It worked. Humidity/dust killed it, like everything else, but it took 18 months.

I've got an EliteBook that has issues with this... at high load after about 10 - 15 minutes it throttles itself WAY back because it can't get rid of the heat.

I think it's because of model fragmentation and short lifetimes - there aren't enough devices with a similar enough configuration available for long enough time that any community can really develop.

Interesting. Generally the components in different manufacturers' laptops are subsets of the same set of options: Intel, AMD, NVidia, Broadwell, etc. Using the same components, I'd expect all manufacturers have similar ranges of variation and rates of change.

There are corporate machines that promise platform stability for 1-5 years in order to give enterprise IT more standardized platforms to support, but I'd be surprised if many FOSS projects targeted those models.

There's a small community of Linux on Mac hardware hackers because they have the slowest rate of change and fewest models to support. In comparison all the PC makers are high rates of churn and configurability. If there were a Mac class hardware build that integrated out of the box with Linux that showed reasonable product-line stability, I'd be buying that in a heartbeat.

The corporate machines may be more stable, but generally they're tied to corporate sales channels that aren't built to be accessed by individual buyers.

> There's a small community of Linux on Mac hardware hackers because they have the slowest rate of change and fewest models to support.

Interesting; I hadn't thought how Apple's culture of minimizing complexity for users would benefit even FOSS.

> The corporate machines may be more stable, but generally they're tied to corporate sales channels that aren't built to be accessed by individual buyers.

IME: You just have to look hard for those with platform stability; it's not prominently advertised and your non-corporate sales rep will have no idea what you are talking about. But once you find one, you can buy it online direct or through many channels, at least SMB channels (e.g., Connection.com); it's just not available from Best Buy or Staples.

Come to think of it, I would think the FOSS operating system community would happily adopt them.

I have an older, refurbished elitebook that I picked up for about $140. It's fantastic. It has a removeable battery and the tool-less backplate. Every component inside can be serviced easily with plain old mini screwdrivers.

The best feature is the hinges. I've had several other laptops over the years that I had to abandon because the hinges seized up and the attachment to the screen was so weak that eventually I opened the laptop and busted the screen. I don't see that ever happening with this elitebook.

If I worked on Windows, I'd seriously consider it; but my workflow is mac/unix so Windows is relegated to Gaming PC territory.

I used a 2007 EliteBook for years before my current MacBook. They're great machines.

Over the holidays, I found out that my mother's old (2012?) Dell had broken. I gave her the EliteBook; it was a dramatic upgrade from the newer Dell, along every dimension: build quality, keyboard and touchpad, CPU speed, memory upgradability. It was ridiculous.

Personally, it's because my experience with their high end consumer laptops made me never trust their engineering again.

Never have I had a laptop that was such a failure in terms of thermal engineering and also mechanical design. Constant thermal throttling, and both hinges cracking after a year from normal opening and closing of the screen.

> my experience with their high end consumer laptops made me never trust their engineering again

FWIW, the corporate products seem entirely different from the consumer ones, at least in my experience.

In my experience, HP does a lot of manipulation of their BIOS settings to make sure you only use their replacement parts.

I've had some issues getting several HP laptops to play nicely with Ubuntu. Some of this was the graphics chip, but there were some basic driver issues as well.

Though, thinking about it now, the machines were not bad. No Macbook Pro in build quality but it worked well enough.

Can we stop using MBPs as quality standard please? I dont know how a such fragile case, mushy keyboard, heating issues, driver incompatiblity everywhere except OSX, ... Even qualifies as "quality".

No question they are good laptops, but there are several out there with much higher build quality. Thinkpads, XPS, ...

Edit:// Before i get more hate on this, think about it. If we make manufacturers think we want macbooks all we get are shiny slim cases, if we messure quality with Thinkpads we get a lot more

Having gone through Dells, HPs, Toshibas, and Apple laptops...

The reason I use MBPs as the reference is because it is still the laptop I enjoy using the most on almost all metrics.

The thinness is nice, a touch thicker to get more battery life would be nice but I use my laptop for several hours unplugged heavily without issue.

The aluminum case feels better than any other laptop I've held. XPSes feel nice, but not like my laptop feels.

The trackpad is excellent. Smooth surface instead of that bumpy stuff on most laptops.

Last-gen Macbook keyboards (pre-butterfly) feel very nice.

I use MBPs as a reference because that's what I mostly want. If I could get a MBP with dedicated GPU and no driver issues for Linux, I'd be pretty happy. Thin things are nice.

Exactly!

After multiple gpu heating issues I rank MBP quality somewhere between Toshiba and acer

At least someone that understands the problem. Kudos!

Afaik mostly because Thinkpads have all that but are slightly better.

I have the Skylake HP x360 with the 4K screen. The 4K screen has awful color rendering that makes everything look like barf and the trackpad is even worse.

My MacBook Pro is so much better.

Nobody ever said anything good about HP's consumer laptops. You can basically think of their consumer and enterprise lines as separate divisions, almost separate companies.

The Spectre x360 is both a halo "Premium" laptop and it's pitched as a Business model. [1]

It might not be a traditional EliteBook, but it's supposed to duke it out with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and the like.

Not stacking up to an MBP is inexcusable in that context, if true.

1 http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/spectre-pro...

HP's business laptops almost invariably have shit screens.

> Why don't HP desktops and laptops get more attention in 'hacker' communities?

aspect ratio - 16:9 is good for media, and maybe some business use, but it's DOA for hacking

I'm not sure that's true anymore. 4k resolution means that you can now fit two 4:3 monitor's worth of pixels (1920x1440) width-wise side by side on a single 4k (3840x2160), 16:9 screen. It's almost 2 monitors in one.

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