My personal fight against the modern laptop [video]
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Now, after moving to chiclet, I find Thinkpad keyboards (especially T series) to be the best on the market.
There are however a lot of cheap ideapads and lenovo chromebooks with really awful chiclet keyboards. Avoid at all cost!
This is true. The new Fkeys are not grouped.
> The arrow keys are proper sized buttons (even the macbook has it wrong).
This is false, look at the linked image[1] and tell me that the arrow keys are different on the new keyboard.
> There is a slight curvature on each key's surface that makes it easy for the finger to feel the borders.
This is also false. The chicklet keys are slightly concave and the island layout makes it extremely easy to feel the borders of each key.
> All of these are missing in the new keyboards.
Again, this is false.
> This chiclet design is the worst thing to happen for the thinkpads.
This is subjective. I have both keyboards, and I like the new style better. I'm a linux user and I use vim. I've probably pressed the Fkeys 10s of times in the years I've owned either laptop. The entire row could be removed and I probably wouldn't even notice.
It's fine if you don't like the new keyboard, but the reasons you are giving are simply not true.
>> The arrow keys are proper sized buttons (even the macbook has it wrong).
> This is false, look at the linked image[1] and tell me that the arrow keys are different on the new keyboard.
Looks like the old laptop has a different height for Left, Right, and Down compared to Up, PageUp, PageDown. Is that really the case? If so, that'd be a pretty noticeable difference for a user of the original design.
>> There is a slight curvature on each key's surface that makes it easy for the finger to feel the borders.
> This is also false. The chicklet keys are slightly concave and the island layout makes it extremely easy to feel the borders of each key.
Just going off the shadow from your image, there's a marked and well-defined difference between the concavity. If my fingers were used to that concavity, I'd be unhappy with the much, much flatter design.
Arguing that he's propagating falsehoods is overshooting. That said, I thought it was pretty bad-ass you had both laptops and took a photo for us.
They are a little less concave than the older keys, but they aren't flat. The lighting in that picture isn't the same for both laptops. [1] is a better angle.
> That said, I thought it was pretty bad-ass you had both laptops and took a photo for us.
It's not my photo, though I do have a t420s and an x230, just not an x220 :-)
[1] http://blog.lenovo.com/images/uploads/blog/CS12KBD_180degree...
Notice the difference between the old and new keyboards, in the ratio of the difference between the touchable area of the arrow keys (up and down) with the control key. Also in the old keyboard, on the top of the down arrow key, there is a line which will help feel the difference in the keys. In the new keyboard, that plastic line on the down key is moved to the bottom. If I keep the finger in the keyboard, it is not easy for me to feel if I am in the up key or the down key without looking at the keyboard. This is my personal thing and you may not feel the same.
> The chicklet keys are slightly concave
The keyboard that I tried is almost flat. Even if it was slightly concave, they are no way close to the original curviness in the classic keyboard. Even in your image you can see that. That curvature is clearly feel-able for my fingers.
> This is subjective.
Agreed. All these are subjective. I just stated my opinion. We don't have to agree :) I did a typing test and I was able to reach about 100 words per minute in the old keyboard but could go only up to 80 words or so. I was using the old keyboard for long. It is possible that I would have reached the same speed with the chiclet keyboard too if I had spent more time, but I have lost interest with the new keyboard by then.
The X240 chiclet keyboard is excellent, I enjoy every moment of typing on it. The only better keyboards are the mechanical ones, which are way too thick for a laptop.
(And function keys ARE grouped in four!!!)
Ah, looks like just the 30 series lacked the grouping, they brought it back on the 40 series.
Recently however, Apple has changed their hardware design philosophy from a fairly open platform to a more proprietary and disposable one. They’ve eliminated the ability to change or upgrade components. The 3rd generation MacBooks have a battery that is glued in place, the memory is soldered directly to the logic board. Later models would come with the hard drive soldered down as well.
Lyle Wiens of iFixIt, said it best in 2012
> "When Apple dropped the MacBook Air to $999 in 2010 to match the price point of the MacBook, they gave users a clear choice: the thin, light, and un-upgradeable MacBook Air or the heavier, longer lasting, [upgradable], more rugged, and more powerful MacBook. Same price, two very different products. At the time, I wasn’t very happy with the non-upgradeable RAM on the MacBook Air, but I respected that Apple had given their users a choice. It was up to us: Did we want a machine that would be stuck with 2GB of RAM forever? Would we support laptops that required replacement every year or two as applications required more memory and batteries atrophied?"
Consumers overwhelmingly voted yes, and the Air grew to take 40 percent of Apple’s notebook sales by the end of 2010.
This sort of vendor-lock down and planned-obsolecence has bothered me to such an extent that the next laptop I buy won’t be Apple hardware.
Meanwhile, Apple has secured an oligopoly in the market, they have such a dominant position with hardware manufacturers that they seem to be squeezing competitors out of getting access to top-quality components (or their competitors don’t care about quality). These manufacturers seem to be building computers with “Apples’ scraps and leftovers”.
Put simply; I don’t see any manufacturers building laptops at the same level of quality that Apple does, and yet, I can’t buy a product that is so tightly controlled, and designed to be obsolete in two years.
My time is worth far more to me than the cost of a Macbook.
I get the same thing from [ThinkPenguin](https://www.thinkpenguin.com/), though the OS isn't linked to the hardware in any way --- they just choose free-software compatible hw.
So yah, did I just drop ~$2,500 on a new MBP? Yes. Did I enjoy spending it? No, but I also want the thing to "just fucking work" and it's a tiny fraction of my income considering my last Apple laptop lasted me almost 4 years... before I dropped it.
Are you implying that PC laptops require you to "dick around with drivers?"
If so, you are basing your logic on non-facts.
Driver updates have been integrated with Windows Update for at least 5 years, now.
For $999 you now get 8 gigs of RAM, SSD that is faster than most competitors, a trackpad that is better than any competitors', and by quite some distance, the best battery life on any laptop. I get something like 20 hours when I'm reading PDFs or using emacs indoors, and about 12 hours of web browsing.
There's less QA issues than most newer laptops with the Air since Apple has been making it for years, and it's still one of the lightest laptops in the field without compromising on too much. The resale value is also higher compared to equivalent laptops because of the 'Apple' brand, so that offsets the buying price to an extent.
Coming to the OS, while it's far from perfect, it's not a privacy nightmare like Windows nor a battery drain like Linux. Linux on a desktop is something I like, but on laptops they still suck a lot of battery life compared to MacOS.
TL;DR: If your idea of a laptop is a portable device that runs smoothly, handles low to medium level workload and lasts(literally) all day, the Air is a solid pick.
1) The ability to run 3 operating systems, and the best laptop operating system, MacOSX. I mostly run MacOSX, but still write shell scripts, use Unix applications, and occasionally run Windows 10 when I have an application that's not on the Mac, but only under protest because MacOSX is so good.
2) Excellent build quality, I've dropped it numerous times without a chip, crack or problem.
3) Retina screen, high resolution that is easy on my eyes, no tiny fonts or misshapen images. Plus while I have Retina on my main screen I'm coding on two 24 inch monitors connected to it.
4) Magsafe.
5) Excellent ergonomics. Trackpad, keyboard are top notch.
6) Far fewer worries about viruses.
7) Far from being quickly obsolescent, Apple computers retain their value far better and longer than other manufacturers. Mine is three years old and I'm no where near considering replacing it.
8) etc. etc
I bill $85 an hour. Has my productivity been enhanced more than 1/4 of 1%? Way more. Have I gotten more work because of the quality of my projects? you betcha.
Any professional who requires a computer to do their job should always buy the best possible computer to do it with. The extra cost is trivial in comparison to professional wages, the benefits in higher performance are always easily justifiable.
If you work a minimum wage job, sure, get the cheapest computer that meets your needs, that makes sense to.
If you are a graphics designer perhaps retina display matters, as a developer which you also seem to be I don't ever think "wow the font rendering is holding me back".
And linux has few viruses etc.
Dell has been making laptops of equal or better quality for a couple years, now.
The XPS line is absolutely stunning.
In terms of build quality, the 2015+ XPS line is comparable (at least) to any Mac laptop offering.
I'm very aware it's a pretty impractical idea but i find it fun to think about :)
Understandable, though, if you want to sit the pack down but still use the system.
Probably what would be better would be some kind of wireless datalink to the HMD, and have the video processing on the HMD itself (instead of sending frame/interframe data - just send the data to render the frame, and let the HMD do the processing - essentially moving the video card to the HMD - this would, though, still require more than a bit of bandwidth, but maybe not as much as HDMI?).
And I think Google and Microsoft are hoping to get a version of this with hololens and tango, where they run machine models and cloud resources when needed and just get the results/models to run on the mobile devices. Still very much in its infancy though.
[1] http://cdn.redmondpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/MacOSXS...
Sierra has been an absolute rock for me.
My last reboot was due to an OS update.
I found I had to reboot Snow Leopard every 30-40 days, but running 3 web browsers with a ton of tabs open will do that.
* slackware
* redhat
* debian
All were on home-built PCs that had no special insight into them, and were very much not top of the range. They have been media servers and a desktop, on 24x7. None had stability issues, ever.
If I could have a 2010 15" Unibody Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard but with today's retina screen, CPU/chipsets and ports (and maybe more battery in place of the optical), I would be SO happy with that setup.
All this in a laptop which cost more than the x61t. WTF :( I want my real thinkpad back!