Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

I'll take a slightly thicker laptop with a working keyboard

Someone should create a laptop which has equivalent aesthetics, high build quality, very high robustness, awesome battery life, an awesome mechanical keyboard, and gaming-laptop like GPU/CPU specs.

I don't care if it's an entire inch thick. Just make the edges super rounded, and I can get it into my backpack just fine! (I'd say to brand it 'THICC' but I'm not sure if that wouldn't draw it towards gaming laptop territory.) The current basic spec 15" Razer Blade is very close to this, but not quite.

View on HN

There are plenty of preferably laptop designs on the market, the problem is that they do not run OS X.

See, the problem is being limited to OS X. Windows is good these days. Linux is good too.

Or, at least, when I left OS X, it was just as clunky & crashy & inconsistent as everything else. And I realized that all my tools ran elsewhere or I could find decent alternatives.

I got really tired of limiting myself to the Apple silo. IMO, Apple's only thing was that they were nearly perfect, and that was reason to accept lock-in. Now, not so much.

When did you leave macOS?

I was alternating between a Windows desktop gaming PC and a Mac laptop for work since 2001 or so, with periodic hardware upgrades along the way. Finally gave up on the Mac laptop about 3 years ago and haven't been back.

I'm sorry but Windows is not "good these days". It's as terrible as ever.

It's definitely not "terrible as ever" as far as I'm concerned. I've been using Windows since the start and it's fully usable as my daily driver for development these days. Web dev under WSL and building Firefox works as well for me as it did under OS X.

You may not care if it's an inch thick, but you'll care when it weights 20lbs.

It doesn't have to be 20lbs. A fully beefed up Razer Blade with GTX 2080 weights 4.7lbs vs a much less powerful Macbook Pro's 4lbs. Thickness of 0.7" vs 0.61"

That doesn't have a mechanical keyboard, which will add quite a bit of weight and thickness (which adds more weight).

The one laptop that ACTUALLY has a mechnical keyboard, the MSI GT83, weighs 13lbs not counting the 2 (!!) 330w power supplies. Shipping weight is 24 lbs.

Honestly, that machine is more a "luggable" than a laptop, in the grand tradition that includes Kaypro CP/M and Commodore SX-64 luggables with built-in CRTs.

It does have a mechanical keyboard: https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-blade-pro

edit: screenshot for posterity https://i.imgur.com/D1Fyrtv.png

Reply on news.ycombinator.com