I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers
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1. I like big, big monitors.
2. I prefer a full size keyboard.
3. I prefer a separate mouse.
4. I prefer big freaking disk drives installed.
5. I put the desktop under my desk, and with a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, there is much less of a snarl on my desk.
6. The desktop has an optical drive I still use.
7. The desktop has lots of USB ports and they're all in use.
8. I can replace/alter parts of the machine without buying a new one.
9. Desktops are cheap.
10. I can build what I want with parts from newegg. Premade powerful computers are always "gaming machines" and I don't want a gaming machine that comes with a graphics adapter that sounds like a 747 taking off.
11. I want an all-metal case because a machine caught fire once.
Edit: 12. My desktop doesn't have a microphone or camera, so they cannot be surreptitiously turned on remotely.
I mean, hardware wise they are not much faster, but cooling is a different story.
The problem is this base clock speed is given by the CPU manufacturer not the laptop maker. And Intel wouldn't know what kind of laptop it's getting crammed into. So careful definitions don't really help. Desktops are already big clunky things that have to be kept plugged in, I can trust them a lot more to deliver the CPU's promised performance. Whereas laptops are notoriously making compromises because customers tend to be very unrealistic about noise, battery life, etc.
More expensive, less performant, and less serviceable with a suite of proprietary bloatware on top.
I might break the pattern this year though, I got a 3900x last year around launch and moved my 4670k to a home server. I've been pretty impressed with the 3900x while the 4670k has been maxing out all cores in the server for some tasks so was considering buying a second 3900X(T) to replace the 4670k again. But with the rumours about the 5900X, I might end up putting the 5900X in my desktop at the same time as a 3000 series GPU and moving the 3900x to my home server.
Most laptop cooling is awful, but you can certainly find laptops that are well built if you look for it.
Not sure you should weigh bloatware, either. You can trivially install a fresh Windows or Linux and you have to on a custom built PC anyway. If you buy a premade PC, it probably comes with the same crap.
For what it's worth, I switched to a desktop once the core race heated up - now I've got a 12 core 3900X.
I can't believe how much faster it is when it's using all the cores. Night and day. Highly recommended. And 12 cores is barely scratching the surface of the crazy workstations you can build these days.
For tasks 4 threads and less, it would be a bit faster than a current gen Intel laptop chip, but I don't think it would have been worth the portability penalty to me personally if that's all I did with it.
The most limiting thing is TDP, which in the highest performance laptop processors is still capped at 45W, whereas a maxed out desktop processor can draw 100W or more.
See these tables for i9, for example, compare Coffee-Lake-S (Desktop) with Coffee-Lake-H (Laptop) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i9_processo...
Maybe a small desktop. My desktop processor is 180W TDP (Threadripper 1950x), while some others are 250W TDP. You can also get a dual-socket workstation, for 2x CPUs (both pulling 200W each).
Thermals and power are significantly higher on desktops, it ain't even funny. Laptops win in power-efficiency, but absolute performance is always going to be a Desktop.
My Macbook laptop, on the other hand, sounds like a jet everytime I run yarn install.
So yes, desktops have higher thermals. But it handles it so much better than a laptop that it almost becomes irrelevant.
At full load, it depends on the heat dissipation; Dell's Precision 7XX0 dissipates heat well enough to keep the CPUs from throttling, but the 5XX0 does not.
The highest spec macbook comes with a 9980HK and starts at 2800 $. A 3900X has approximately twice the performance in multi-threaded workloads and you can easily build an entire quiet workstation with it for less than 1000 $. Half the performance, thrice the price. Great deal.
Yes, there are also "laptops" with a 3900X in them. But even those still have lower performance than a desktop with a 3900X because of thermals.
Desktops are great.
Though with water cooling you might also have a lot of pump noise, especially if the radiator is mounted incorrectly.
In my case I have a DDC style pump, and its very quiet after I got a car wash sponge and cut a square hole in it and put the pump inside. It looks ghetto but its inside a case so who cares.
At first I was worried about heat, but its lasted 10 years so far.
The larger the diameter of a fan, the lower the RPM it can spin at to move the same amount of air (same cooling capacity) as a small fan. Provided you can put the air where it's needed (e.g. a 1 foot fan can't "focus" air onto a 6 inch radiator) a larger fan will just about always be quieter and more efficient.
Oh, and having a water cooled PC with the radiator and fan inside the PC itself is silly. If you run the pipes outside or into your basement, your PC is almost completely silent, plus the cooling capacity will usually be much, much higher, because not having to cram fans and a radiator into a small enclosure lets you make them bigger and more efficient.
And historically, bigger case fans have been problematic, those 200mm fans they tried to introduce some years ago. Bad static pressure if I recall correctly?
Also, I wouldn't call having a radiator and fan inside the PC silly. The case eats a lot of the noise already, it's the easy and the common setup, and good AIOs are quiet and cool well. But maybe you just wanted to share a cool big water cooling setup with everything noisy routed into the basement ;)
The hoses aren't welded steel, you know.
I heard a story about a DIY PC that did nothing but circulate water through the cpu cooler from a fish tank; the tank was big enough to dissipate heat through evaporation and other means, only occasionally needing a top off.
I actually mounted an automotive transmission cooler to the outside of my PC and made it part of the watercooling loop, because it was inexpensive and large. There are no fans on it, but it still reduces the work the standard pc cooling radiator with the fans on it needs to do.
Specs can never tell the true story, but it's clear that the mobile processor is going to be much slower for anything remotely processor intensive, and probably much more than twice as slow for anything making good use of multithreading.
Having had to go back and forth between a laptop and a desktop for a processor intensive application (AutoCAD) the difference was painful.
Also, laptops generally have CPUs that pull 15 watts. Whereas desktops have CPUs that can pull 95 watts or higher (sometimes up to 150). The difference is astounding.
See: https://evanmccann.net/blog/2020/5/13-inch-macbook-pro-revie...
40, 100, 29 in pmset -g thermlog instantly.
CAD, for example, barring new geometry work in progress now, is single threaded.
People working on high surface count models want these things:
Big, fat, fast cache
Sustained sequential compute performance
Sustained I/O
GPU that focuses on geometry and precision. This is not generally an issue today, but can be on laptops.
Desktop machines with active cooling are where it is at.
* https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-1185G7-vs-Inte...
* https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/4354735?baselin...
These are short tests too, so would be a best case. In real life, laptop performance is probably significantly worse due to thermal throttling.
While we're mentioning other minor gotchas, another one is memory latency and bandwidth. While desktop systems commonly have XMP and 1.35V support, very few laptops do (typically running at JEDEC timings at 1.2V). While there's diminishing returns, the difference between JEDEC 2933 CL21 or 3200 CL22 and say 3800 CL16 can actually be noticeable in certain workloads and is often effectively "free" (one-click in the BIOS) extra performance on the desktops.
Time after time, as someone who's been working on his 10 year old desktop (with a replacement ssd + graphics card when the old one died), I meet devs and analysts using laptops who reason more or less: "well it says i7 and it says x GHz and it says ddr3/4 and it's got a gpu with the same marketing number, so laptops perform the same as desktops cause they have the same hardware in them don't they".
Clearly, what they really mean is "I've never worked with and compared with a desktop". I suppose one of the problems is that SOME of them that have 'used desktops' were actually using neutered VMs in a shared corporate environment that run really poorly and are pretty underspec'd in a shared environment.
But every time, it's actually been the case that not only is the desktop faster and cheaper, but things usually remained faster on an X year old desktop hardware vs more modern laptops for any serious workload.
Edit: and in case it needs to be said, I have both desktops and multiple portable devices in my household because the downside of desktops is clearly portability.
Laptops being power-conscious, they're usually much closer to the point of maximum efficiency on the power curve. In that sense you get better performance per watt. But that's negated by the increased front cost.
As a result, your 10 year old desktop is probably 50-100% faster than the most expensive Macbook Pro or Thinkpad. It can be quite astonishing swapping to even an old desktop after using a laptop for a long time.
I'm planning to drop in a 5950X upgrade in the workstation in a couple weeks as well. Looking forward to both the huge multi-threaded and IPC gains.
I have mine set to 80% and only set it to 100% if I know I'm going to be away from AC for a while.
How often is that a problem, really?
A well proven way to move heat out of a silicon package to prolong its ability to perform at its highest potential. And in a desktop, you've got room for 'em.
There are all kinds of vendors / models, who knows what kind of throttling they use?
You seem to assume it's the case that heats up to 80C or more, that's not true and also not necessary for NVMe SSDs to go over their limit. Your CPU/GPU has fans moving the heat away, that's a better position to be in...
You will just have to accept that you've been wrong on this topic. Move on, it happens.
Read and learn! And then accept when an initial assumption turns out to be wrong.
Go to https://www.computerbase.de/2020-09/samsung-980-pro-ssd-test.... look at the graph. You see that a bunch of them go to the 80C line or hover above. All of them throttle (what you said does not happen). In that graph are shown, going above the limit:
1. FireCuda 520 1TB
2. Patriot Viper VP4100 1TB
3. Samsung 970 Evo 1TB
4. WD Black SN750 1TB (+ the same one with a cooler)
This is only a small part of the market of course, but it goes to show that the throttling is a real thing that happens with multiple models.
Then you had a moving goalpost there, that those SSDs do not throttle under realistic workloads. However, this is a sequential read that's only 5 minutes long. Hardly unrealistic. The hour long constant load benchmark is a different graph, however, constant load is also realistic if it's longer than 5 minutes.
If you activate the other chart modes you see the measured performance, which shows the drops linked to the too high temperature, and that they did the same thing for write performance.
You can counteract this with a lot of targeted airflow and/or a heatsink, the heatsink will at least help move the throttling to a later moment. Gamersnexus had a very impressive demonstration of this, one where they did get this wrong: They had an article about a MSI SSD heatsink where they claimed it did not help (so the SSD did throttle! Again something you said does never happen), where it then turned out that it did not work only because their applied temperature sensors (glued them to the heatsink), and IIRC they also missed the higher performance they got regardless. GN often gets it right, stuff like that happens, but it made this one memorable and highlighted the positive effect of these heatsink coolers.
I'm into this topic professionally for years now. I'm not wrong here. If you can't take my word for it, look at professional SSD reviews, they have covered this also for years now.
And sure: There are scenarios where this does not matter. Gaming. Browsing. But: In those workloads there is no significant difference to a SATA SSD anyway. These NVMe SSDs are only interesting if you have large (and thus: long) file transfers. This is what they have to get right (and some do, but not all of them).
By the way, by repeating that I'm wrong and by starting with a straight "No", by always commenting without reasoning and politeness, you made sure that I will correct you - and that I'm not buying into your strange attempts to correct your statements to something that is correctish. They don't work anyway, these SSDs throttle.
You should change your tone around here.
But you don't know what causes the throttling. Its stupid to shove a heatsink on nand. It does not help. Not a single bit. Period. Under any normal daily usage, or even if you had a workstation, you're not going to be reading/writing so constantly frequently that you're ever going to cause the controller to heat up and cause throttling. If you experience any excessive heat. You have bigger issues in your case. Period. Your only proof of throttling is benchmarks running constant read/writes over a period of time. This is not real world usage and doesn't make it necessary to go out and start shoving heatsinks on every single nvme drive. If that was the case then all the laptops which have space between the nvme and the case, or motherboards which lack a 'heatshield' like the gigabyte board you linked to, would have throttling issues. Which they don't.
> You should change your tone around here.
So now you're threatening me?
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Anyway I'm done, not gonna sit here an argue anymore.
I installed an EK spreader sandwich on my Samsung NVMe drive, and it made a massive (20° c) difference over stock. It was previously a bare stick with no surface area/thermal sink to pull heat away.
To test that, one can try it with ramdisk first, before getting an expensive ssd.
Having a fast machine that can sustain throughput and I/O is a perfectly rational desire, and for some of us, need.
Multithreaded builds (make -j 24) can really hammer the drive. Read and write interleaved, which uses up cache in both directions.
Pick anything over the 800$ range that isn’t a macbook and you’re way more likely to hit clocks than not.
Note that workstation-class (H) laptop CPUs also make compromises on performance - the Ryzen 9 4900H is 8C16T but only has 4MB L2$, 8MB L3$, and a max TDP of 54W. A desktop Ryzen 9 3950X by comparison is 16C32T and has 8MB L2$, 64MB L3$, and a 105W default TDP (and will go much higher with even basic PBO if your cooling allows). The differences on the Intel side are even starker.
Yes. And as a bonus, I can use my Alienware 17 R4 as a throwing weapon. Or for workout. And the power brick is a perfect cup warmer.
But I like it, nonetheless.
It’s obvious that it’s impossible at the moment to get 3950X performance in a laptop format, but you can get laptops able to keep temps reasonable with 35-50W, and that’s what a lot of laptop SoCs target as total power.
Those SoCs hit (and sustain) their top clocks, whatever those are for that specific SKU.
What I understood from OP is a common complaint for macbooks, that fail consistently to sustain their specified to clocks, because Apple deliberately under specifies their cooling solutions for better ergonomics (and design reasons).
This is actually completely wrong. Almost no laptops sustain their top (boost) clock on heavy workloads. Most usually only sustain max performance for minutes (or seconds!) before throttling. Here's an example chart that shows how various premium Athena/Evo U laptops perform: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-S-UX393JA-Laptop-...
On the workstation side, people complain about Macbooks, but recent MBPs actually throttle their Intel H processors less than a comparable XPS 15 for example: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-2019-in-r...
If you are interested in how modern Intel laptop chips throttle and what base and boost clocks mean, you want to do a search for PL1, PL2, and Tau. For AMD chips, you will want to look up STAPM, Fast and Slow PPT.
Note that while a i7-10875H's top "boost" clock is 5.1GHz, the sustained "base" clock is only 2.3GHz. This is so low to be meaningless as a top speed. In practice, unless your laptop's cooling is absolutely terrible, you'll probably end up mostly running in the 3-3.5GHz range under full load. In comparison, on a properly cooled desktop system, a same-gen i9-10900K desktop system should be able to maintain a sustained (all-the-time) clock of about 5GHz (very close to its 5.3GHz boost). AMD chips scale a little bit better due to 7nm having better power efficiency and how PPT works, but the same ratio roughly applies.
This is the problem with all the marketing BS. When I talked about “top clocks”, I wasn’t referring about “boost” clocks. I’m talking of the clocks that the SoC is designed for (that won’t appear on the box), i.e. a lot of laptops are not leaving “performance gaps” due to bad cooling, those SoCs are designed for that level of performance and attaching a fat copper heatsink won’t do much difference.
I had a lot of trouble with a client that complained that our board was not properly designed because the performance they were seeing was not “as advertised”. In the end we had to ship the whole thing to AMD, and have them test the system with a thermal sink. Everything was as expected.
If anyone is interested in this kind of stuff, your explanation is really good, so I won’t add anything because I’d probably do a terrible job :)
Back in the day, most CPUs had had a fixed clock, but these days modern Intel and AMD chips simply don't - they all clock opportunistically, which depends on powers, thermals, but also workload (try running an AVX-512 loads for example). How do you characterize "clock" in this context? Base (minimum) and Boost (hard limit, now split to Max Turbo <2C and All Boost MC) seem to be reasonably sensible numbers.
Now we can argue semantics all day, but to bring it back around if you're just going to say "top clocks" is what the SoC was designed for at a specific workload/power envelope (In AMD's PB, that'd be PPT, TDC, and EDC) then every laptops will "hit their top clocks with no issues," but I'd say that argument (statement?) is a bit circular/pointless. ;P
I would love elaboration on what happened.
I had to wash the floor, walls, everything in my office to get the stink out.
Replaced the mobo and graphics card and I was back in business, but this time I bought some sheet steel and set the computer on that, which hopefully would buy some time to get the fire out.
The machine had a metal case, which I'm sure greatly slowed down the spread of the fire. So for me from now on, it's metal cases all the way, baby.
This reminds me of an old joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/46sere/a_p...
I also bought a chromebook just for fun for $150 from the pawn shop. I have a "build farm" of various computers with different operating systems in the basement for use when there's a problem with one of the D targets, but using putty to remotely access them.
You can have these with a laptop too. At home I use my laptop with an external screen, keyboard, mouse (the latter two are wireless), because it's much more comfortable.
It's not just the monitor being big, I want lots and lots of pixels. I'm currently running 3840*2160, and have a second monitor attached set up in portrait mode (so I can display a manual page while I work on the other one).
Of course, I'd get an even bigger monitor with more pixels if they didn't cost so dang much :-) How big, you ask? A wall size retina display! I've wanted one for 40 years.
With Thunderbolt/USB-C hubs, this is easily fixed.
edit: two monitors is still a pain, though.
I’ve got a USB-C dock hooked up to my TV too with a wireless KB/mouse combo connected into that, if I want to plug my laptop in on the couch.
Even works with your phone, if you've got one that supports it. Recent flagship Samsung phones with DeX do, but I'm really holding out for more external monitor support in Phosh so I can plug in a Librem 5 like this.
Prior to that I used Apple keyboards which work fine but have low-travel chiclet-style keys which aren't as nice to type on (they are much quieter for office environments though.)
Once the laptop is festooned with hubs, external drives, cables everywhere, might as well just buy a desktop.
I used an external monitor, keyboard and mouse when at the desk, even when I only owned a laptop. But I also use the laptop a lot on the couch, not just for traveling - so I wondered if I would find it annoying to have a separate desktop machine.
So far it's been well worth it. The desktop performance is much better (especially for gaming) and Dropbox, git, Chrome sync and VS Code sync make having multiple machines relatively painless.
Edit: I see in previous comments you were looking for a full sized bluetooth keyboard. I recently got a Logitech G915 [0] and I'm pretty happy with it. Expensive though.
[0] - https://www.logitechg.com/en-eu/products/gaming-keyboards/g9...
Sure if I'm on a high latency link I might have to adjust to clicking taking a wee bit to register, but normally I don't have to adjust my usage.
Windows to Windows.
The couch is fine for reading a tablet.
For me the trick when moving back and forth between the office and home was to have an external drive with everything on it and carry it back and forth. A better approach is probably remote desktop or remote login.
I travel with a cheap laptop loaded with only what I anticipate needing on the trip. It eases my mind to not worry too much about having it stolen, lost, or smashed.
It's a dealbreaker for me.
At home, I have a similar setup but with a 27" colour-calibrated screen in place of the 34" curved.
When travelling, I use an unpowered four port dock which means I can connect five external drives without needing the powered dock and its power brick. The unpowered dock only struggles if I have more than a couple of platter drives (instead of SSD) connected.
not only is that hard, it's hard to find a bluetooth keyboard that isn't laggy as heck and doesn't occasionally freeze for a second or five. Or just give up until you re-pair it.
Maybe one of the next 20 that I try...
> How big, you ask? A wall size retina display! I've wanted one for 40 years.
I have always thought, since Digital Research GEM, that the "desktop" in GUIs should be your desk's top. We're nearly there...
Never had any issue like that with my full-size Apple Magic Keyboard. It Just Works™
Microsoft make at least two, the Surface Keyboard [1] and the Ergonomic version [2]. I own several of the standard ones, and they're the best-made keyboards I've ever owned (and the only ones my joints can currently cope with), but the fact that they're Bluetooth instead of USB drives me insane. I'd pay extra for a wired version that just instantly sends the keystroke every time instead of going to sleep after a while (while it's awake it's instant, it just wants to save battery after being idle).
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/p/surface-keyboard/8r3rqvvfl...
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-ergonomic-keyboard...
If you really want a dongle the previous Sculpt Ergonomic has a dongle but the Num Pad is separate :-/ It doesn't have the delay you talk about, and has much better battery life than the Surface version (had it for three years and have't changed them yet).
https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/products/keyboar...
Obviously there's a tradeoff, but the point is you can get many of the advantages of both fairly easily.
My setup now is a laptop with the USB-C docking station. So I plug in one USB-C cable and get:
30" external display, ErgoDox Ez, USB mouse, bigger speakers, 120W power, Mic for zoom calls.
>6. The desktop has an optical drive I still use.
for what? You're probably better off (in terms of both convenience and IO performance) to store it on a hdd/ssd as an iso and mount it.
2. Failing that, just archive your existing discs and ditch the drive for good. It's the year 2020, and most (all?) software are distributed digitally, so you shouldn't need to get out your drive in the future.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installat...
2. Burning a bluray for backup. (I do backups on different media types just for insurance, and I like that blurays are write-once and incompetence and ransomware cannot fk with them.)
No need. You still buy CDs, you're old enough that we can wait.
;-)
(I still buy them, too.)
... You can put a big disk on a laptop, USB3 hub, etc etc
I think main thing missing for me is a beefy GPU and maybe a bit more RAM.
I know that purchase was effective, because a week after it was installed there was a big storm and power went out everywhere except my neighborhood. Just having a generator successfully wards off power failure, you never have to actually turn it on.
I submit this is objective proof that I am living in a simulation and none of you exist, you're just artifacts of the simulation.
Every time.
Fortunately, after about 6 weeks or so, the market forgets I did a transaction, and things start moving my way. I'm forced to be a long term investor.
Vijay, is that you?
Beware, you need to regularly maintain it too (hopefully it does a weekly starter test, and it probably needs yearly oil changes). I didn't check mine, and found the battery charger had failed at about 1 am when my wife had a flight out that morning. That was fun.
(We don't have everything on the generator, so it's not as effective as yours, our utility wiring is actually pretty fragile, and our well pump is one of the things not on the generator, buying a portable genrator for that seems to have helped, but I did have to roll it out a week ago)
It would have cost twice as much to run everything with the generator, and that isn't really necessary, so it's a smaller one.
I worried about the battery being dead and no way to hand crank the generator, so I made sure that the generator could be started from a car battery or one of those zap-o-matic car jumpstarters. (I bought one of those last year, and had occasion to try it out on my stone dead car battery last month - it worked great!)
Hmm. Is this something I can buy at Home Depot or something?
Probably less of a concern, but it also moves the heat output.
They have some really cool fanless builds, that if you were using a CPU like the AMD 4750g [1], you would have zero noise, and it'd make for a very decent workstation.
1) I have 2 "big big" 4K monitors hooked up to my laptop so no problems here. The laptop's monitor is not used as the lid is closed.
2/3) I use external keyboard and mouse. No problems here
4) I have 2TB worth of SSD in laptop and I also have huge external drives array.
5) Said laptop is sitting on my shelf, I do not even see it. On my desk are 2 huge monitors on arms with VESA mounts and wireless keyboard/mouse. Said laptop is also running NOMACHINE so I can also access my few worktations and servers without lifting my butt.
6) I have external optical drive but frankly I do not recall single time in a last 3 years when I had to actually activate it.
7) I have 2 external 10 port USB 3.0 hubs hooked up to 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 port of said laptop. Again no problem in this department.
8) Yep. Desktop is much better in this department.
9) Not my desktops ;) They're server/workstation type.
10) This is how I build my "desktops". No argument here.
11) I do not know what to say about it.
BTW, it sounds to me that your laptop setup is indistinguishable from a desktop, and your setup is even less portable than a desktop, so why not go the cheap desktop route?
But the key for me is I do that because I have a work laptop and a personal desktop and I want no question about the ownership of things I do on the desktop.
I organized my windows and tabs and splits in such a way that it degrades gracefully when I switch from the external monitor and back.
How often often do I really need that? Not often, but when I do it's really useful.
Not any laptop but some do. It even does it while driving its own built-in monitor but I do not really use it.
>"your laptop setup is indistinguishable from a desktop"
you got that part right
>"your setup is even less portable than a desktop"
Nope. When I am out of my main office for whatever reason I unhook said laptop from all the cables and it works off-site including all my development environment. If my stay away is extended (working for a month in ocean side cottage for example I also would take one of those monitors). I just do not run production servers/databases/etc on my laptop ;). Btw my laptop soon transitioning from 32GB RAM to 128GB RAM as to give me more flexibility with the databases.
Worth case I can still access my workstations/servers remotely using SSH or NOMACHINE if SSH does not cut it. Since I have very fat internet pip it works just fine.
That 'extreme example' weighs as much as many laptops and it's just a case. Even if you carried a small display, and everything else you need, I doubt most people would take that out if they found themselves with extra time at the airport.
Edit: Found the machine I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable
Edit: Especially with the rise of the Small form factor PC culture.
Small cases have gotten pretty nice but if you have to carry around a separate screen to go with it then you might not end up any better off than if you had an all-in-one luggable computer.
Your points are all good but this one gave me pause for thought. We're all working from home and using our microphones and cameras more than ever. I'm using my regular laptop with plug-in microphone and webcam. Are laptop makers thinking in terms of upping the specs on the microphone and webcams in their upcoming models?
In any case, because of all my remote collaboration these days, I bought a decent mike on a boom to use, and my colleagues say it is much better. Still have to find a decent camera.
Ideally you want a camera that does clean HDMI out (no ISO indicators etc), but even that can be worked around if you run OBS studio and crop it out.
Advice from my wife, a photographer:
- if you're still having picture problems (after setting the camera's anti-flicker to 50Hz/60Hz as appropriate), put diffuse illumination on your face e.g. a full-screen browser window on http://blank.org; or for more control--colour temperature as well as brightness--a cheap LED panel and desktop tripod (from a photo supplies shop).
- turn off any "smoothing" or "beauty"features in the cam's software.
- likewise, don't use any fake background features. Pin up a plain bedsheet behind yourself if you think your place is too messy to be the background.
Anyway, once there is a picture of any kind, in my experience most people care more about the audio being unclear or laggy, so you're well ahead.
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I feel like this is a bit much of an exaggeration. I just measured my Pixel 3 (at its thickest point, the camera lens) and a 2011 Macbook Pro (including the rubber bumper, admittedly, but those were super slim at the time), and the MBP is only ~2mm thinner than the Pixel. The race for ultra-thin laptops seems like a relatively recent thing to me.
I do agree with the other items, especially number 10. It's the one big thing I miss from having a desktop.
Desktop computing FTW.
This keeps most of the advantages (the processor is weaker on the smaller form factor thanks to the cooling requirements), while also keeping some size, mobility and power-saving benefits.
I got into this because I got tired of opening up the large cases, moving to a smaller form factor and external devices was much easier. I don't care for working on the move, and every place I'm likely to ever want to use the computer at will have spare monitors/keyboards/mice.
It was able to be angled for comfort, etc. So, you'd be able to put a desktop somewhere (above? below?) and use it from bed.
No idea if they're still sold, but it wouldn't be too surprising. :)
Laptops are for shallow work, not much else.
For you. I get all my work done a laptop and have been for a decade.
You can, until Apple integrates all the suppliers into their supply chain.
I migrated entirely off desktops and went laptop / mobile.
Got happy as my current work benefits from me being highly mobile. Super glad I did it. Ended up surprised at just how much can do with a Note type phone and optional keyboard / track pad.
But, I never did replace fast and responsive. Just kind of coped and the other benefits made the whole thing worth it.
This pandemic has me rethinking some things and yeah, I want to build a nice machine. Want that workstation type feel and performance.
The closed computing argument holds more water every quarter too.
What we need is a reasonable battery pack, and software to throttle the machine down on an interruption. Make this package a couple hundred bucks, or something a person can just load their own cells into and it's bound to be a winner.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Alienware-Area-51m-i9-9900K-RT...
Just as a PSA for others: Laser printers in particular draw too much inrush current through their fuser drum heater for surge protectors/UPS devices to handle. They (the printers) should be always connected directly to the wall.
Or are you just doing ssh work?
When I'm at my cabin with 10/2 Mbps internet it's like I'm at home, except when I forget myself and start watching YouTube, then I notice the reduced quality of the video (RDP selectively encodes fast-updating regions to lowish bitrate h264 or similar).
I even do my Teams stuff over RDP, bidir sound just works without fiddling.
Basically you can work on a laptop, unless it's a special extremely short term situation.
Upgrading stuff and costs are both really significant for personal use (which is why I am typing this from my home desktop), but if money is no object, I just get a desktop-replacement laptop.
I hate the whole "let's just make laptops like tablets" thing, where "like tablets" means "no ports."
I need ports for all kinds of stuff, including driving robotics and interfacing equipment. Which is also why having a laptop is nicer than a desktop. It's really great to have a built-in UPS and be able to move my office easily.
EDIT: Just checked, and it's easy to upgrade RAM or replace the battery, and I have room for a 2.5" hard drive and actually 2 NVMe SSDs (they make 8TB ones) plus an optional SIM card and a PIV card and SD card and the built-in camera and microphone array are really nice to have nowadays. But I do love desktops. You wouldn't think 10 USB ports is that important, but nowadays everything uses USB, so it's nice to have for pure convenience.
Out of curiosity, what do you use instead? I'm wondering what the best options are for workstation-type desktops.
If you do not need a strong graphics card you can always just get a weak one, with less energy usage. GT 1030 for example, though that's really weak, but it's also just a 30W card.
Or depending on the processor you need you can use the integrated graphics. The AMD Apus are pretty great, Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G - and there are new 4000 versions that can be be bought in kits or OEM machines. Intel has their own weaker integrated graphics on most of their processors, even their stronger units, for just office work strong enough.
If I'm running a multicore big job, the fan spins up and annoys me.
Only for consumer level ones. Higher end ones are "workstations" and can generally be specced from mid-range-consumer-level to almost-a-friggin-supercomputer-node. ;)
As a bonus, no RGB. :)
Examples:
* https://www.quietpc.com/sys-amd-workstation
* https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...
* https://www8.hp.com/us/en/workstations/desktops/index.html
I am pretty sure your computer has a microphone, because it most likely has a speaker.
I have only ever seen the hybrid mic/headphone ports on laptops and not desktop motherboards. They may exist, but I have yet to see one. Although I guess what matter is how the ports are actually wired.
Also just gave away the remaining one of two 24" NEC flat panels I bought 17years ago. It still works.
in case someone thinks I dunno how to write
13. I'd like to work on some spreadsheets from my couch.
Damn...guess I'll buy a laptop again.
Also every laptop has a different - stupid - keyboard layout.
Also when pressing Ctrl+F4 I use the outside of my hand to press Ctrl, then my index finger for F4. That means that the F4 key needs to be over or to the left of the #5 key, or else I can't reach.
This makes the whole keyboard lopsided, rendering the rightmost quarter completely useless. Don't get why they would do that.
Let the 15 people in the world who _need_ the numpad for data entry use an external one.
> 1. I like big, big monitors.
I've realized that I find it uncomfortable to use more than one screen, so I just use one 27″ 4K screen. But occasionally I open my laptop and put it on a stand to show some extra windows.
> 2. I prefer a full size keyboard.
My favorite keyboard is the older version of the Apple Wireless Keyboard powered by AA batteries. It feels really nice to type on it (maybe because I'm used to it.) I recently bought a brand new Apple keyboard because I thought it would be better (and I could recharge it over USB), but it's much worse.
> 3. I prefer a separate mouse.
I use an Apple trackpad, and I love it. I only go back to a mouse if I'm playing a game.
> 4. I prefer big freaking disk drives installed.
I have a 2 TB SSD, which is more than enough for me.
> 5. I put the desktop under my desk, and with a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, there is much less of a snarl on my desk.
I like to put my laptop on the desk, and I only plug in a single Thunderbolt 3 cable for charging, gigabit ethernet, and my monitor. I really love my CalDigit TS3 Plus dock [2].
It's really nice that I can unplug a single cable and take my laptop to any cafe or co-working space. (Before/after the pandemic.)
> 6. The desktop has an optical drive I still use.
I haven't used an optical drive for about 5 years, and I don't own any optical disks.
> 7. The desktop has lots of USB ports and they're all in use.
My dock has a lot of USB-A and USB-C ports, and it's in a very convenient location.
> 8. I can replace/alter parts of the machine without buying a new one.
That's a great point, and it's one of the major downsides of using an Apple laptop. I do have AppleCare, and Apple's support is really amazing.
> 9. Desktops are cheap.
That's very true! But I was using a 2012 MacBook for 8 years before I upgraded it, and I think I'll probably continue using my current laptop for another 8-10 years. It's expensive, but it's a very high quality machine and I think it will last for a very long time.
> 10. I can build what I want with parts from newegg. Premade powerful computers are always "gaming machines" and I don't want a gaming machine that comes with a graphics adapter that sounds like a 747 taking off.
I certainly can't do that for any kind of laptop (either Apple or other brands.)
> 11. I want an all-metal case because a machine caught fire once.
Nothing to worry about there
> Edit: 12. My desktop doesn't have a microphone or camera, so they cannot be surreptitiously turned on remotely.
MacBooks have a hardware light that turns on when the camera is active, and I haven't heard any reports about hackers being able to disable it. Although one disadvantage with the newest MacBook is that you can't attach a sliding camera cover anymore, because it will crack the screen when you close it.
The microphone can be surreptitiously turned on, but it's not something I'm too worried about.
Advantages of using a laptop :
- portability - I work as a consultant and I need to work on premises occasionally - if I had to switch between desktop/laptop it would be too cumbersome
- standalone when you need it - when I travel or am on vacation I usually need to do a few hours of work - I won't lug my full setup but I'm 100% ready on the go
- can develop for OSX/iOS with MBP
Disadvantages :
- thermals - I use a fully loaded 2018 i9 MBP and I have to undrvolt/disable turbo boost in office because the laptop hits full fan speed with a VM + IDE running and people start turning heads
- lower performance compared to desktop equivalent and especially compared to best available workstation
I'm hoping VS code and remote development setups (either running VSCode in the browser hosted on my desktop or remote tools) get sufficiently good that I can get a lightweight ARM Mac and then I SSH to my home workstation - feels like the ideal solution if the tooling gets there
Ideally Apple would push out a 2in1 with touch but they are set on pushing iOS for touch - which is just too limited for all intents and purposes. I would gladly buy a premium Lenovo 2in1 or some Ryzen 5xxx series ultra portable windows laptop (they are much better on thermals from what I've seen) but I still need a OSX client from time to time unfortunately. There's just no flexibility with Apple ecosystem - you either fit into their intended use cases or you're stuck with suboptimal tradeoffs.
I'd like to be more client-server these days too, using whatever device is convenient at the time but storing my data centrally so all my devices can access it, it's all systematically secured and backed up, I can also access it remotely via VPN, etc.
The key thing, though, is that I want it to be my server, not someone else's that I don't control and have to keep paying for.
My laptop only runs Office 365 for email, calendar, and the occasional word doc. It also runs Slack and a browser for zoom meetings as access to Jira/Bugzilla web interface.
Oh, and RDP into XFCE on Ubuntu on the desktop that runs as a server.
Plus the server is cabled up to development platforms (serial ports, remote power, GPIO, JTAG, USB). So it cannot move, and even if it were a laptop, it could not move.
I don't require the laptop to be upgradeable or powerful, it is just the UI into the rest of the system.
It currently sits here with the lid closed cabled to a 27 inch display.
In the Windows land the only hope seems to be AMD while Apple has me hoping for the A14 performance.
Check out iStat, it gives you the ability to set a fan curve and that has helped quite a bit with my laptops Thermals. I found the highest rpm I could run without hearing the fans and set the two lowest points in the curve to keep it at/under that point and I almost never hear my fans anymore. Only time I really hear them now is when something is compiling and even then it's much more bearable since I keep the highest rpm limited to 80/85%.
In my case a mouse slows me down. I have to take my hands off the keyboard and reach for the mouse. The touchpad is right there where my hands are. My touchpad also have three physical buttons, which are very useful instead of tapping the touchpad (I disabled that.)
I really need a mouse only for playing (which I stopped doing on my laptop since many years ago) or to try out some very rare sites linked to HN. It doesn't happen every year.
This is probably the only ergonomics pro of a laptop (except that I carry it with me, of course). Just in case I'll need a separate keyboard again, does anybody know of a good full size one with a touchpad under the space bar and physical buttons? I googled and found many keyboards with a touchpad in place of the number pad or further to the right. By the way, the number pad is not important for me. I'd love not to have it on my 15" laptop. I can keep it there on an external keyboard, but it's extra travel for my right hand if I really have to use a mouse and I never use it anyway.
You can connect an external display to your laptop. That's what I'm doing right now. Similarly for 2 through 6.
> 7. The desktop has lots of USB ports and they're all in use.
The external monitor will give you more.
I think reasons 8, 9, and 10 are all legit. I don't think there are any intrinsic benefits to going one way or the other. It all boils down whether you feel the time you spend building your rig is worth the money you save.
It takes less than an hour. I enjoy it, and it keeps me familiar with the guts.
Most of the hour is just being careful I'm hooking up the wires correctly. In college I worked as an electronics technician, and one job was putting together a stack of Heathkit serial interface cards. I don't recall the exact times, but the first one took me an hour and the 5th one maybe 10 minutes.
It's also like taking the cylinder heads off my old Mustang V8. The first time took me 2 hours. The third time - 20 minutes. It's all in being familiar with just what to do, and having all the right tools ready.
1. Not thaaat big, but I prefer sub-4k anyway: WQXGA support, with docking station more than one - check
2. External keyboard - check
3. Check
4. Two M2 1TB Samsung + one 500GB SATA + optional external drives of similar sizes. More than enough
5. Admitted, docking station for some cases and connections.
6. Not anymore, USB bootable devices for the rare occasion. Other former reasons are more or less obsolete for my causes.
7. Docking station again
8. Lenovos are not so bad in this respect too
9. This one was > 2000EU - but will last several years as its ancestors did too ...
12. A piece of duct tape solves all camera problems
I am a consultant, the necessity for traveling around was partly responsible for the original choice, but even today I'm not missing much. I have still NAS-es with even bigger drives and DIY desktops and rack-based servers for image processing (requiring multiple GPU's). But thats me and my area of work. For most things, the laptop ist quite sufficient.
You can buy fairly powerful desktops configured with just the on chip graphics or inexpensive business class graphics cards.
I'll add a '13' to your list.
13. Bluetooth is evil, and any desktop I have seen with Bluetooth had it on a mini-pcie card, and could be yanked. My desktop is always cabled via 1Gb Ethernet, so if yanking the BT also loses the WiFi, I don't really care.
If you are using wireless keyboards/mice, I don't know if the logitech adapters are more or less secure than BT. That could be an entire separate thread.
1. M.2 cards
2. Full-size PCIe cards (WiFi+Bluetooth combo cards, the Bluetooth part may actually connect to an internal USB header)
3. USB dongles
4. The size of the drive isn't an issue; you can fit big drives just as easily in a laptop. The only difference is that a desktop PC can fit more than two drives.
I've come to really like the convenience of being able to pick up my workstation and take it with me.
To me, there's only one really, really big disadvantage to laptops: the noise. If I put together a desktop, it's as quiet as possible. Powerful laptops apparently can't be quiet.
This quote suggest to me the author is an integral part of the problem.
Companies are ALWAYS trying to increase their profitability. If they can lock down the computer, they can drop the price while _increasing_ CLTV.
That’s why System76 is more expensive. They’re NOT overpriced. They’re priced as “general purpose computers” must be to be competitive.
I agree with this author, but this suggests that the strength of his conviction is maybe $400.
Are these laptops more expensive than a similarly spec'd mainstream alternative? Yes. However, as is the point of the article, you're really not buying the laptop for the specs.
Unfortunately, the desire for open source being rather niche, these companies do not benefit from the economies of scale a mainstream brand enjoys. AND these companies are not positioning themselves to profit from their customers recurringly through cloud memberships, app stores, microtransactions, and the likes.
They're distracting people from the real problem, and doing so is harmful.
I doubt that.
You confirmed this how?
> Read their site, they go into the details there.
Debunked. The HAP bit doesn't do what they think it does:
Compute Cores are fine, so the CPU still works.
I forget what all of the main players are right now, but I know I’ve read on at least 2 of these types of open hardware companies’ sites how they scrub the intel ME all but completely out of the machine. That’s kind of the whole point, and they advertise that pretty conspicuously in their marketing.
If I didn’t start using a (17”, 3lb!) LG Gram laptop right around the time before I learned about open firmware, I would probably use a system76 laptop. For right now, the LG is just so damn light for that huge beautiful screen.....i’ve ruined myself and can’t switch to anything else until further notice unless another manufacturer makes a similarly ridiculous screensize:weight-ratio’d laptop lol (pine, purism, s76...you listening?)
Other than that, it meets all the Free source and ergonomic thin laptop requirements for $200.
My ideal setup is something like that as a client, and a bunch of high end machines located far away from my desk.
How much? I bet it's not much.
> That’s why System76 is more expensive. They’re NOT overpriced. They’re priced as “general purpose computers” must be to be competitive.
They're so much more expensive because they're niche. Not because of anything inherent to the product or producing it.
So "overpriced" sounds fair to me.
> I agree with this author, but this suggests that the strength of his conviction is maybe $400.
Is that not enough? If you can spread the word enough, and get enough people that are willing to spend $50 extra, you'll find plenty of companies begging for that money. The profit margin for building computers is bad.
At home, though, I do run a slightly modified old Dell desktop that I bought on Craigslist for basically nothing, and for daily work I much much prefer it to any laptop. So yeah, old desktops and S76 FTW.
I really want to want a System76 laptop, but I just can't bring myself to get one because of the 16:9 screens [1].
[1] 16:9 screens are another one of the computing marketplace's shitty regressions over the last decade. General purpose computers should have 16:10 or 3:2 screens, but unfortunately the number of models that have one is very small.
Additionally, like you said, for text, you ideally want windows with portrait aspect ratios - but if you split a fullHD 16:9 screen in two, your portrait windows only have 960 pixels of horizontal resolution which is not enough for many IDEs (or e-mail clients or spreadsheets).
On a 28 inch 4K screen 16:9 is not a problem - you can have 3 long vertical text windows next to each other, or ultra-wide spreadsheets, or a combination thereof. On a 13 inch laptop screen it is a different story.
One is they don't get the volume.
Second is they don't get kickbacks for bundling an operating system, or other software or make a profit collecting data. This is probably $50 per machine.
That said, sure making your own desktop is also an option.
Latest gen AMD motherboard with strong power delivery, 32gb of blistering fast memory (3600/16), 12/24 core Ryzen CPU @ 4.4ghz all core (1.27vcore loaded; 1.3v idle), PCIE4 NVME storage - 1kw platinum PSU, 360mm AIO CPU cooling (one DYI was enough..), a great case with terrific airflow (Define 7 Dark TG, Corsair ML140 fans) - overall it's a bloody ripper of a (gaming#) workstation. 7731 CineBench 2.0 score.
Absolutely love working on it. I have four monitors - 4th above the middle one on my custom aluminum profile. MKB & mouse, studio lighting.
I run Win10, but all my work is through WSL2/Ubuntu/MS Terminal. I happen to really like this combo - and it's my computer, so my choice.
#) Everything's new this year - I renew every 5 years or so, and son gets my old. Am however using an old 1080TI and holding off on the GPU until well into 2021, due to current market craziness and to be able to see the size of AMD's rabbit. Oh and my Soundblaster ZXR stayed too; love the wired audio I'm getting from this!
I'm still running an i7 6700. Initially it was one of the fastest components in my system, but has become the bottleneck as I've upgraded the parts around it (added a discrete gpu and nvme ssd, affecting the bottleneck for gaming and compiling, respectively). But honestly, it's still good enough most of the time, and I'm in no hurry to replace it.
Also/especially, while the initial build is not that much cheaper, the cost over time is — both the longer expected lifetime of the parts and the ability to upgrade piecemeal instead of replacing the whole thing.
Mainstream manufacturers have to deal with consumers who know nothing about computers. They expect full support. They will also follow directions on any website without knowing what they're doing, and mess things up. The move to lock down computers isn't really a Big Brother conspiracy to prevent us from doing things on our computers that The Man doesn't want us to. It's a safety measure to stop inexperienced users bricking their machines and demanding support fix it.
Purism (and others) sell "overpriced" computers to people who know what we're doing. When I had a problem on my Purism laptop, they told me to unscrew the back and check the connections. That's not something that Dell can do with their customers.
I think they'll always stay "overpriced", partly because we're happy paying for the extra freedom. And partly so that they don't become mainstream and end up with a huge support overhead.
Given that the author's demands are being met, exactly, by Purism (etc), then I don't think he gets to complain that it's "too expensive" - that's not how markets work. You have a niche need, you pay a niche price. Stop with the Big Brother conspiracy theories and pay the extra cash to get the specific thing you want.
I'm yet to find a decent laptop in this range that's max 14.5"@min 1440p (I don't even need 4k!) and support for 24GB RAM.
Librem 14 is not even launched yet and only has a 1080p option.
Correction: Has Ended. The vast majority of people using computers has shifted to phones and tablets. I have a friend who's a millenial who barely knows how to use his desktop PC (It's a Mac) but is fluent on his iPad/iPhone.
Most people are not content creators, they are consumers. The people who are still building their own PC's are mostly enthusiasts. There's no profit in building custom PC's anymore, so local computer shops aren't selling them (And if they are, it's at a hefty premium).
The author of the article calls the 1980's the "Golden era" of personal computing. I disagree. Networked computing is an amazing thing, but it's also been monetized and now the consumers are the product being sold. And happily so. The outliers are those who buy pre-2012 computers so they can skip UEFI and are happy to live under their rocks to do it. That's okay with me.
Personally I need a faster computer than that, so I'm stuck with UEFI and because W10 is the right OS for my needs, I'm stuck with it phoning home. This doesn't mean the golden age was in the 80's or 90's. It means that by the time we figured out how to make computing awesome, we also figured out how to make computing itself profitable, not just the computers. The golden age the could have been, never was.
Now granted I’ve rooted every phone I’ve had since the HTC Incredible, and I always check XDA forums before buying a new one to see if there’s a decent development community. And in recent years there has been a SHARP drop in the % of manufacturers that even allow their bootloaders to be unlocked - I don’t think the last like 6 samsung galaxy’s have ever been possible to do it. But there are still plenty, I’ve managed to find a kickass flagship model every year or 2 years and upgrade through at least 2 or 3 versions of android (I always buy last- or last-last-gen models used for <$200 so they’re typically a bit out of date already).
I couldn’t imagine any other way honestly. I absolutely love rooting & flashing custom roms, and it’s kept all my phones practically as young and snappy as the day they originally released...or better
You can also run mainline linux on the Nexus 7 2012 but you lose wifi support.
Most alternative OSs just use the patched kernel that shipped with the device.
If Linux didn't already exist it would never have been possible to create since all computing platforms are getting more and more locked down.
For people who actually care, I think the concerns are overblown and we'll always have access to a machine that can run open software.
And yes sure, we might not be able to pay consumer prices for them, but they are not going anywhere.
And sure, we might elect a fascist government which will simply ban the technology, or the west will go to war with China making it very difficult to manufacture anything. Unlikely.
What makes you so sure the restrictions will stop somewhere you're comfortable with? What happens when unlocked machines are only available to "enterprise" (not unlike a certain Windows version), and you have to agree to audits when buying them? What chance do free operating systems stand, when 99% of users don't even have access to computers that could run them?
We need not worry as long as somewhere, in some dark basement, a sysadmin is able to assemble an unlocked personal computer from his company's old hardware?
Right now, today, it has never been easier to just go down to the local mall and buy a general purpose computer, and sure, there are lots of phones, tablets, and consoles on display as well, but there is no less computers as a result.
I don't know why do you think it would? Both software and hardware-side, there's no end of complaints that power users are being left behind. All the money is in making Fisher-Price software for the masses. Ain't nobody have time to cater for ergonomics or efficiency in computing, it's only a distraction from milking the general population.
This, to me, is a clear example of the market underserving a customer segment.
The more worrying thing IMHO is that the software to make use of that hardware is becoming increasingly polarised between what's aiming for big businesses and what's aiming for consumer drones.
The thing that gives me some hope is that the geeks all those businesses rely on to build the software that makes them billions are almost all in the "lost middle" and, given enough time and inclination, are quite capable of creating open software to destroy those businesses.
Sure, I'm as annoyed as you and the author about UEFI, but as long as I can install an OSS bootloader and launch whatever I want, I'm good. It may be a pain, but the tinkering capability is still there. If it wasn't possible to tinker with it, less people would buy that laptop.
Having closed hardware is a problem and it definitely doesn't make me feel safe. We may all be full of NSA backdoors, but to be honest I don't care much about it and I assume a large part of the tech knowledgeable feel the same way. I suspect this is why Open Hardware is not more prevalent in the market: not enough interest.
I don't care about computer companies making more user friendly devices; we can find a way to hack whatever or just start buying laptop parts from China and make our own laptops. What worries me is if the government will decide to ban cryptography or introduce regulations that force me to change how I tinker with my computer.
Sure, there are some spercific form factors that I would love to have that are not available or very rare. I really want to replace my iPad with something that runs linux, for example.
All I'm arguing is that, I don't believe that in my lifetime, or the foreseeable future, will there ever be a time where I can't reasonably easily get some kind of desktop computer and run whatever code I want on it. (Unless those computers literately become illegal - like some code already is)
I might not be able to carry it in my pocket, or wear it on my face, and it might not have some holographic interface that has not yet been invented yet.
I'm also not saying we should ignore the the fight for general purpose machines, and I will continue to vote with my wallet, as well as lobby to have laws that opening our machines.
I think its a disgrace that Apple no longer supports my iPad witch functions perfectly well, but I can't install anything on anymore.
Society would be much better if all our phones were open, I just don't think we need to freak out about desktop computers disappearing.
The percentage of unlocked computers for consumers has been falling. Consoles, tablets, smartphones (all iPhones and many Androids don't allow rooting), smart TVs... even some laptops. Surface RT laptops had locked secure boot, and Chromebooks made it very difficult to install alternative OSes, as far as I know.
As for the incentives of the "open market", there's profit in locking down devices, and selling you back fragments of that locked functionality. For example, nvidia pushed an EULA that forbade using their consumer GPUs in datacenters, making them buy the far more expensive enterprise versions.
With how markets tend towards oligopolies and monopolies, there's no guarantee the handful of manufacturers left won't conspire to put restrictions on all computers. Especially if 95% of consumers don't care about being able to run gcc.
These regulations can easily outlaw general-purpose computing on the same grounds of being too dangerous for the society. I can remind you how encryption algorithms were considered "munitions" back in 1990s, less than 30 years ago. At that time one would possibly say that it will always be possible to bring a small bottle of water onboard of an airplane. Betting on things always being "naturally" available, without a conscious effort to sustain them, is a fraught enterprise.
If we continue to give power to right wing extremists, all bets are off.
The way to stop this is through legislation and protest, but it's a battle because the state likes locked down computers too.
Before social media, the average person had little to no interest in the internet - or PCs in general - aside from email and instant messaging apps. The internet has changed, but it's 99.9% because more people are using it, and their interests and needs are best served by 'it just works'.
This change, along with progress in general, has also made life better for technical folks. General purpose computing is dead? Come on. Desktop Linux actually works. Municipal fiber is a thing. Capable enterprise hardware is available online for less than a second hand iPhone, and if you don't have a couple of hundred to spend, a VPS costs less than a hamburger.
I don’t think this is true at all, everybody that has a Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / YouTube / TikTok account is a content creator. There’s a reason the term “browsing the web” has died out, it’s not about passive consumption anymore.
Writing code is just about the only thing you can’t do on an iPad. And while I think we can all agree on HN that having a gateway to programming is super important, you can’t expect most people to care.
Typed on my iPhone. In bed.
All the fora you mention are characterized by lack of longform text. What people are creating today tends to be image-heavy and eschew any long argumentation or prose storytelling.
Having just a smartphone obviously represents a limitation. For example, I am a member of some niche travel communities. A decade ago, when it was common for people to lug a laptop, there was a healthier community of people writing detailed blog posts on certain destinations, editing Wikivoyage or Hitchwiki, etc. Now that those same travelers are leaving the laptop at home and traveling only with a phone where it is inconvenient to enter much text, the ecosystem of travel resources is actually poorer than it was in the past.
Swift playgrounds will actually run quite large codebases with a little fiddling around.
You can trivially get a robust Linux command line with Blink and a free tier Google compute instance.
I agree there is no XCode.
This is in contrast to almost anything else you might care to do on a computer, where the iPad equivalent ranges from "basically fine" to "actually better".
But people's perceptions are lagging a few years behind where the platform is at. That's normal.
I didn’t make the distinction between writing code and writing software but I guess it’s an important one.
I think you’d be surprised how close swift playgrounds has become.
All it really needs is a project navigation UI, and it will be good enough for building pure Swift/SwiftUI apps.
That's where it's going to go, the security situation is not getting better. You already see it in a lot of political organizations where many of the workers get by with chromebooks. And for joe schmo, that's FINE.
This worries me not because of any open computing concerns, but because of how FUNDAMENTAL general purpose computers are to nearly every decent paying professional job out there. All of them. No one daily drives Excel or Salesforce One or edits video or codes websites or balances accounts in Quickbooks on an iPad. Literally no one; we're decades away from that being mainstream, if it ever happens.
Everyone needs to be computer literate. Being a wiz on your iPhone or iPad does not, in any sense of the word, make you computer literate. Kids growing up with these closed-off devices quite literally destroys the fire of desire for learning how computers work, or even accidentally gaining a glancing knowledge with them enough to hold a good office office job.
Companies like Apple endlessly mouth their desire to get more kids to code, then their arms release devices so closed off that even trying to take a quick peek at how they work triggers eighteen system integrity protection alarms. You can't have it both ways, Apple.
Well, whatever. I don't really care. It just means more ultra high paying jobs for me. Apple (and Google, and to a lesser degree Microsoft) are literally actively sabotaging their own talent pool, guaranteeing that they'll never be able to hire enough people while paying the ones they do hire a ton of money.
Apple C-Suites: "We want kids to code."
Apple Ads: "What's a computer?"
Whilst it might be me, somebody somewhere doesn't understand something.
If you think of it as a firewall around knowledge, it's basically like this set of rules:
Deny: all
Allow: <specific group>How does limiting the supply of technicians lower their wages? Is it because Apple is limiting their own supply of available technicians? Why can't a given technician go elsewhere -- is that because the "don't poach treaty" never stopped or something else?
I edit 4k video on my iPad, edit pictures, memes, do a bit of drawing with Procreate. I'm by no means professional at any of these things, but it isn't the tools holding me back.
I don't see any reason not to use Excel or Numbers or what have you on an iPad with the keyboard. I'm sure it would work fine.
I know a couple professional music producers who do the bulk of their work on a tablet now.
What hasn't made it to tablets is coding environments. Codea and Swift Playgrounds feel like toys to me.
But it's only a matter of time. I think "decades, if it ever happens" is entirely too pessimistic, it's more "now, if you want it", for most of those things.
And it's definitely not "literally no one". It's more people than you think.
If it were possible to multitask Excel or Word in Android, that's probably what I would be using right now for a lot of my basic workflow.
We look through rose colored glasses because, back then, we were able to use Excel, Word, (insert your program of choice). The people in our social circle were also able to use them. However, this was almost entirely because of who we hung out with.
The shift to closed devices (may) eventually have an effect on hobbyists, in the same way that the average person no longer knows how to change the oil in their car, but for now there's little evidence that iPhones and tablets are limiting the number of young, competent programmers (or even the number of IT hobbyists in general).
I think the author would have better phrased his comment: "What worries me as much as the end of general-purpose computing for hobbyists and hackers is that so few seem to understand that it is ending." reply
> Correction: Has Ended.
I guess I have a different definition of "General Purpose Computing" than you or the author, because personally I see the iPhone and iPad as the beginning of general purpose computing for the masses. The traditional PC was computing for the elite/ computer experts.
This romanticism of 80s computing as the golden age completely mystifies me. The 80s/ 90s were a phenomenally fun time for geeks like me/ us. For everyone else, a PC was a thing you had to learn a bunch of esoteric bullshit to use.
"For the masses", the iPhone, Android, and the iPad are far more interesting and useful.
Even if you look at more specific PC style computing, most people don't care about whether their bios is locked or not.
PC is better for long text. Phones are better for photo / media. Both have pros and cons.
There's also the platform. A lot of phone content ends up siloed into auto-suggesting apps, where click-bait (touch-bait?) tends to just overrun people.
People can now sit for hours just swiping on auto-suggested content. The same can be true for text (see clickbait) but you'd tend to access that through a web browser, where you're just a tab away from something actually useful.
And using locked-down devices will condemn them to that for the term of their natural lives.
But actually I disagree. At different stages in their lives, people do different things. Make music. take photos, and wonder why they suck. Make family trees. Various hobbies, that require working with multiple bits of sotware on on multiple projects.
Take electronics. It's a hobby. It's nuts to use apps that each store their data in their own sandbox. One app to draw a schematic diagram, another app to plan the hardware layout, another app to record calibrations and test results, another for photos--and other apps to record the project goals and plans, and the lessons learned.
If I couldn't use a general purpose computer and store all of these files (and others, such as manufacturers' datasheets for critical components) in a single folder for each project (not part in one app, and another bit in aonther app, and so on), I'd be using paper, a drawing board and a filing cabinet.
Most (all) shops I have seen will sell you custom PCs for the price of the components. Unless you are talking about Entreprise ones (not sure if they do exist), most of these cater for gamers who are price-sensitive. But the components are the same, and you can pick an aluminum case instead of the RGB ones.
Even your example describes someone who, while he isn't fluent with it, actually owns a general purpose computer.
- Most computers' UEFI firmware, desktop or laptop, allows you to install your own keys.
- And every computer I've ever heard of with UEFI will allow you to disable secure boot.
- Linux runs just fine on UEFI.
I'm worried about a lot of the trends in laptops and smartphones, but I'm not yet worried about UEFI.
>All x86-based Certified For Windows 10 PCs must meet several requirements related to Secure Boot:
> - They must have Secure Boot enabled by default.
> - They must trust Microsoft’s certificate (and thus any bootloader Microsoft has signed).
> - They must allow the user to configure Secure Boot to trust other bootloaders.
> - They must allow the user to completely disable Secure Boot.
The last two points in particular. It's been this way since SB was introduced.
Note that this requirement does not apply to non-x86 devices. In particular, ARM devices (Windows RT) are explicitly required to disallow SB from being disabled, to meet the certification requirement.
This one in particular always pissed me off, and I'm glad it only applies to pre-built machines that come with Windows 10 preinstalled. If the individual motherboard makers ever decide they need to be "certified for Windows 10" and start auto-trusting a certificate for closed-source commercial software, I'm left with no choice but to either stick with my "old" (not really that old) hardware or switch to another platform like POWER9.
My Ryzen board trusted Microsoft out of the box, it has to if they want to pass Windows logo certification. You can check yours here: https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/dashboard/hardware/searc...
That's the entirety of my complaint.
Thanks for the link! My board is not on it as I assumed.
Sure, they're loaded by default, and you can argue that we can't prove the board isn't gonna trust them behind your back -- but that applies to older non-open hardware too.
My bigger annoyance is Intel Boot Guard. I want Intel to let us control the firmware more directly -- even if it requires some physical authorization/kills some DRM component in ME or something. But that's not happening anytime soon...
The requirements mentioned by grandparent are for setup where without any extra configuration you can approach a computer with Windows 10 install media and it will install properly.
You can do this on any x86/x86_64 hardware made in the past 15 years. Whether your machine has a traditional BIOS, UEFI with SecureBoot off, or UEFI with SecureBoot on, Windows 10 will install with zero complaints.
You only get to be "certified by Microsoft" if you follow all of their rules, but you don't have to be certified to install Windows 10 (yet).
It also covers "will work as advertised", i.e. certain features will operate properly. And secured boot path is, indeed, one of such features.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/informatio...
From 2012 until present, computers have been produced that run any EFI binary you want. Why not buy one of those? It's no different than sticking with pre-2012 machines, except you aren't attached to cruft from the 1980s anymore.
So I was a bit confused when I read the OP.
It is true that the billion-dollar media companies have decided a subscription model is more lucrative than a one-time-purchase model for the mass-market content they produce (movies, TV shows, music, etc.).
But also unlike the author, I don't think my ability to consume mass-market media on my own terms is a moral imperative or has much bearing on my overall freedom. If Warner Brothers doesn't want to sell me a copy of Transformers 43 that I can play with VLC, I don't see that as much of a threat to anything I care about.
With the kid, I want to get a motherboard, power supply, RAM and disk and build it all up to a prompt.
Then do Linux From Scratch on it.
Not practical for daily usage, but invaluable for teaching what is at stake with the stack.
The question is how much of that is thanks to this kind of article appearing for the past thirty years.
It's kind of like saying Y2K wasn't a problem: it would have been a problem if we hadn't prepared for it.
We got awfully close though. Had Linux not been popular enough back when UEFI SecureBoot started being adopted, Microsoft would require x86 UEFI motherboards to not allow the user to install their own keys, like they did with ARM UEFI (https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2012/jan/12/microsoft-c...).
Microsoft has enough clients that require custom keying that for them, locking it down would be a financial downside without Linux being in the scope.
The percentage of “open” devices has been trending downward.
I'll give you a computer with the following:
* 256GB of solid-state storage
* 6 CPUs @ 3+GHz
* 8GB of RAM
* Weighs only 200 grams
* Battery-powered, lasts 5+ hours
* 1440 x 3168 resolution display
I would have been absolutely gobsmacked. Such a machine absolutely outclasses every desktop up into the early 2010s!
And then you would tell me that it's mostly used to shitpost on reddit and Twitter and would be completely useless as a development machine, and the manufactures would do everything to make it impossible to put what software I want on it...and also it would spy on me everywhere I went in order to sell me garbage...
We took a wrong turn somewhere, didn't we?
It's also a trade off between installing what software you want and security - the App store means you don't have to worry about (certain kinds) of maliciousness from software you install.
I just think it's a little bit of a spicy take saying mobile devices "don't deliver" when they are most successful form of computing in history by a large margin. I would argue this is for a reason and they provide enormous value.
Of course, you need an OS that supports that and provides a proper desktop-like experience.
I'm not surprised Apple doesn't have something like this as it would probably cannibalize their Macbook sales.
My point is that they have incredible computational power that is often wasted on pretty graphics and other nonessentials. Pretty much all communication/text apps (except video) could easily run on a device spec'd far lower. The web is ridiculously bloated and full of ads and crapware. Just rendering pages of decent-looking text shouldn't take so much power. Even manipulating maps for navigation is mostly a 2d graphics scaling problem that can't possibly require that much horsepower.
But yes, my point about development does pretty much rely on having an external keyboard and mouse.
Here's a pic of the logic board of an iPhone 11: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/UNjifVHATsvaagZB.f...
The miniaturization of tech is absolutely astounding to me, even today. We're pretty unappreciative and wasteful, IMHO. 20 year old me would have been absolutely astounded that that much power was packed in that tiny space, and yet what it delivers is just marginally prettier and not more usable than back then.
That said, they're not so hard to dev on. You can unlocked bootloader Androids fairly easily.
I have an old PSP (PlayStation Portable) and whenever I turn it on I'm amazed at how fast and lag-free it is. This probably proves that the problem is most likely the software, not the hardware.
You have the opportunity to be able to know exactly how all of your customers will run it and you have a good chance of having the extra $ to actually give a damn about performance.
Frameworks piled on frameworks to make things 5% faster to develop, combined with a general tendency for software developers to not optimize anything until someone complains.
Two aspects are important to keep in mind for a decision of this kind:
This machine is going to be your primary professional tool for the next several years - do you really care about a few hundred dollars extra? Especially if you have niche-requirements (read: non mass-market) like strong Linux desktop support and deep concern for privacy / security?
Sure - you could do the research and build yourself and pay less for the parts - but if you consider your time at market rates, are you really making a financially smart decision by not paying a small premium on the price of constituent parts?
Of course, I am aware of the excitement that can be associated with creating a custom build - if you are into that sort of thing: enjoy it as a hobby project, not because it is a better deal.
Humans seem to have a hard time taking costs into account that are not easily quantified.
Not sure I've ever seen anyone wanting secure boot. what is it actually good for aside from generating searches for Google when you have to figure out how to circumvent it?
I also really like the capsule firmware update mechanism, I’ve been able to use fwupdmgr to keep all of my devices firmware up to date, from Linux, without freeDOS or windows foolery. Additionally, the Dell UEFI BIOS supports booting right to the firmware update cab or exe, further strengthening the utility of a Linux-only install.
With UEFI I can set up my own boot entries and boot directly into whichever Linux kernel I like with whatever arguments I like. I can write a script that easily boots me into another OS exactly once. And it's a delight to not have to think about traditional bootloaders anymore.
I tend to side with others in the thread that the "end of general purpose computing" isn't a result of manufacturers pushing in a direction but rather following consumers. The percentage of computer scientists, programmers, and enthusiasts that consider the openness of their hardware a deal breaker grow smaller each year. For the rest of the population, they can find something that's general enough for their use cases.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for opening hardware up and making it transparent. But until we as general consumers (not just the fine folks of Hacker News) care enough to let that sway our buying decisions, this trend is going to continue.
There will always be general hardware. It's just going to get more expensive.
This is an even stronger claim than that consumers don't care if their hardware is closed. Consumers aren't begging for their hardware to be closed, and companies aren't passively trying to please them. The vast majority of consumers don't care if their hardware is closed until they discover something that their hardware is capable of doing that they're not allowed to do with it or something that their hardware is doing that they're not allowed to keep it from doing. Companies close as much as they can while trying not to upset consumers enough that they leave or complain to the government - which means either that they have to find ways to 1) add or limit functionality in a closed way, or that 2) they have to get all competitors to agree to prevent or allow the same things (to eliminate alternatives), or 3) they have to advocate a POV (and lobby for it in government) that whatever functionality is missing or required is dangerous to add or remove.
This is following consumers in a way; like building a wall behind them every time they move in a particular direction could be considered following them.
Of course, Android malware exists too. But Google's approval process, application sandboxing and the ability to remotely remove applications after they're found to be malicious makes it a much smaller problem. It's not something consumers cheer about, but rather something we mostly don't think about when using phones and tablets.
I don't think the assumption that processing power is decreasing and all devices are becoming dumb terminals is true, either. Moore's law... Look at the new chips released by AMD and Intel. Look at CPU benchmarks: the more recent chips blow older generations out the water... and there's no conspiracy to keep these advancements out of consumer's hands. Anyone is free to buy a server rack and build a small super computer (should they have the cash.)
What this article raises that I agree with is the complaint that many chips contain proprietary blobs that can't be inspected or removed. Unfortunately, technology like this is how companies try protect trade secrets. It's definitely not ideal, and backdoors + security flaws have been found in these areas in the past. I think if you're concerned about such flaws you really have to ask yourself whether you need to protect government-secrets... or whether your laptop is just going to contain your shopping list and other mundane data. Once you decide what type of data you're going to be working with. You can decide on an appropriate security strategy.
I doubt it makes sense for most people to stick to decades old hardware to avoid the possibility of having someone exploit (and risk revealing what would probably be worth millions on the black market) something in their firmware or microcode.
Thought the same when skimming the post. Creators, streamers, AI folks, Kagglers, gamers, some crypto devs, all have a desktop, mainly because of nvidia GPUs. This isn't news for them for probably a decade.
Anyone who consciously thought desktops were a good idea to move away from in the above case made an initial, much bigger mistake. (Again presuming it was a general lifestyle choice and not some necessity.)
It's as simple as answering the following question:
Would you rather have a) a tiny monitor with a bunch of expensive fragile dying-to-have-coffee-spilled-on-it shit jutting way out at you in the horizontal, always at a weird angle or too low or b) a couple of big beautiful monitors and loads of desk space? If you think you can have both, you're probably wrong. Even a nice dock setup requires you to do things like install brackets under the desk to shove your laptop in to, and disable its monitor lest it become a weird bastard screen full of junk you have no intention of looking at.
All the docks and laptop stands and extra monitors in the world can't solve the problem that laptops are broadly speaking, unpleasant to use. I think the only times I've actually been grateful to have my expensive and pretty laptop, are during power outs - watching netflix in bed. Though the whole setup is reliant on a well practiced construction of pillows and an external bluetooth speaker because no laptop has ever been made with speakers worth the power they draw.
If you can even remotely get away with not using one, don't use one.
Also for whatever reason the desktop screen market doesn't know about retina style high ppi displays. It's a shame, same with dropping 16:10.
I don't think desktops require retina displays. There are an endless selection of big, bright, high refresh rate, high resolution, and cheap monitors to choose from.
Macbooks max out at 16 inches. Retina displays are (a good) attempt at trying to make laptops more viable for long use, but still they fall short of even the cheapest 4k decent nitts desktop monitor. They haven't adapted the tech, because it's not needed. The same pressures of selection aren't present.
The biggest font and text clarity nerd that I am aware of agrees on the matter, and makes some sensible suggestion and gives reasoning here: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/
Ignorant nonsense.
UEFI, while overengineered, allows for a computer-OS to tell the firmware how to cleanly boot it, so you can have several OSes installed in parallel without anyone stepping on anyone else’s toes.
Basically it simply and cleanly solves the dreaded and always unreliable dual/multi-boot situation which almost exclusively Linux users have had to endure, with Windows update accidentally overwriting their bootloader every now and then.
But who complains about UEFI and the solutions it brings and clings to legacy BIOS boot with all its warts and complications? Yup. Linux-users who are so politically opposed to UEFI that they cannot bother looking into the actual technology to see if their political opposition is warranted at all. Talk about FUD, eh.
It’s a sad sight. And I say that as a happy (UEFI booting) 100% Linux desktop-user.
The amount of people asking if they can upgrade the CPU, GPU, SSD/HDD or memory in their new-ish laptops is disheartening. Most of the questions concerns the CPU og GPU where the answer is no 99.99% of the time these days. 90% of consumer grade laptops have the RAM soldered to the mainboard too now. Luckily the HDD/SSD is usually replaceable or upgradeable in case of failure, performance problems or lack of free disk space... but for how long?
From a purely ecological standpoint, the laptop producers should be forced to buy back and recycle all their shitty unupgradeable, unrepairable, made-to-fail consumer electronics. It's a shameful situation we are in.
If societies can get 99% of glas and plastic bottles recycled using bottle deposit money, we should be able to reach the same figures for consumer electronics like laptops.
One thing that caught me off guard was the number of low end models with 4 GB of RAM and pricier models limited to 8 GB RAM. With Windows using nearly 2 GB on boot and a chunk being used for the GPU, that doesn't leave much for applications. Having a non-upgradable CPU is not a huge issue in my opinion, except the performance of low end models is astoundingly abysmal. I doubt that many of them could keep up with my 8 year old desktop, which was not a high end build at the time. Not only is the hardware disposable, in many cases it is intended to have a very short life.
Overall though, I would be happier if manufacturers were clear on what you are getting. While I do some real work on my laptop, I tend to offload most of my work onto a desktop. This means that I look for a handful of key features and don't care about the rest. Unfortunately, my last laptop purchasing experience was a nightmare. Researching a couple of laptops took more time than deciding upon parts for a desktop build and, of course, you have to look at more than a couple of laptops to find something that is acceptable in terms of features, performance, and price.
Meanwhile, the rest of us just want to get work done: my Arch Linux desktop that boots with UEFI is functionally identical to one that boots with BIOS. So.. really, who cares?
Seems like UEFI make sense, as it is agreed upon by all large vendors like Intel, Apple, MS.
It's a mechanism to lock down a computer to only run "trusted" OSes. Who gets to decide which OSes are trusted? Does Arch have lobbyists?
It's just one falling domino in a series of falling dominos, where maybe one day you don't get to run Arch anymore.
This stuff really can go either way. People were allowed to record TV using VCRs in the 90s. Ripping CD Audio onto hard disks? Dunno. Copying DVDs & Blu-ray onto hard disks? Definitely not. What about running software on a phone? Better "jailbreak" it.
> my Arch Linux desktop that boots with UEFI is functionally identical to one that boots with BIOS
Stallman agrees with you that you don't get anything from UEFI: "This is not a security feature. This is abuse of the users. I think it ought to be illegal."
He also made the claim, "Microsoft demands that ARM computers sold for Windows 8 be set up so that the user cannot change the keys; in other words, turn it into restricted boot."
Crazy?
> For logo-certified Windows RT 8.1 and Windows RT PCs, Secure Boot is required to be configured so that it cannot be disabled.
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
edit: Just thought of three more battles currently going on:
* Oculus headsets now require Facebook logins.
* youtube-dl just got blocked on GitHub
* Iranians and GitLab
Just like many other closed platforms of yore, or how in practice Macs of today work (their UEFI is, plainly, not to spec - a lot of hackintosh work is figuring out "what Apple did wrong this time")
Including approaching the booting of a computer as if it was still KA-10 and you were using RIM10B bootstrap loader.
When an article starts with a statement[1] like this I know I'm in for a whine-fest about how everything sucks now and we need to Make Computing Great Again.
What the author wants is a ThinkPad P Series or a Clevo clone. I don't know why the author is making the assumption that a more modular, utility-focused laptop or portable device doesn't exist. They absolutely exist. Just don't be mad that it's a niche and that other people who just want an appliance have different needs than you. Don't be mad that other people in the world aren't necessarily any more interested in computing than they are in fixing their car.
It's also entirely inaccurate to say that the 1980s was a freedom-loving general purpose heaven. In reality, users still bought into ecosystems and proprietary technologies, perhaps even more-so than today.
For example, remember when you had to worry about what format your floppy disk was formatted in? Remember when the same productivity program on a different platform had different save formats? Remember when different platforms had different ports and physical connections for things as simple as a mouse? It's not like Amigas and Commodores and Apple ]['s were just oozing interoperability with each other.
When you've set up your laptop to be ergonomic to use, it's as portable as a desktop, so that one thing it did well, it turns out, it couldn't even do that.
Laptops are portable, when you REALLY need to be able to compute at some different place than usual.
They're expensive and even then, still underspecced compared to desktops..
My desktop has 20 tib of storage and 64 gib ram, has a 5 ghz cpu and it runs silently most of the time, I can't even buy a laptop with those specs, if I could it'd be super expensive and noisy or frequency throttling.
This is unfortunately going away a bit, but I still have many more upgrade options for a desktop. Now everything is USB but with the right adapters, I can still use those weird ISA cards I've got hanging around, I can still read 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, and CDs and ZIP. (and yes, the "easy" way to read those disks is using a isa floppy controller on a USB to ISA adapter).
Also, I guess I just don't need to move around that much, but when I do, I have a second-hand I7 machine with 16 gib memory that runs linux off of an SSD reasonably well, if I need "performance".. If I only need connectivity, I'm using a this small blue HP StreamBook 11 that I bought for around $200 years ago, it also runs Linux well enough, but it's pretty much limited to running a terminal and ssh.
I do get a little nervous being without a computer when I'm on holiday 5-6 times a year, but in 25 years I've never actually had to do any emergency work while on holiday. I think the risk is very small.
If the day comes that I can't get a laptop that I can unfuck, I guess I'll just have to work in a remote desktop on a VM in one of the servers. I can always keep the laptop and devices from chattering through the routers. I do have a real fear that it might become hard to find routers that I can install OpenWrt on, or that OpenWrt might go the way of Firefox.
UEFI, properly implemented, is a huge improvement over old BIOS. It isn't required to be 'locked', and I have never encountered a Windows laptop or desktop that didn't not allow you to disable secure boot within the BIOS. I am not as familiar with Apple hardware so I will not comment on that.
UEFI and it GUID partition layout is superior to traditional BIOS. I develop within embedded systems that rely on GUID partitions to provide granularity of storage. One current system I support has 34 partitions, to support redundancy, safe image updates, and soft recovery.
With UEFI on the desktop, you can implement the same strategies.
So those are two statements in the post that I found to be misleading, if not outright wrong.
On the hardware front, yes, current era consumer laptops have become completely sealed boxes. If you want to own a laptop that can be upgraded and maintained, you need to buy either a gaming or enterprise laptop.
For most people, and enterprise laptop is only going to be slightly more expensive than a consumer grade device. It is not going to be as slim and 'sexy'. It t will likely have useful ports down the side.
On desktops, as long as you are buying a full sized desktop, I have not seen any (yet) that are not completely equipped with appropriate connectors and cabling to support upgrades.
I have seen 'mini' systems that are completely soldered down, but that is the price you pay for small. Connectors consume real estate.
I got my first PC 30 years ago and never bought a new one ever since. It was always upgrades, small or large. Even stepping up MB and CPU I've kept my drives, graphics card, most of the smaller peripherals, sometimes even RAM, so even the largest changes are always in several hundred dollars ballpark. The process is fun, interesting and makes me keep tabs with industry.
I've bought a laptop when switching to "digital nomad" lifestyle for several years, and it was my very worst experience with personal computing. I've spent about 15 hundreds bucks and never made worst investment ever since.
I'm using a MacBook Pro from 2014, after putting in a new battery recently it still works great, and when I'm at my desk I plug it into a big monitor. Not as upgradeable as a desktop, but even assuming I can't sell the laptop when I upgrade it, it cost me less than $500 per year.
I've tried using multiple computers in the past (big desktop + MacBook Air, costs about the same in total as a 15" MacBook Pro that is much less powerful than the desktop) but I realized that the convenience of knowing that all of my files are on one computer is more important to me.
However, I have a nice laptop from work and I really like my work setup, where I just connect a couple ports and instantly have a couple more big monitors, a good keyboard and mouse and other stuff.
So I've really been considering replacing my desktop with a decent laptop at home. I've also seen some benchmarks that are putting fairly commodity systems within spitting distance of what my old workhorse can do, meaning if I invested in a decent laptop I could probably keep about the level of performance I have today, but gain portability.
Then in the last few months we got the new Nvidia 3080 line (with AMD's RDNA 2 coming soon), the AMD 5000 series processors, new classes of SSDs like the 970 Evo Plus which have performance that used to be what we saw with DRAM.
All of these combined in a new system are going to be an entirely new class of desktop performance that my old system won't even come close to touching and portable machines won't touch either.
So I'm thinking of going with a new desktop sometime next year once inventory and prices stabilize, and if I need it a rock bottom budget laptop for traveling. Target price <$3k all-in.
From a technical perspective not many laptops come close to my desktop's performance and if they did they'd cost way more.
But the psychological benefit of having a desktop to do my work on is when I get home I don't continue working. I lock my ability to do most of my job (DevOps) to my desktop at my private office away from the home. That means when I get home I can do basic tasks on my 2020 MBP but for security reasons there's a lot I can't do.
Maybe this is something to consider when making your choice? Let me know how you get on.
- Ability to show the internals (from a few feet away!) thereby spawning curiosity on the possibilities of technology
- His coursework can be seen on TV and ensuring that TV is not merely entertainment
- "Certified" media for him to consume (we don't have youtube installed in any of our devices so I use youtube-dl to download astronomy stuff for him)
I do not remember using a laptop as my primary dev machine in last 10 years, I use the same 10 year old c2d 2.5ghz machine with newer motherboard(2014-g41mcombo gigabyte) and enough ram.
The system runs both ubuntu and windows 7 at ease and I am not considering update in at least next year. that describes the robustness of desktop. It is not that desktop does not break, they do quite often. But mostly we can manually troubleshoot them, In 10 years I have fried a motherboard, bricked 2 psu, ram and 3 harddrives. Its that I can just fix broken part and get going.
Hardware upgrades are only required if you are resource constrained, like require multiple vm, or multimedia editing and some crypot type gpu and cpu intensive stuffs. Even in those cases desktop shines.
Laptops are really great for mobility and they are really capable machines which can be configured to comparable performance with most of the desktops but not in durability and flexibility.
I wish people interested in this gave it more of an in-depth look and actually played with it.
It really attacks the problem at its source in a way a lot of these other methods don’t.
You can use a desktop, but services are still going to be largely centralized. We need a from first principles correction to fix broken incentives.
Now getting some of that configured to use the cheap hardware is a more complicated story.
Unlike the author I do use recent Laptops with Linux. Like the author I like to actually own my machine.
I would never trade this for a "gadget" running Android, ChromeOS, or IOS - other than my phone that is.
Today I have multi-GigaHertz machines that I can't build the simple projects that I could use with my Amigas because I have no way to interface directly to the buss.
The latency of what present computer supplies is horrible.
It seems like the bit-banging abilities of these current PCs are as good as they ever were.
None of this is news but it definitely makes the development experience so much nicer, and I can play any game with max settings on it too. Building desktops is also just a lot nicer than it used to be. There are tons of quality of life improvements in the cases, PSUs with detachable cables, silent fans and cooling solutions, etc.
I realized I hadn't taken my main MacBook off the dock in 9 months. When I go out, I have an older one that I'm happy to use away from my desk. Since it's acting like a desktop now, I though maybe I'd replace it with a higher-spec mac desktop. But a high end mac mini isn't much different than a high-end MacBook.
It seems if you want a high-performance mac but don't want to spend 6k+ on a mac pro, a specced-out 16" MacBook is the best choice. Is that correct?
If I buy another Apple laptop it'll probably be a 16" Macbook Pro. In fairness to Apple I usually get at least 5 years out of one of their laptops so can generally live with the premium.
I do wish I would have gotten a bigger internal SSD (I bought it with 256GB, but have now moved most of my files to an external SSD and it's a constant struggle).
I've also now purchased an external GPU to drive my 2 4k monitors at home (it can do 2 4k monitors of text editing itself without struggling _too_ much, but it does run about 15C cooler with the eGPU), so it's hard to say if an iMac wouldn't have been a better purchase, but the nice thing about the mac mini is I can easily throw it in a backpack when I need to travel every couple of months.
It was awful on all dimensions, even the portability as the thing I choose at the time was not light, I used it at home only once.
Not worth it.
Whilst it wasn't portable, it was _fast_. Granted not in single threaded performance (they are all old hat nowadays)
But I could run a bunch of containers, VMs if I wanted and run slack and chrome (although I use firefox mostly)
New work has given me a fancy macbook. Which is fine, but I miss the extra resolution of the 4k screen (which I suspect is perceived rather than actual. I have very small fonts)
I also miss linux as a local dev environment.
My new Dell XPS 13 came with Ubuntu pre-installed (which I replaced with Void Linux) and for the most part allows for a lot of tweaking. When I'm at home, I connect to my eGPU unit with one cable, allowing me to use my secondary monitor, a proper mouse, and external hard drives (although internal is already 1TB SSD). The eGPU unit is a Razer Core V2 with a GTX 1060, which is good enough for VR games, which play well on Linux these days surprisingly. Then a lot of my stuff is self-hosted in the cloud anyway, like a media server, backups, servers for development, even an IRC bouncer. I also run my own smart home software on a raspberry pi.
So while at the moment this might not be typical for an average consumer, the trend towards edge computing will really make the laptop into an "internet appliance" as the author says, and the browser an OS. Hell, with 5G, cloud gaming for VR may even be viable, and then we're back to the equivalent of terminals and mainframes.
The only real issue then is the ownership of these services — I don't agree with the author that everything will become a SaaS and no more open hardware will exist. It will always exist as long as there's a demand for it, you just have to accept that it'll be more expensive and less consumer-friendly. E.g. I have to accept that I can't hotplug my eGPU on Linux like you can on Windows, and I need to pay for my servers. Spotify and Netflix will always be cheaper than any legal means of acquiring media otherwise specifically because of their size.
I was thinking of the opposite: the case being the heat sink. The Fanlesstech blog presents these sometimes. https://www.fanlesstech.com/
I don't know if it's enough to just cool the CPU (and using integrated graphics) and let convection handle the other components? Does the chipset or memory need active airflow over them?
Totally done with laptops, honestly.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we see a resurgence in desktop computers since all the places a laptop shines: coffee shop, train commute, working on a plane, aren’t all that important anymore.
From all features of pre 2012-NOW laptops the REAL KEYBOARD is what I miss the most.
I really hoped that Lenovo will make something more from its 25th Anniversary Edition ThinkPad (some name id T25) but from what I know only 5000 pieces were made and finito. Or ar least that Lenovo will PERMANENTLY provice a classic/retro ThinkPad with every new generation with REAL KEYBOARD.
That is why I still use 2011 ThinkPad W520 and ThinkPad X220 - to have REAL USABLE KEYBOARD with REAL PGUP/PGDN HOME/END INS/DEL keys block in the top right space.
Future looks very dark since years in the laptop space.
The more I look into laptop computing (and often computing in general) the more only single word stands out.
D I S S A P O I N T E D
I now type happily on my X1 Yoga. It’s a very good keyboard, you get used to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are tradeoffs we all have to make, and I chose having new processors and things like USB-C over having a really good built in keyboard. I just settled for a good keyboard, not a really good one.
Thought that I will get used to it. I kinda did but the first moment when I moved back to REAL 7-row keyboard was like driving a bike again. Its just so good I do not want to get back to anything other then that.
Maybe I will have two machines. One to type and one for other things ... or with external ThinkPad SK-8855 keyboard :)
Time will come, maybe I will do one last 'hop' with ThinkPad 25th Anniversary Edition ... if they will be available in several years ...
Thanks.
I know I'm probably a dinosaur. I run a lot of desktop applications for work, and run most my models locally. I use the shell to automate tasks, and rarely use the "cloud" and try to limit browser tasks.
What's funny about this post is that I'm actually in the market for a new laptop, and am quite paralyzed in the process. I can't get myself to spend $1500 on some mediocre machine where everything is soldered on the mobo, I can't replace the battery, and that will become garbage in 2 years.
All the pro desktop vs laptop arguments are funny. No one wanted less performance at higher prices. We want to take the machine with us and use it in different places.
I too have been considering going 'back' to desktop recently, but it's to do with the pandemic. Laptop died last may, I got a new one, and... it's still reasonably good. However, I've been far less mobile in the last few months, and that will likely stay that way for a long time.
I've been primarily on laptops for the past 12-13 years or so. Much of my work involves traveling and meeting clients, sometimes doing some work on their premises. This was not an every day thing, but it was enough that I considered the laptop the primary tool. And I would typically get the higher-powered laptop models when I'd get new ones, as it's the main day to day tool.
The last 6+ months have changed most of my movements. I haven't met a client in person this year. I don't expect I will for at least another year. If it's sooner, it's sooner, but probably not. Being forced in to being non-mobile, my thoughts are turning back to desktops. I'll still want a laptop, but price/performance, I know I can get some more from desktop, and I'm considering switching to desktop as 'primary work tool' in the next couple of months. I'll keep current laptop (18 months old now) and it will serve fine as a secondary tool.
I'm curious how covid will impact other peoples' decisions in this area. I can't be the only one in this situation thinking about this decision.
Have set up three USB-C "workstations" with montior, keyboard and mouse (USB via Logitech Unify) in the house: One cable dock for any of the household laptops. There has been some toothing pain, but with USB-C reaching corporate machines, these are quickly becoming a non-issue.
Have been moving the SO and kids to USB-C laptops over the last couple of years (used Thinkpad X's are great value -- and tend to get full teen approval).
Do you have any good dual monitor USB-C docks you could recommend? I’ve been wanting to expand my work station a bit.
I recommend that you take a look at the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers. They're cheap too :-)
Excluding his exaggerated motivation, why would you use a laptop for real work anyway, when you can run a multiple monitor desktop with tons of storage, no thermal problems and a real keyboard to type on?
Personally I use a desktop 95% of the time for work. I own a laptop but I only work on it when I have no choice.
Due to Covid I moved away from our central office, but next year I'll have to commute there every month or two for meetings. Obviously I can't lug a massive desktop around on a train.
So I bought a customised Dell Precision Mobile workstation. It cost a small fortune, but I reckon I'll have this for years. The CPU will probably outperform my current 4790K and it allows more RAM (128GB) than my current motherboard (32GB). I can also stick a 4G SIM card into it so I'll have broadband pretty much anywhere I am. Ideal for these days of remote working.
I'll get work to buy a M.2 drive and I'll stick a VM on it and restrict work activities to that. If I leave I can just send that back.
I'm not sure I'd buy another desktop if my current one goes kaput. Potentially for gaming, but I don't do that quite so much these days. (Ryzen would be a temptation though.)
I have a low powered laptop for 'on the go' but I only tend to use it to take notes in meetings, and rarely if never use it for work.
Gone are the days of buying a 2k-3k laptop every 18 months and being disappointed with the performance!
My solution: run desktops at home as your own private cloud and use them in various ways from you laptop or phone. Create your own services or use oss services to fulfill your needs from your thin internet devices, no middle man/woman needed, use your desktop/s anywhere. This won't solve your uefi problem if you use modern laptops, nor will it solve your usb 2.0 problem if you stick to old laptops. But set up your own services, don't let them take over! It's quite a bit of work to setup, but maybe it'll get easier if more people take on the challenge. (Disclosure: this is my personal pipe dream, and I'm in the early stages of working this out myself.)
On a side note, the open laptops you refer to can be more pricy, but if that's what you believe in, then support the cause!
I know it’s not a practical choice for everyone, but I’ve always maintained both a desktop and a laptop. The desktop tends to be both significantly cheaper and more powerful, and it typically also survives a couple laptop upgrades before being replaced.
I suspect a lot of the movement towards laptops was and is due to the desire to run macOS. It just so happens that Apple desktop computers are either way underpowered or way expensive. An MBP is basically the sanest way to run macOS. So MBPs tend to become makeshift portable desktops, with external screens, keyboard, mice / trackpads, power bricks, and cooling pads.
If your work processes are not beholden to Apple software, building (or ordering a customized) desktop is a refreshing gulp of power. You suddenly can afford much more, or spend way less.
I'm writing this from a Linux desktop, and I'm quite content with it.
Use a server! , You can get cheap used, Dual Xeons 12 cores, with like 128G of ram on ebay for about 1000$
And that's not the only thing you get compared to a regular desktop you get:
- IPMI
- Dual Power supply
- Hot swappable drives!
- ECC Ram (nice for zfs)
- A decent Motherboard with PCI extensions
Thanks to Fiber Optic based DisplayPort cables, I have my server 30 ft away from me in the basement. My work area is dead silent!
Note I also use a usb extender and a usb DAC, so I got 2 long cables and I get keyb/mouse/audio and 4K 60Hz video.
I think a comparable spec new desktop would have cost about 5-10k..
With the savings I was able to get a PCI card with NVME drives, and 2x16TB drives and that was still cheaper :)
I had desktops for a while. Then I decided to switch to laptop and bought latest Thinkpad X1 Extreme (at a time). It throttles, it struggles to play even relatively easy games. Occasionally it loses connection to the lenovo dock and I need to restart it. It can't have more than 3 monitors.
When the time of next upgrade will come I'm certainly going to desktop + some light laptop like my wife's X1 Carbon. I don't like macs and I strongly believe that Win + WSL / dual boot to linux are much better for development.
Also since you have a lot of computer science majors, and coding is a thing everyone knows about (?), it seems like there will always be a sizable portion that will need proper computers and a proper OS that isn't just a "device". I mean without programmers and technical people in the future the companies themselves will not be able to run so there must always be proper options for those who want it
I'm also using old laptops (T500s) so that I can replace Intel's firmware with libreboot and also install alternative wireless cards.
The USB 2.0 thing is a problem, and reading this article made me think that there might be a way around that, and sure enough, you can get a PCMCIA card with USB 3.0 ports[1].
I know this isn't a long term solution, but it might be an immediate solution to the time spent making backups.
[1]https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00GU-00075?Description=PCMCIA%2...
All that said, I have moved 100% away from desktops. I really do like to be able to work outside (two areas to choose from), kitchen table next to our parrot’s cage, living room, or bedroom. Sometimes I need to work while traveling.
Finally, iPad Pros (or similar products) are simply better devices for reading, doing research, and watching entertainment.
A beefy desktop computer - high performance/$ CPU and GPU with several terabytes of storage so I could not worry about how much stuff I download and have several OSes installed without having to shortchange some on storage.
A netbook - one of those 10"-screen dinky little things that had just enough compute to run some basic desktop stuff. I would use this as a remote terminal to the desktop so I could still use the desktop's power from my couch.
As wifi speeds have increased, netbooks have all but disappeared and laptops mostly suck, I'm seriously considering this again, but instead of a netbook I'd jerry-rig a Raspberry Pi into a "laptop".
I've always used self-built desktop towers. When it's time to upgrade we build them five or ten at a time so every system matches. It makes for a much simpler build and bring-up experience.
In this case I needed to continue working, and so I decided to task two HP laptops on the network as external processors for the FEA tool. I have to say, they worked great for about four weeks. During that time they experienced about 18 hours per day of continuous processing. Fun while it lasted.
What these people usually don't get is that computer at the end of the day is just a tool. It is a means to an end not the goal. Having a powerful computer for the sake of having a computer doesn't accomplish any meaningful.
(it also means it can run Linux properly, not with battery issues...)
The rub for me is that I really dislike Windows. I use it for work - I have to - but it's not an OS I'd choose for myself[0]. I like OSX but the problem there is that, unless you go down the Hackintosh route (which soon I suspect won't really be a viable option anyway with the move to ARM), you have to buy preconfigured Apple hardware.
And then there's desktop Linux, which fills me with dread simply because I've not had great experiences in the past. Moreover, some key software that I need simply won't run on it. Notably Ableton Live. (I know Linux-compatible DAWs exist, but I really like Live and don't want to have to give it up.)
A decade ago, for me, buying a Mac was unequivocally the best option. Now that's perhaps no longer the case and, worse, there aren't any other great options that I can see. I'd be glad to be proven wrong though.
EDIT: Actually, maybe what I could do is dual-boot Windows and Linux. Use Linux for software development and most everything else (even Office 365 will run on Linux under Wine nowadays, apparently), then use Windows for Ableton Live and games. With UEFI it might not be the worst thing in the world to set up and maintain either.
[0] The main beef I have with Windows is that it just doesn't get out of the damn way. It really wants you to know it's there, from the dreadful multi-DPI multi-monitor support[1], gimpily inconsistent UI, the shitty 10 second dance all your desktops and windows do when you plug in another monitor[2], and crappy update mechanism, to the driver issues, WiFi connectivity issues, ropey audio support, instability and blue screens. And there's always, always, ALWAYS some random thing or other sucking CPU and running the fans. Don't get me wrong: every problem that bothers me on Windows also bothers me on OSX. It's just that on Windows these problems bother me several times per day, whereas on OSX I'm bothered by one of these issues maybe once a month. The upgrade to Catalina was initially painful and enraging but after the first couple of weeks, having upgraded everything, all was well again and remained so.
[1] Granted, likely to be less of an issue with a desktop system where you're likely to purchase monitors with identical DPIs and resolutions.
[2] Also less likely to be an issue with a desktop system, unless you need to use a KVM so you can share your desktop displays with your work laptop.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
And as far as USB2 limiting backups speed, I would look at a NAS with gigabit Ethernet which any old laptop should have.
* A fanless Chromebook with decent screen for travel use
* An Intel NUC that is hooked to a big monitor, which is also the device I'm typing this on
* A beefy Ryzen desktop that sits in the corner of my balcony, which I usually connect via ssh and perform all the heavy tasks
To me I'm getting all the benefits of each computer, and the combined cost is still less than a so-called macbook pro :)
I switched back to desktops when the 1st gen Ryzen 8-cores came out and haven't regretted it for a second. Bigger screens, beefy specs, more connectivity, and all of it is incredible value given the price of some 13-14 inch laptops!
I can go actually as light as I would like on my laptop now, even something ARM so that's a plus too, if you don't need mobility and beefy specs at the same time.
Two problems, it has: Weight/portability for when I do need to take it somewhere, and that it runs Windows and I prefer Mac OS. I keep my MacBook Pro because of these but am thinking of making the PC a dual-boot Hackintosh.
I've tried VNC and other remote desktop solutions but the but the performance has always been abysmal, it's a niche idea and obviously comes with the network requirement, but I think it would give the best of both worlds when you need the portability of a laptop around the house, with the power of a desktop.
I guess plan9 tried this approach....
RDP is also fantastic (text is sharper), as long as you don’t need to play movies or games or something.
I recently stepped up the game a bit and built a homelab.
I don't care if most people move on to using dumb devices that limit what they can do: they are probably not the people who were really using computers anyway.
Everyone who wants a good PC will have one, nothing is threatening the existence of PCs and the esports industry will keep them alive.
As for a brick and mortar computer store? If you're lucky you live near a microcenter or something.
A couple months ago I got full ATX case with the 16 core AMD CPU, the best GPU out there and it runs cool, quiet and I just RPD to it when needed (prob less than twice a year)
When I'm not in my computer room I dont want to be using a computer anyway, so theres no downside for me.
Those three things taken together, with a well-targeted government intervention, could turn the internet into a walled garden, in the name of stopping scams/terrorism/child porn/piracy for the first few years, obviously.
A desktop would definitely be faster. My wife has a low-end desktop that blows my top-end laptop out of the water.
But I don’t play games, and need to take my system on the road, occasionally, so I need the laptop.
I do have a couple of screamingly fast external USC-C SSD drives. They work nicely, and are teeny.
The best camera is the one you have with you.
The best computer is the one you have with you.
But, I am annoyed heavily that I can't play some great games due to lack of graphic cards, and would like to investigate the whole usb-c/thunderbolt plug in video card thing.
That said, pretty much every point of WalterBright also applies.
I personally don’t care what boot stuff is under the hood if it can boot Linux.
Cloud eating everything on the other hand does worry me. Busy building a home server to get away from that a little
Because personally I hate to do 'research' with my phone. Of course on the go, or for a quick lookup that's perfectly fine.
1. 104-key is in my muscle memory and i'm much more efficient.
2. Laptop plus keyboard plus power supply = desktop.
3. By being flexible, I can use only secondhand hardware.
/linux laptop owner who paid up
It’s great!
I also had fun researching how to get the best deal ~$2,000.
I do use a laptop when necessary, on a plane, etc...
/linux laptop owner who paid up
mine laptop (T520) was released 9.5 years ago and I have no issues with performance after upograding SSD hard drive and adding RAM
Something like a Mac cheese grater is probably more power efficient than my custom built PC, but you lose a lot of the value going with a prebuilt system.
The best way to see this is to buy a watt-meter and test it while doing what you normally do. Also remember that two decades ago you'd probably have had the computer _with_ a CRT sucking several hundred watts constantly, probably with some nice incandescent / halogen bulbs to keep things extra toasty, and a decade ago if you weren't using a Mac you probably had most of the power savings features disabled for system stability and/or compatibility. By now even the faster components have great power management when they're not fully loaded.
Depending on the workload, a device that consumes a lot of power but also goes into an idle state much faster could actually use less overall power.
This is one of the reasons that I ditched my desktop and switched to a laptop for my daily driver (moved heavy workloads to the cloud inc. gaming via GeForce Now, ditched all file sync tools to keep my desktop and laptop sync'd, etc). I can now comfortably close my office door and not have my office heat up to a zillion degrees.
My plan is to next time buy the cheapest laptop I can stomach and assume the thing will pretty much only last a year and then move resource intensive stuff to a desktop.
Also I'm not ever buying HP again, they make overpriced garbage.
At this point I'm pretty happy with cheap small laptops and ssh into my larger ryzen desktop in my workshop.
I was actually shocked to see on my iPhone that I’m spending several hours a day on the device. I remember five years ago, my main activity when laying in bed was thinking about things going on in my life or sleeping. Now I spend hours in bed reading on my phone — and honestly, it’s not the most productive or uplifting content. It doesn’t necessarily better me in any way.
I agree that newer devices aren’t necessarily improving in the right ways. The MagSafe charger on my 2015 MacBook was a fairly innovative and user friendly design choice. It no longer exists, presumably to make a thinner laptop, but honestly — the weight of my older machine was never a problem. Apple solved a problem I never had, and I carried that MacBook to and from work everyday for the past 5 years.
It basically feels like a rat race where companies, to show value and drive earnings for their shareholders, are making pointless design choices with no real vision. Even the larger track pad on the new machine doesn’t really solve a problem I previously had. If anything, I just needed a more performant machine, preferably with a larger screen. I honestly would have preferred a better front facing camera, but instead, I have a thinner machine, different keyboard, and larger trackpad. We’re in a period of cheap money with cut throat capitalism — in my mind, the federal government have made all this possible and massively inflated asset prices. Apple’s stock continues to go up up and up because of this.
I’m singling out Apple for examples sake. They’re not alone in this.
Laptops have mostly regressed into consumer appliances; my 2011 thinkpad is significantly faster and has more memory than a 2017 macbook pro. The monitor (and I guess speakers if I'm using it as a TV) is better in the macbook; that's it!