You know how thick I want my laptop? Just thick enough for an ethernet port with no dongle.
We’re lucky that we still have removable M.2 SSDs at all. It looks like devices will be moving to fully soldered storage in the next few years.
What makes you say that? Unlike smartphones, laptops are still widely used as productivity stations. Surely that means there will continue to be high demand for upgradable and replaceable internal storage.
- Two m2/nvme slots
- Upgradeable ram
- 17" retina resolution
- 2.9lb weight
- 16:10 aspect ratio
- User replaceable battery/speakersI used older Thinkpad for 2 years on laptop keyboard exclusively, but then switched to external ones as they are just better.
Otherwise I'd buy a tablet.
Shame no Thunderbolt though.
I was thinking about upgrading recently and was leaning towards the T470 for various reasons, including seeing a few nice used ones available locally at "okay" prices... until I started to actually compare them!
Based on the benchmarks I could find, I came to the conclusion that the performance of the T470 was no better than that of my old tank, the W530 -- and may have even been worse! Once I looked into the cost of upgrading the RAM on the T470 (as I tend to run several VMs concurrently) I decided I'd simply be wasting money "upgrading" to the T470.
Additionally, I've got a T420 which, although even older, still performs amazingly well -- once it was upgraded to 16 GB of RAM and a 480 GB SSD. I've only got ~$150 in it and it'll do a fine job if/when the W530 finally dies.
(The "upgrade" wasn't really a priority anyways, as I've got a beast of a workstation that I use 90% of the time.)
Was 1400 quid, the ZenBook I bought the missus with the Ryzen 4xxx obliterates it.
The perf improvement from 3rd to 8th gen intels was marginal.
Thank god AMD and M1 is pushing things forwards finally.
Buying a machine 4 years later and getting bugger all improvement gets old after a while.
Now I’m wfh forever I use my desktop and the laptop sits next to the work MacBook, forlorn and alone.
And yet repetitively we dont get those products.
Like this trend with protruding cameras out of phone's body. Just make the body that bit thicker and slap bigger battery on it.
And you can boast in ads that it last 2 days instead 5hrs.
Maybe we are wrong? Or there is some kind of nonobvious business logic behind it.
5000mAh and 30W charging for just over £200: https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g9_plus-10432.php
There are a couple of dozen now https://www.productchart.co.uk/smartphones/
It seems wildly stupid, and it is in some objective sense, but people make bad purchasing decisions. See: Cars in the united states continuing to get bigger and bigger.
I searched for weeks to find a phone matching my SO's requirements and in the end had to order it from China . Few 'majority consumers' have the time or patience for that, so they just put up with thin batteries and camera bumps.
I don't think most people care about RAM upgrades. Non-technical people will probably either just put up with their computer becoming somewhat slower if software requirements change over time, or they don't have use cases where they'd run out of RAM in the first place.
A nice and "modern" looking form factor is probably a greater factor for most people even if they did care about the upgradability to some extent.
I don't really get the trend towards non-replaceable batteries, though, at least not from a customer perspective. Batteries often begin to degrade much earlier than a decent laptop would otherwise show any age, so it makes almost no sense whatsoever (except perhaps some kind of a small improvement in size due to simpler construction) to not be able to replace those. Maybe people get their batteries replaced at a shop or they just put up with degraded batteries, too.
I agree it replacements and upgrades should be doable, and that it would be responsible, and I'd appreciate it if at least models marketed towards developers, engineers and other technical professionals would have that. Most people probably just won't care enough, though.
I had always assumed they did this for case reasons. A smaller phone means room the case could occupy. Fairly logical imo, though it feels like crap if you don't have a case.
As it is my iPhone 10, a fairly small phone (not a large model, i forget which) feels huge with a case. Cases make it weird.
That being said, my T480s had to go into warranty aleady, three times total if you count the TB3 docking station (which to me counts as one system I use together all the time): the motherboard was fried on the T480s. And since everything is one block of silicon, they had to switch out the entire thing, except for the hard drive.
The TB3 dock gen1 is the single worst bit of technology I ever had the displeasure of owning and using. Next to countless incompatibilities and instabilities, it just died a sudden death on me recently. Still a couple months within the 3-year warranty.
That's a serious engineering flaw on Lenovo's side. A better manufacturer would've made sure it died outside of warranty. They're really dropping the ball, you can tell by that.