Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

300 pointsgodDLL719 comments

I'd like to understand if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015 or so. Here's what I'd like to have:

*. Goes: preference and alternative, deal-breakers:

1. SIM preferable, WiFi acceptible, but Bluetooth has to be good

2. Spill and dust resistant keyboard that doesn't feel like typing on nothing

3. Trackpoint or trackpad, that works

4. Stylus or touch-screen that doesn't glare

5. Good power management, lasts through the day, done charging in 2.5 hours

6. Runs the hacky-mac or Slax, has a head-set jack

7. Good GPU, fast storage, two fast external storage ports

From my understanding I fit a kind of profile, and am very much not alone. But I'd like to know what the HN crowd take on this is.

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1. S3 Standby/suspend support.

If your laptop supports that, you can close the lid and it will power ~everything except the RAM down (sometimes a USB port still charges). In 'new' laptops, including almost everything Tiger lake and Intel, S3 is being phased out for Microsoft's "Modern Standby", known as S0ix (or sometimes InstantGo). This is much more like a mobile phone, where it stays on but attempts to use as little battery as possible.

So, peripherals might shut down, but you might still be able to get critical Windows Updates or receive an important notification -- all while your laptop is unplugged, lid closed, in your bag overnight. This is pretty bad for heat, battery, and often not what you might expect. My new laptop uses about 15% battery overnight, just doing nothing.

In the future, perhaps this mode will work as well as S3 used to for battery life, but finding your laptop fans on while it's closed inside your bag and getting really hot is not fun. This applies to lots of laptops currently.

2. A good screen. Brightness that goes high enough to be seen outside (400, or more) - and it'll usually auto turn down the rest of the time to save battery. Hard to go wrong on a Mac, but really variable screen quality across other brands and models. You'll spend a lot of time looking at the screen.

> In the future, perhaps this mode will work as well as S3 used to for battery life, but finding your laptop fans on while it's closed inside your bag and getting really hot is not fun. This applies to lots of laptops currently.

Modern standby was designed for ARM-based Windows 10 Mobile initially, but I do feel that Intel had plead to Microsoft to allow them to implement it too. Regardless, even the best Intel cores (except for their clean-room Atom designs, not all Atom-branded CPUs have these) runs hot that it's a disgrace that Microsoft haven't insisted on requiring S3 sleep.

Was going to post the same thing (albeit far more poorly explained).

Isn't Microsoft embarrassed about this? This has been an issue for my last two laptops over the last 5 years. How is it acceptable for this problem to still exist?

My Lenovo supports S3 sleep, but I didn't discover it until probably a year into having bought it, so at that point my battery's ability to hold charge had already been sufficiently degraded, to the point where I'm having to charge this thing every day when I'm mostly only using it for basic web browsing.

I will never buy another Windows laptop, and if Visual Studio ran on Mac I'd probably switch my PC out also. I'm not a mac guy, I find MacOS fairly unintuitive, and really hate the placement of the Ctrl key, but at this point it's clear that Apple's model better lends itself to quality, and I'm sick of all the broken crap that is deemed acceptable in the Windows world.

As I was typing this, a great example of said broken crap, is Lenovo popping up a MessageBox asking me to reboot to update my firmware. Didn't software developers all agree well over a decade ago that windows stealing focus was not a good thing? So why then is a top of the line brand in the PC world writing shit like this?

> and if Visual Studio ran on Mac I'd probably switch my PC out also

Not sure if it supports all the features you need, but it exists.

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/

That’s just a rebranded Xamarin IDE - but for .NET development on Mac, I’ve found JetBrains Rider does most of what the full Visual Studio package does

Yes it's just Xamarin modified to look like a native Visual Studio for Mac.

Much better off using Rider (also works nicely on Linux).

IntelliJ is still a little broken on wayland I think. Last I checked they were waiting on a patch to Swing, so right now it's only running under XWayland, it's fairly buggy and doesn't scale nicely. You also need to set some env variables or you'll get a blank screen. It still works pretty well though, which is better than any other similar IDE.

I like Rider better even on Windows. My favorite thing about Visual Studio on Windows was always the debugger, and I think Clion and Rider have lapped them there in the past two years.

Seconding Rider if you're on macOS. It shares its analysis code with ReSharper, so it's extremely featureful. In fact, it's usually faster than VS + ReSharper because it isn't running two code analysis engines at once and it doesn't have to run the analysis out-of-process.

Note that if OP expects anything like the "real" Visual Studio that runs on Windows, this is really nothing compared to it. I'd even go further and actually prefer Vscode with the right extensions compared to this "Visual Studio".

sounds like when we try to run iTunes on Windows - each competitor is intentionally crapping on the other's users

iTunes is crappy in Macs, too!!

Don't worry, the Music app on macOS is just as bad as iTunes on Windows...

It's more that Visual Studio is a massive project that was built around running on Windows. It would be a huge undertaking to bring it over to another OS and probably not add nearly enough value. The only reason macOS has "Visual Studio" at all is because Microsoft bought out Xamarin and rebranded their Xamarin Studio product.

Yup it would just not be worth it to bring real VS to macOS. Then why decrease its brand value by marketing a crappy product like Xamarin (which I think has always been bad, and I honestly don't know why MS bothered to buy it) as if it was VS? Just call it Xamarin, or VS "lite", or anything, but not VS as it is not VS.

Consistent branding. Visual Studio is the name they're using for all their code editing software. I don't think it's a good idea given the confusion it causes when people talk about the various programs, but they are distinctly named Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio for Mac.

Microsoft has never been good at naming things. They made that mess of Windows naming at multiple points and they are still making a mess with the Xbox brand.

Your battery is likely worn from keeping it charged at 100% constantly, lenovo have an option to limit max charge to something like 80% which will greatly reduce battery wear, you just have to turn it off if you are actually planning to run it without AC for as long as possible.

My HP G8 zBook Power have this feature as well, but its only accessible through bios. Luckily their BiosConfigUtility64.exe allows changing bios variables from windows, and the change takes effect immediately. My two .bats for 80 and 100% charging limits.

C:\Programs\SP107705\BIOSConfigUtility64.exe /setvalue:"Battery Health Manager","Maximize my battery health"

C:\Programs\SP107705\BIOSConfigUtility64.exe /setvalue:"Battery Health Manager","Let HP manage my battery charging"

My two-year-old Dell Inspiron also has a BIOS option for a "Mostly on AC power" charging profile. I'll still give the power cord a yank every now and then and let it run on battery for a while.

dell has had this feature since i was in college twenty years ago.. it's such a great one

Most batteries on laptops are worn out by heat. They really do not like heat, but will take lots of it, when placed and used in unfavorable conditions, which most laptops probably are.

Heat mostly matters when charging or discharging rapidly, if wear is concerned. So might be less significant than you'd think.

Well, I have a gaming laptop I bought quite new, but second hand, that was almost never used without cabel (I saw the formerly setup) - and the batterie was allmost dead and blown up in size after some months of use. But since it is a gaming laptop - it generated massive amounts of heat under load. I bought a new battery and took care of the heat: and it is still quite good, after roughly the same time and amount of use and I do charge till 100%.

Throttling of CPU and GPU should surely account for 90% of what you describe, coupled with an old, uncycled battery that can't move ions no more.

My laptop only heats up in sleep mode, unfortunately.

This is really a poor software solution to an old hardware solution that disappeared for the sake of thinness: removable batteries. In the past with easily removable battery packs you could simply pop them out once they're fully charged and pop them in when you wanted to make sure they were charged up. When manufacturers started touting long life cycle batteries to justify internalizing them and making them difficult to replace and impossible to quickly pop out, software manufacturers added this in to attempt or extend battery life.

Before, I simply removed my battery when plugged in all day and significantly extended my battery life. If I needed it, it was mostly charged. It would of course dissipate over time so if I had any plans of using my laptop in an actual mobile fashion or wanted to move my laptop from one long term power source to the next, I'd pop it in, make the move and pop it back out. I of course lost the UPS feature having a laptop with a battery pack also served but I could assess when I thought my power source was/wasn't stable and pop the battery in under those conditions (not very often).

Most people I know use laptops as portable workstations. If you frequently operate in situations where you desire battery alone then the OS charge management works quite well. I don't and most people I know don't. In today's world, mos the use cases I operate under those conditions are better served by my smartphone.

They should just install a physical off switch for the battery, along with physical switches for the camera and networking.

What's wrong with the current solution of having a software switch, aside from lack of use/knowledge about it? What's the advantage to making it physical?

Software switches can be controlled remotely without your knowledge. A physical switch requires physical access to the device.

I am just talking about the battery. I don't see any privacy issue there.

Maybe the concern there is devices appearing to be turned off but really still running in low power mode? The only way to be sure is to physically interrupt the power supply.

The people writing the software have a vested interest in your battery wearing out so you have to buy a new laptop

Sometimes you really need to make sure there is no power flowing through your device, which you can't be sure of using software when you are trying to fix software problems. Of course I should have said recording devices and networking, rather than just cameras.

Also, true power off guarantees nobody is remotely activating eavesdropping on your device.

Lenovo have a battery disconnect bios option specifically for doing service work.

Or externalize the camera and networking modules, so that one can pop them in and out like a battery. Yes.

This is why I still use my Thinkpad W520. If I don't need the battery I just take it out until I need it. I hate that we got rid of removable batteries in basically all devices.

I set it via tlp[0]:

    sudo tlp setcharge $start_precent $stop_percent BAT0

[0]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/

It is terrible to limit max battery charge, so max battery charge doesn't decline!!!

Its akin to not driving your car in the redline constantly - sure you can do it, but its going to reduce engine life.

Its the same with batteries, you keep them at 100% constantly they will wear out. Its just a limitation of the technology.

Some devices now try and use "machine learning" to determine max charge, for example iphones will maintain a medium charge throughout the night then do a final top up charge to reach 100% just before you wake up.

> Its akin to not driving your car in the redline constantly - sure you can do it, but its going to reduce engine life.

Yes, of course. That's not the issue, though.

> Some devices now try and use "machine learning" to determine max charge, for example iphones will maintain a medium charge throughout the night then do a final top up charge to reach 100% just before you wake up.

That's different and even opposite from advertising X max charge and only delivering 80% of X as the max charge. What I referred to is a bait and switch, where the manufacturer advertises one thing but provides another. Your example justification, however, is not a bait and switch but aligns the technical MVPs and marketing promises.

The situation is similar to purchasing a fridge that only operates at 80%. All food spoils more quickly, but the fridge lasts longer. If that had been disclosed, instead of the opposite implication from the marketing, then consumers would have almsot certainly made different purchasing decisions. That is why these sorts of things are generally illegal.

In your car example, if a car is advertised with 400 HP but never goes above 320 HP, that's called false advertising. Sure, the engine can get to 400 HP tested on a bench, but that's not why the car was purchased.

Right, so what vendors are doing now is calling batteries consumables that last one, maybe two years with the default 100% charging limit to get max run time on battery.

Consumers can either accept this and pay for a new battery every few years, or if they want they can limit to 80% and get way longer life battery life if they can live with the reduced runtime.

I'm not aware of any vendors claiming x capacity battery with mandatory limiting charging to 80% of x, rather its an option you have the choice to explicitly enable.

His battery is likely worn by recharging cycles. As the computer is being discharged more often.

Nope, its from charging to 100% constantly which accelerates wear massively.

I've had my Lenovo carbon x1 for a few years set to 80% max charge and its battery life is still good.

Battery stats report 480 charging cycles, capacity has dropped only 8 percent from rated.

It’s not charging to 100% that wears batteries out. It’s storage at 100% that does that.

If you charge to 50% and keep it there, it basically last years.

If you use your notebook primarily on AC, battery is charged and kept on “storage” until you unplug from AC. Over the years, this is equivalent to a battery stored on a box.

So, time stored on a box with 50% is better than 80%, which is also better than 100%.

But. If your notebook is used primarily unplugged from AC, that 100% is better than 80%, because you’ll have fewer deeper discharges.

Deep discharges is what form dentrites. Dentrities is what kill lithium batteries.

> If you use your notebook primarily on AC, battery is charged and kept on “storage” until you unplug from AC. Over the years, this is equivalent to a battery stored on a box.

I'm not sure what you mean, by default most laptops will charge to 100% and keep trickle charging it to that level consistently while on AC.

Setting a charge max of 40% would be ideal, but there is point where you want to maintain some level of runtime when removed from AC, so 80% is a reasonable compromise.

JetBrains Rider. If you care about quality, don't bother with Visual Studio at all.

Or CLion, if you’re doing C++ or Rust development

> if Visual Studio ran on Mac

It is! What do you mean? :)

The Mac version of Visual Studio is closer to a fork of MonoDevelop than mainline VS. Rider is a better experience than either though, IMO.

As a Mac user with the same gripe of the ctrl key placement: Remapping it to the caps lock works wonders :)

I use so many keyboards, not all of which are under my control.. I wish I could, but it would bring chaos to my typing world.

Something like that exists for DVORAK. Maybe someone else makes a similar product that works like an any keyboard.

https://www.keyghost.com/qido/

You can set this in the OS itself.

Wouldn't you need root/admin access for that ?

The implementation of the none S3 sleep on most windows laptops these days is not microsofts fault. Critical updates (firmware) always have priority and even on mac's you get negging pop-ups for updates all the time. That said you can fix everything what you said with one checkbox. It's not the pc which sucks it's you the user.

For all the people downvoting. He is the equivalent of people making "screenshots" with their mobile phone instead of using printscrn. I bet you are complaining about your own users all the time and here you defend someone who can't even be bothered to look at the options he has. smh

The complaint was not that the firmware notification existed or was urgent, but that it stole input focus.

Visual studio running on Mac? I’ve been using visual studio code on it for years no problem. I’m now realizing there’s a difference between the two. Care to explain a little more why you use VS and not VSC?

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are completely different things. VSC can do a subset of what VS can do, but some people really need the full power of a traditional IDE. VS vs VSC is like the difference between a smartphone camera and a full camera platform. You can rig up an iPhone (VSC) to do everything a D6 (VS) can do, but it won't be as usable.

But Visual Studio 2019 is available for mac.

It shares some code nowadays (started with a MonoDevelop codebase). However, Visual Studio (not Code) for Mac is mostly targeted at at C# or mobile development.

If you want to make Windows apps, it just doesn't support that scenario.

And they just announced they’re rewriting it to native for Mac in 2022…

I actually just want them to fix connected standby and properly be able to do these things with low power.

My phone (a oneplus 6) can be on standby for nearly a week. That windows laptops attempt at this mode drains the battery by the end of a workday is just pathetic. Instant resume should be available with no practical compromises.

That is seriously bad.

Just as a data point, my 2019 mac sleeps perfectly for multiple days, no problem.

My 2019 Razer Blade does the same.

> really hate the placement of the Ctrl key

Macs used to be really customiseable, and they haven't got around to ripping all of that out yet.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys

You can control how the various keys behave.

> Isn’t Microsoft embarrassed about this?

Do Microsoft Surface devices have this problem (the heat/fans spinning/high battery drain while sleeping, I mean)? If not, then Microsoft has no need to be embarrassed; it’s the rest of the PC laptop industry that should be embarrassed for not shipping hardware that does the right thing when the OS asks it to.

(Though, I mean, the rest of the PC industry should already be embarrassed, for still shipping new PCs in 2021 that don’t have Thunderbolt/USB4 ports, and desktop PCs that don’t even have a single USB-C port.)

There’s also the fact that Microsoft is (perhaps by accident of fate) “building for the future”; a lot of Windows 11’s assumptions in particular make sense given hardware and CPU steppings in mind that should have shipped a year ago, but which are caught in the COVID logistical conga-line and so won’t be seen for another year. That includes e.g. Intel CPUs with ARM-like big/LITTLE designs.

Yes, Surface devices have this problem. It was a frequent occurrence for me to put my Surface Book into my bag and later take it out completely dead or hot and drained.

Wouldn't put all the blame on hardware. It's a back and forth sometimes to get the OS and hardware working together.

It's not a 50/50 responsibility split, but it's definitely not 100% on hardware.

My bet is that Microsoft and Windows laptop manufacturers aren’t embarrassed by this because approximately no one uses their laptop as a portable device. The laptops just sit on the desk charging 99.9% of the time. People use their smartphones the rest of the time.

Most companies issue laptops instead of desktops.

While commuting back and forth to work those are definitely asleep in a bag/briefcase.

Really? Maybe in 2020 or 2021, but not in 2019. My work laptop got dragged to meetings and gets taken on flights to remote offices. My personal laptop gets used in every room of the house.

> As I was typing this, a great example of said broken crap, is Lenovo popping up a MessageBox asking me to reboot to update my firmware. Didn't software developers all agree well over a decade ago that windows stealing focus was not a good thing? So why then is a top of the line brand in the PC world writing shit like this?

Don't think that MacOS spares you about that either. Update notifications are equally distracting.

> Don't think that MacOS spares you about that either. Update notifications are equally distracting.

You're right but if I recall correctly notifications do not steal the focus.

> why then is a top of the line brand in the PC world writing shit like this

"It's OK when we do it"

Isn't Microsoft embarrassed about this?

Yeah, I was astounded when I recently found out about the "modern standby" idiocy. I've almost always used Mac laptops, but I just assumed that at some point in the last 20 years the PC world would figure out reliable sleep. And it seems like they mostly did, and then Microsoft broke it for no good reason?

VS for Mac: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-20...

Isn't this the MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio version of VS?

> Visual Studio ran on Mac

Visual Studio Code does. Is that the same?

Even has native M1 support.

It's not the same at all. Visual Studio is an IDE (like Eclipse) and Visual Studio Code is an extensible text editor (like Emacs).

It is pretty good though. It's enjoying a big surge in popularity lately and seems to deserve it.

Microsoft released windows 11, so, no, they have no shame. Microsoft is a company without leadership, without direction, and without a central vision. The only feature of windows that people like, is that it continues to run the software they need. Other than that the OS itself gets in the way, stops your workflow, and makes your life harder. And the only other commercial alternative is just as bad in other ways. The natural result of letting the computer marker be controlled by a few big players.

Battery drain a problem? Join the Framework laptop movement. Mac bothers you slightly less than Windows does (and costs more for the same hardware)? Make the jump to Ubuntu and dip your leg into desktop Linux. If you're inseparable from Visual Studio, I'd think Wine could handle it.

This ! Support forums from all brands (big ones like Dell or Lenovo, but also niche brands like Framework) are plagued with requests from unhappy users with their laptop dying in their bag. All because of the Modern Suspend feature. Let's hope AMD mobile processors will work better, and that we'll be able to find decent laptops using them.

I had an AMD Ryzen ThinkPad. It has all the same issues with modern sleep. The solution is to enable S3 sleep in the firmware.

Unfortunately, even in S3 sleep, the battery would drain in a day.

I am now back to a MacBook Air (M1) and sleep works perfectly. Life is to short to deal with the terrible state of sleep on Windows/Linux laptops.

Thanks for the tip. I had a Lenovo Ryzen that would require a Win10 reset of WiFi after each resume. Frustrating. Finally got an Intel Lenovo -- no WiFi issues.

I'm fairly certain that your Macbook is actually hibernating, and not merely suspending. This seems to be the case with my 2015 Macbook. Suspend alone will drain your battery.

I have a Ryzen ThinkPad p14s with Linux. What you do is turn on S3 mode (they call it "Linux") in BIOS as you did. Then in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf you enable AllowSuspendThenHibernate. You can adjust the time. I have mine set to 30 minutes. I also have suspend set when the laptop lid closes. Which means when I close the laptop, it suspends for 30 minutes. If I open before 30 minutes, it resumes right away. If not, it hibernates. The battery will last for practically days if you configure it this way.

You have to configure Linux to hibernate and this will depend on your setup. Just know that it is possible to use LUKS encryption and hibernate to a file (or partition).

Another factor with my Macbook is that it seems to automatically resume from hibernate in the morning. Not sure what it's doing. Maybe it's keeping track of when I typically open my laptop. But you can get this same behavior on Linux with rtcwake. If using LUKS though, you'll probably need to use a keyfile rather than a passphrase for this to work. It would be neat if someone wrote a program that could monitor the time you open the laptop and automatically adjust the rtc wakeup times based on historical data.

I wouldn't be surprised if most people didn't notice that their MacBook was hibernating. Apple tries to hide it by showing you the login screen immediately, but that period where you can't interact is the device resuming from hibernation. It's a similar trick to what they do on iOS. When you open up an application that was suspended, it shows an image while reloading the saved state to make it seem like the app never closed. (As documented here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio... )

I'm fairly certain that your Macbook is actually hibernating, and not merely suspending. This seems to be the case with my 2015 Macbook.

Actually, as far as I understand it's a mixture like modern sleep in Windows. Like modern sleep, the system also wakes up to fetch e-mail, calendar events, etc. But in contrast to Windows, it actually works well and is very restrictive (only certain whitelisted apps can update). Apple calls it Power Nap:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-power-nap-m...

Which means when I close the laptop, it suspends for 30 minutes. If I open before 30 minutes, it resumes right away. If not, it hibernates. The battery will last for practically days if you configure it this way

I know, but hibernate on Linux has many issues. First of all, properly restoring hardware state is even more of a hit and miss than S3 sleep (where e.g. the trackpad would often not come up correctly).

Hibernate on Linux also has all kinds of security issues. Hibernate currently does not work with Secure Boot + kernel_lockdown [1]. Hibernate with randomly-keyed encrypted swap requires all kinds of workarounds.

I am not willing to forgo security mechanisms that have been supported for some time on other systems.

[1] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/55845.html

> Let's hope AMD mobile processors will work better, and that we'll be able to find decent laptops using them.

It doesn't have anything to do with the processor does it? Surely neither intel nor amd have removed S3 support?

AFAIK it's integrators (motivated by Microsoft's push of "modern standby"?) which make it unavailable in their bioses: S3 needs bios integration, modern standby is just S0. Or do you mean "hopefully AMD will have a better S0 idle"?

Intel 11th gen CPUs are 100% Modern Standby and DO NOT have S3 sleep. I don't know about AMDs support.

Lenovo still puts it back on some of the laptops, like the X1 Carbon 9th Gen. So, I suppose this is not strictly dependent on the CPU.

After looking for confirmation of this, S3 support seems to be either missing or broken in various ways, there'a a reddit thread where a System76 engineer talks about the mess that was: https://old.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/k7xrtz/ill_have_w...

Wow, TIL I'm never getting an intel CPU again. Not that I was planning to, mind.

You can mitigate it by configuring the power settings so that after 30 minutes the laptop hibernates. You lose your connected standby of course

That's hibernation though, so it takes way longer to wake up and also does a lot of I/O on the probably not replaceable SSD.

(Also, why does your post show as being made on the 2021-10-14 when this "Ask HN" is from today? Wat)

Sometimes posts get put on the "try again" queue by the moderator, where they are floated to the bottom of the home page to see if they will attract attention the second go-around. I don't know if that's the case here.

Ah indeed, the Ask HN itself is from the 14th and various comments are from then as well. Seems like it got put through that process which causes HN to "fake" the short timestamps to make everything look like fresh discussion.

Anecdata but my 5-year ThinkPad and 3-year Dell are doing fine (also a 10-year Asus). I've been always hibernating for the night. 16GB RAM, takes at most few seconds. I don't get this allergy to hibernation, is it such a killer to wait a few seconds when I know I won't be using device for hours/days?

Takes seconds to resume and saves a lot of battery since the machine is truly powered off.

So which laptops do a good job of reliably supporting S3 standby/suspend? Any idea if the Framework laptop does?

You can check which ThinkPad BIOS has the option at their BIOS emulation site: https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html

For mine it's under Config // Power // Sleep State. Windows 10 means useless Modern Standby, Linux means S3. https://i.imgur.com/Y5CchL9.png

In this covid helped me because I learned about this before I cooked my expensive new laptop in its bag :(

Wow, that is an incredibly cool thing for an OEM to offer. Never seen this for any other vendor before.

What does it mean if there is no sleep setting here? I haven't actually rebooted my P50 yet, but the simulator doesn't have this option showing.

The P50 very well might predate this Modern stuff.

Type

powercfg -a

and see:

The following sleep states are available on this system:

Standby (S3)

True enough, thanks for the info. I can't complain either way, whatever suspend mode I have works well and quickly. Hibernate does work (all under Linux here as a rule).

I'll have to try powercfg next time I boot into Windows.

The Framework Laptop does not support S3 suspend. I have it running with S2deep in Linux, which works okay, but it isn’t a fantastic scenario. Hibernation is the way when the processor doesn’t support S3, unfortunately. Even Windows would fall back to it after a short duration.

Yes, this is my only beef with the laptop so far. I really hope we get a firmware update with S3 enabled soon.

> get critical Windows Updates

So you mean Microsoft can force your laptop to restart and lose all your work even when it's "off"? Amazing.

Not all windows updates require reboots.

Most don't even.

Quite a lot more stuff supports auto resume after reboot, including unsaved Notepad files.

But not REPLs and Jupyter notebooks.

nor Windows Explorer.

For the File Explorer it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced Value PersistBrowsers set to 1.

Thank you! This reminds me of the old annoyances.org that listed a bunch of little tricks to improve your Windows 95 experience.

You don't need to manually edit the registry for this. There's a checkbox in Explorer's settings.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/recovery/regi...

No, not when it’s actually off. If you’ve shut down, then it won’t do this, but if you put it to sleep it can.

That being said, I hate this, with my old laptop I could close the lid and pop it in the bag and it would lose maybe 5-10% battery per day, with new laptop it happily unsleeps itself in the bag which has zero ventilation.

So for safety reasons I have to shut my laptop down before putting it in my bag, then have to wait for it to start up (which is slow due to corporate software) before being able to use it again.

I’ve been using Macs for over five years now and before that I was all Linux. From reading this it looks like Windows has actually reverted to where Linux was over five years ago: having to fiddle with the machine to get sleep to work. That’s just sad.

Windows wasn't good at this in the past either. Didn't they used to have sleep, hibernate and a load of other options too?

Just sleep/hibernate/restart/shut down, as far as I can remember? - sleep vs hibernate being a distinction you want, in my view, as the battery drain/restart time behaviours are different. I'm sure I don't need to explain why separate restart and shut down options are a good idea.

(Never liked not having the sleep/hibernate choice on macOS. I know better than the computer what my upcoming plans are!)

You could make Macs hibernate via the CLI until a few versions back at least, maybe you still can? I used that occasionally, but at some point sleep got so good I stopped bothering. If I disable the waking up to fetch mail and the like thingy in Settings, mine will hardly lose any battery even when sleeping for extended periods.

Macs can't even toggle session saving behavior through the CLI; your only chance to toggle session saving it is logging out via the GUI.

My experiences with macOS involved tons of unexpected sharp corners like that. Really feels half-finished when you're coming from Linux, as ironic as that sounds

Windows ha(s/d) suspend/sleep/hibernate/restart/shutdown.

Sleep was a suspend/hibernate hybrid that allowed fast restarts if you still had power, but would restore from disk hibernate-style if you ran out of power while suspended.

I’ve been on Mac so long that all 5 options feel erroneous. I just close my laptop lid when I’m done.

I've had the same problem on Mac, if you leave an SD card in it drains completely.

I just to try and gett TV rtf TTa we t feed define the t TTreally I just wh from G they rrdand I

(me typing on a mac keyboard)

Try Hibernate.

> 1. S3 Standby/suspend support.

Intel diasabled S3 in Tiger Lake

What is the reason for this decision? Idgi

Force everybody to use Win11, as a gesture to Microsoft.

Luckily there are AMD thinkpads and they are great.

Yep. The thinkpads I've had running Linux has supported s3 sleep but it feels like it's going away more and more.

You start with a laptop at 80% charged if you use Microsofts stupid system. The more I use Linux, the more annoyed I get at Microsoft and how they keep worsening the entire pc experience every year.

Users are not users, they are cattle to be managed by Microsoft.

Is it really Microsoft's fault that vendors only listen to it? The fact is that Apple exists in it's own closed ecosystem, and Linux runs second hand on systems built for Windows. There are very few other folks dictating requirements. Laptop vendors for the most part don't want to be in the business of maintaining an OS. Companies like system76 and framework are the way to address this.

Also Linux does not work well in this mode (problems to wake up), so it is important to be able to switch it to S3 in the BIOS.

Reasonably fast boot time. Yes my XPS seems to be booting about half the time I open it, due to power management or windows updates, which is annoying. But what makes that extra annoying is that it spends like 45 sec each time just in the BIOS step. What on earth does the BIOS do that needs so much time to run?

(Other than this I do actually quite like my XPS. Though I do wish I had gone without the touchscreen. It's just annoying because you can't wipe grime off without it causing a touch.

I used to put my Windows 10 laptop in my bag at night, but every now and then I'd realise later that it had powered itself on, the fans were going nuts, and it was obvious really, really hot!

I don't think it was actually installing updates (I use Enterprise eds), though I've no idea what it was doing. I've since started leaving it plugged in on my desk, and haven't noticed it turning itself on at all since then. Weird.

Seems mad they'd try to install updates while not on AC power, and I'd think it's fairly common for sleeping laptops to be placed in a bag overnight.

Check your wakeup settings. I've have to use corporate Windows machine and for some reason they're all setup to wake up on some wifi/ethernet signal.

Bahahaha.

Sorry, long time Linux user here. I just presumed the sucky state of this sort of thing was SOLELY due to my insistence on using Linux.

Relatedly; seriously - besides the obvious "mindshare" and so on, and I suppose "mostly for the people here;" Macs I get, but why do people still use Windows?

Also a longtime Linux user here, and I have the same question: why do people keep using Windows? Everything I hear about it sounds superb frustrating, while for me, Debian stable has been rock-solid for me for years.

How does S0ix work on Linux? Is there a way to powerdown more?

> if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015

Yes, you missed something huge.

Apple Silicon M1 or nothing. It's just too good. Low power consumption allows the laptop to actually be used as a laptop. The power use-to-performance ratio is unmatched by anything on the market. Apple is breaking us free from decades of stagnation on the hardware front.

Nothing else on the market comes close. I expect this to change in the future. Will happily switch to a linux laptop once an energy efficient alternative to x86 becomes mainstream for linux. There's just no way I can go back to x86 after tasting the sweet nectar of M1.

Also, the M1X laptops (probably) release Monday and will be even more ridiculous.

I’ve been waiting for years, finally time to replace my 2015!

M1X will be a trade off. Trading battery life for speed. It will still have great battery life relative the dumpster fire of x86 laptops.

If the M1X 16" keeps the battery size of the current model, which is the largest possible battery you can take on an airplane, it will run a bit shorter than the M1 Air at full throttle (but get more done in that time), but significantly longer than the M1 Air for casual use, because it's presumably using the exact same efficiency cores.

Depends on what they do with GPU. If they put in desktop-class(-ish) graphics, then that would impact battery life heavily (and make me super happy OTOH).

It probably wouldn’t, at least not in every situation. It would probably be low power until more is needed.

You're actually right.

MacBook Air M1: 49.9Wh | MacBook Pro 16" 2019: 100Wh

The 16" MacBook Pro is rumored to have double the performance CPU cores, and either double or 4x the GPU cores. So for tasks that are strictly GPU bound, battery life could be about half of the M1 Air.

Considering that this is the absolute worst case scenario battery life (assuming of course that they don't make the battery smaller), the new 16" Pro is looking pretty exciting.

And CPU/GPU core count is only one factor for battery life, so 4x the cores would not even result in 4x the power draw.

Beefier graphics often improves battery life (more cores at lower clock, like nvidia mobile vs desktop for the same model number: lower TDP, same perf). They might move to more power hungry RAM as part of it though.

The on-chip GPU Apple ships in their MBPs draws way less power than the dedicated Nvidia chip. This is especially noticeable in the battery life drop that occurs when the dedicated chip is used exclusively.

On chip/package has many power advantages, and Apple is on a much newer process node with M1 (TSMC 5nm).

The point I was making was that e.g. a GTX 2070 desktop has around the same compute power as the mobile version, but the mobile version uses much less power. It does this by being beefier (2560 CUDA cores mobile 2070, 2304 CUDA cores desktop 2070), but running at a lower clock.

They better bring some "pro" memory and IO along with it, they won't be replacing my Thinkpad unless I've got 64 gigs of ram in my backpack.

Like so many people, I love the hardware but hate the software. Hoping that once Linux is solid on there, I'll be able to get one.

From a practical point of view the software works pretty well (I've got M1 Air, Big Sur) but I can understand if people want independence from Apple.

It seems that virtualized Ubuntu with UTM works ok: https://youtu.be/hnwK-nkXolc

I was in the same boat around 2012. After 11 years of linux on the desktop and crappy student laptop, I needed a proper laptop for freelance jobs. Bought a macbook to put linux on. Ruined macos on day one. Reinstalled macos. Got used to it. Loved that all the hardware and software just works. Never installed ubuntu desktop again.

Would like to use linux again on the desktop, but macos is so nicely integrated with everything. The desktop experience is so much better than the gnome or kde version of the day. I code embedded c and web (python). Also do the occasional cad drawing and 3d printing. All this software just works on mac. Even corporate slack works okay, ms teams as well. Word, even! It sucks to be a linux desktop user or fanboy in professional environments. Not a mac fanboy, would switch if there was something better.

One drawback is that docker is just awfully slow compared to running it on native linux.

"Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."

A reference to the freedom from corporate bondage you trade away for convenience in macos.

(I don't have any significant issues with Ubuntu Mate, but I don't use it for many things however.)

Is ARM really the reason the M1 is so much better than the current x86 CPUs? If you have a look at the competition (Qualcomm), it sounds to me that it's Apple expertise at designing a SoC and using a more advanced node that makes it such a good CPU, not really the architecture.

Said another way, I highly doubt we will see a non-Apple ARM CPU outclass the x86 competition in such a way anytime soon, so saying "never x86 again" might not be very wise. ARM is not a magic bullet.

ARM isn’t _the_ reason. It is a reason.

If we were to go back in time to before apple introduced it’s own SoC and before it had acquired chip design start ups, even before than ARM was on the table as that is what the iPhone ran.

RISC-V wasn’t a thing back then. So the alternatives were MIPS, Power or maybe a home grown instruction set.

So we just have to go with what the reality is now. The apple silicon has been well optimised for performance per watt. And it runs on an ARM instruction set that apple itself helped in the design of.

100% agree.

A lot of people asking for ARM based machines do not really realize that the reason is not because of ARM, but they just want faster/more efficient machines. I think to make a analogy for HN frontend sw devs, imagine a non-technical marketing person going to a developer and saying "I want this website in AMP, because AMP is fast.". And sure, a lot of sites with AMP framework are fast... but that doesn't mean that you have to build a site in AMP to make it fast. You could build a simple site with similar principles and get it fast too. Similarly, not all ARM laptops are fast. Even if the laptops hw is fast, you want something that can efficiently run x86 code as well for compatibility purposes for many years.

It’s true that ARM alone isn’t the reason for the M1’s performance, but it’s definitely a significant factor. x86 is old — modern x86 chips are still backwards-compatible with the original 8086 from 1978 — and it’s stuck with plenty of design decisions that might have been the correct choice sometime within the past 45 years but no longer today. Whereas the M1 only implements AArch64, a complete redesign of the ARM architecture from 2012, so it doesn’t have to deal with legacy architectural baggage. (We’ve known x86 was the wrong design since the 80’s — hence why there’s no Intel chips in smartphones — but it hasn’t been realistic for anybody except Apple to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to make a high-performance non-x86 chip.)

Some examples:

- x86 guarantees strong memory ordering on multi-processor systems, which adds completely unnecessary overhead to every memory access. arm64 uses a weak memory model instead, providing atomic instructions with relaxed or acquire/release semantics (see https://youtu.be/KeLBd2EJLOU?t=28m19s for a more detailed discussion). This significantly improves performance all around the board, but especially with reference counting operations (which are extremely common and often a bottleneck in code written in ObjC/Swift): https://twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238434235568128

> fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1

- x86 instruction decode is pretty awful, a significant bottleneck, and not parallelizable due to the haphazardly-designed variable-length CISC instruction set. arm64’s instruction set is highly regular and easy to decode, so Apple can decode up to 8 instructions per clock (as opposed to 4 for x86 chips). Most sources agree this is why the M1 can have such a big out-of-order-execution window and achieve such high instruction-level parallelism compared to Intel/AMD.

- x86_64 has only 16 architectural registers, compared to 32 for arm64. This means the compiler has a much harder time generating efficient, parallelizable code and must resort to spilling registers much more often.

The issue for me is that ARM is also really old now. I mean, just look at the ISA Apple has to use to run their MacOS on it: it's littered with NEON extensions and more cruft than you can shake a stick at. Simply put, Apple's implementation of ARM is decidedly CISC. On top of this, I'm still dumbfounded by the fact that they didn't go for a chiplet design where ARM could truly shine: if Apple had went the chiplet route, the M1 could have had a much higher IO ceiling and might have a shot at addressing more than 16 gigs of RAM.

Apple has a much bigger issue, though. ARM doesn't scale: it's a fundamental conceit of the architecture, one that a lot of people are probably willing to take on a laptop that will mostly be used for Twitter and YouTube. This presents issues for the rest of the market though, and it will be fascinating to see how Apple retains their pro userbase while missing out on the high-performance hardware sector entirely.

I think x86 is pretty terrible too, if it's any consolation, but really it's the only option you've got as a programmer in the 21st century. I hopped on the Raspberry Pi bandwagon when I was still in middle school, I grew up rooting for the little guy here. Looking out on the future landscape of computer hardware though, I really only see RISC-V. ARM is an improvement on x86, but I don't think it's profound enough to make people care. RISC-V, on the other hand, blows both of them out of the water. On consumer hardware, it's able to accelerate pretty much any workload while sipping a few mW. On professional hardware, you can strap a few hundred of those cores together and they'll work together to create highly complex pipelines for data processing. On server hardware, it will probably move like gangbusters. Even assuming that cloud providers pocket half the improvements, a 5x price/performance increase will have the business sector racing to support it.

So yeah, it is a pretty complex situation. Apple did a cool thing with the M1, but they have a long ways to go if they want to dethrone x86 in it's entirety.

Where to start?

> ARM is really old now.

Well aarch64 was announced in 2011 so not really that old.

> Apple’s implementation of ARM is decidedly CISC.

CISC is a description of the instruction set not the implementation.

> ARM doesn’t scale.

No idea what this means but you can get 128 core Arm CPUs and address huge amounts of memory but perhaps you have another definition of scaling.

And so on.

As far as I understand it, “CISC” doesn’t mean “has a lot of instructions”, it means the individual instructions are themselves complex/composable/expressing more than one hardware operation. For instance, on x86 you can write an instruction like ‘ADD [rax + 0x1234 + 8*rbx], rcx’ that performs a multi-step address calculation with two registers, reads from memory, adds a third register, and writes the result back to memory — and you can stick on prefix bytes to do even more things. ARM doesn’t have anything like that; it is a strict load/store architecture where every instruction is fixed-width with a regular format and either accesses memory or performs a computation on registers.

Stuff like hardware primitives for AES/SHA, or the FJCVTZS “JavaScript instruction” don’t make a processor CISC just because they’re specialized. They all encode trivial, single-cycle hardware operations that would otherwise be difficult to express in software (even though they may be a bit more specialized than something like “add”, they’re not any more complex). x86 is CISC because the instruction encoding is more complicated, specifying many hardware operations with one software instruction.

I’m not exactly sure whar all the “cruft” is in ARM that you’re referring to. The M1 only implements AArch64, which is less than 10 years old and is a completely new architecture that is not backwards-compatible with 32-bit ARM (it has been described as being closer to MIPS than to arm32). NEON doesn’t strike me as a good example of cruft because SIMD provides substantial performance gains for math-heavy programs, and in any case 10 years of cruft is much better than 45.

I’m curious as to why RISC-V is different or better? I don’t know much about RISC-V — but looking at the Wikipedia article, it just looks like a generic RISC similar to MIPS or AArch64 (and it’s a couple years older than AArch64 as well). Is there some sort of drastic design difference I’m missing?

The only advantage I’ve heard put forward for RISC-V on single threaded applications is the existence of compressed instructions - which could reduce cache misses albeit at the expense of a slightly more complex decoder. I’m a bit sceptical as to whether this is material though as cache sizes increase.

Of course the flexibility of the RISC-V model allows approaches such as that being pursued by Esperanto [1] with lots and lots of simpler cores.

[1] https://www.esperanto.ai/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/HC2021.E...

ARM had THUMB, which definitely improved performance back in the GameBoy days — but they dropped that with AArch64, so presumably they decided it wasn’t beneficial anymore.

Indeed and IIRC the increased code density got them into Nokia phones too.

I find it hard to believe that they didn't drop Thumb from AArch64 without a lot of analysis of the impact on performance.

If you don't think arm can scale any further, why do you think x86 can? They could easily double all the specs in the "M2" and slap two+ of them into a mac pro.

> On top of this, I'm still dumbfounded by the fact that they didn't go for a chiplet design where ARM could truly shine: if Apple had went the chiplet route, the M1 could have had a much higher IO ceiling and might have a shot at addressing more than 16 gigs of RAM.

Remember that M1 is just a mobile SoC that work for iPad/MacBook Air. It's exceptionally great so people tend to confuse M1 is targeted higher end. 16GB max is fine for a mobile SoC in 2021. I can't wait M1X.

M1 has very fast memory and BUS access. It takes money and is not so sexy for marketing, but it works.

On the competition, like Qualcomm, many Apple engineers (IIRC several tens of them) from the chip design team left and formed a new company called Nuvia, which was then acquired by Qualcomm in the beginning of this year. Apple has had a big lead on SoCs for some years, but I wonder when/if Qualcomm’s acquisition will start beating Apple’s lead here.

From listening to interviews of Apple tech folks, they also have done a lot of optimization of their CPUs based on calls frequently used by Mac OS. I don’t recall specific examples but the fact that they can control both the hardware and software allows them to profile and tune the system as a whole.

Agreed that architecture is only a (possibly small) part but Arm’s business model and the other things that Arm brings to the table are also relevant. For example the small / large core approach that Apple uses hasn’t previously been an x86 feature (although clearly that is changing).

Also non Apple Arm CPUs do outclass x86 in a huge segment of the cpu marketplace - on smartphones and tablets.

I’d don’t think that anyone previously has thrown the amount of cash at laptop / desktop / server Arm designs that Intel spends on x86 designs - we are now seeing a number of firms having a serious go (AWS / Ampere / Qualcomm / Nvidia possibly) so with Intel fighting back on its process issues it will be an interesting few years!

I'm curious to see how Alder Lake's clone of the ARM big.LITTLE design performs. I wouldn't be surprised if at the very least it lets Intel beat out AMD in the mobile CPU space. (Which would be great simply because Ryzen 4000 laptops are near impossible to get)

ARM is not a magic bullet but the M1 stems from the trend of phone processors growing up to be competitive in the PC market.

Since almost (all?) mobile phones use ARM I can see a similar process of adapting other ARM processors to the PC market.

But of course Apple is so far ahead that we really don't know wether and when there will be a competitive alternative, so it may as well be a streamlined x64, or a new ISA, sure.

It seems to all depend on some very experienced CPU design teams and it seems that actually Apple lost some of them in the last year, I would track these news to get a better model of predicting the future than the ARM/x64 divide.

What are you doing on your laptop where you can see such a big difference? My x86 laptop (Purism Librem 14) has an all-day battery and plenty more performance than I need. But I don't do things like compile code all day. If I were running a really big compute task I'd use a desktop or cluster.

This is what I don't get about high performance laptops.

Low end Ryzen 3 laptops have four cores, single thread performance within a few percent of the fastest processors in existence and will do something like render a web page at a speed indistinguishable from instantaneous.

The fastest laptops have twice that many cores. And if you actually try to use them, either half of them are low performance cores or they all clock down to a speed that makes them equivalent to a quad core desktop.

Whereas for the same price as a high end laptop, you get a desktop with 12 or 16 high performance cores and >16GB memory which is so much faster for intensive tasks that the laptop should be embarrassed to show up.

Why should I do anything other than buy an inexpensive laptop with a good screen and keyboard and a fast desktop I can access remotely for any kind of intensive workload?

I do agree ultrabook + powerful desktop is the best combo for most people who actually need a powerful computer. that's what I ran for many years. there are a few reasons why you might want a powerful laptop though, mostly coming down the limitations of remote access.

using a GUI over remote kinda sucks imo. even something like text editing is not as smooth as it would be locally. photo/video editing and especially anything 3D (CAD, gaming, etc.) is really painful.

there's also the security implications of enabling remote desktop. it's not a showstopper, but it's something I'd rather not worry about for my personal computer.

and finally, if you have the money for a powerful desktop and a powerful laptop, why not get both?

anyways, I just gave away my old xps 13 and replaced it with a zephyrus g15. it's not nearly as fast as my 9700k + 1080ti desktop, but it runs most games acceptably at 1440p. c++ compilation is very fast, though obviously not comparable to an overclocked 9700k. the portability and overall fit and finish aren't as nice as the xps 13, but now that I'm not taking the laptop everywhere as a student, I don't find it to be much of a compromise.

I agree in principle.

The real answer for why most do not do this is that IT-organisations are already under-dimensioned and over-burdened and it’s cheaper to maintain a small set of laptop models (which most likely are bought with some sort of support contract) than it is to assemble and support desktop computers.

Agreed. I hate that M1 is so good. I got an M1 macbook pro when my older laptop broke and I needed to temporarily deal with some iOS work. I bought it thinking I would regret it and have to replace it with another machine especially being used to 15inch devices. But it turned out to be such a great experience using this device without ever worrying about charging and rosetta2 worked so much better than expected.

I hate that this device is so great that when I look at other options with linux support I just get drawn back to this. It is really frustrating to have such a great hardware be limited by the software, rather the userspace(kernel and drivers seem solid). MacOS is just so frustrating at times. Asahi team's linux support can't come fast enough.

What do you feel like you're missing in userspace?

- A good (not Homebrew and not quite Macports) package manager.

- Ways to permanently disable Gatekeeper

- Some kind of quick setup. On Linux I use a bootstrapping script, MacOS does not offer the same extensibility.

- Real virtualization support like QEMU

- Real container support (if I set up another local Docker host on a Mac I swear to god...)

- Up-to-date coreutils

- A way to install Git without dragging along a few gigs of dependencies

- Ways to monitor my network usage and ensure Apple isn't spying on me

- Real encryption (eg. Apple/NSA isn't holding a master key)

- CUDA support

- 32-bit app execution

- A way to disable the hash that gets sent to Apple every time I open an app

That's just the starter kit, if I sat down with some pen and paper I could probably keep going ad-infinitum.

- A good (not Homebrew and not quite Macports) package manager.

nix?

- Some kind of quick setup. On Linux I use a bootstrapping script, MacOS does not offer the same extensibility.

Apple mdm implies that the hooks exist, although I know notthing of using that and it very well might be insufficient.

- Real virtualization support like QEMU

Isn't hyperkit decent?

I agree with the general thrust of your comment, though; just unsure of some details.

> - Ways to monitor my network usage and ensure Apple isn't spying on me

This may not be complete monitoring, but Little Snitch (from obdev.at) can monitor outgoing connections, alert you and let you to block or allow those. Last year when macOS Big Sur was released, this didn’t work for a while for Apple’s programs, but that was later changed by Apple.

I feel you, but for me it's not a list of deficiencies in OSX. I came from Linux then used OSX almost exclusively (because work) for about 4 years and I still hate it. I agree the list of things above are real problems, but you could solve all of them and I'd still hate it.

For me it basically it comes down to this:

Macs are just similar enough to the Linux to fool me into thinking I know what I'm doing. But then things are just subtly different such that nothing quite works. It's like, if you were Satan and your Q4 objective was to design a computer that you could give to me -- a "computer expert" -- to make me feel like a moron every time I try to do literally anything at all on it... Apple computers pretty much hit it out of the park.

It's also a lot of little usability things. I thought Apple was supposed to be the usability king? Yet it patently cannot handle simple things like:

* I want "natural" scrolling on the touchpad, but "regular" scrolling when using a plugged-in mouse with a mousewheel. The options are in TWO DIFFERENT settings windows, but changing one changes the other. Why? Even Linux, not famed as the Usability King, had this figured out in 2012.

* I want one of my monitors to be vertical. When I plug them in, it's a coin-toss as to whether or not it will remember which one it is. 50% of the time I have to tilt my head 90 degrees and set the 270* monitor to 0* and the 0* monitor to 270*. In the end I wrote an apple-script to do this automatically and bound it to a keyboard key.

> I want "natural" scrolling on the touchpad, but "regular" scrolling when using a plugged-in mouse with a mousewheel. The options are in TWO DIFFERENT settings windows, but changing one changes the other. Why? Even Linux, not famed as the Usability King, had this figured out in 2012.

This also drives me bonkers. The reason I think it is still this way is that at Apple everyone is using the Magic Mouse which has touch scrolling on it (you scroll like a trackpad with your finger) and so presumably most never toggle this. Another example of pain if you go off the happy path the apple developers use and keep tidy and clean.

I have this exact preference as well, and my solution was this little utility app: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ Being a Mac user for many years, I’ve found that there’s almost always been some simple app that I’ve been able to find that can fit my UX preferences.

Wait, are you saying that if you set up FileVault to not use your iCloud account, Apple still holds a master key? I thought that was the whole point of using your own recovery key

Seconding this question!

2017 article says Apple doesn't have a copy without iCloud enabled, https://www.macworld.com/article/229963/want-to-recover-a-fi...

I can't respond in good faith without access to the source code. Everything that I would tell you is just conjecture based on either trust or hatred of Apple, which is equally useless to the consumer. Use your best judgement.

What do you want to do that homebrew doesn’t do well?

Re: package managers, have really enjoyed pkgsrc. Only wish there were more prebuilt packages.

Most of the important ones like package managers, containers, not calling home etc are mentioned by the others. So I will mention things I don't think are discussed enough by linux switchers.

The one I didn't think I would yearn for but am really reminded of everyday are- desktop environments and window managers. My friends couldn't stop praising the UX but even after a long time trying to get used to it I still am annoyed by the application switching keyboard shortcuts, lack of ability to set system wide shortcuts for launching basic things like terminal. I won't talk about the lack of some cli applications I loved because I expected that when I moved(and it is better than I thought). I have tried iterm2, hyperswitch, rectangle. I understand that different systems have different behaviours and I can't expect it to behave the same but I have observed my friends, and others and the level of keyboard driven userflow I can achieve even in something like windows just seems worse here. It's not that it isn't possible but rather the behaviour has subtle quirks that I can't always rely on it. And lastly animations and latency. Even after turning all animations, it just is slow. I was used to having applications open before my keyboard would even leave the shortcut key and here I find myself waiting for things to start. I thought I was being nitpicky until I had to use my 2014 model haswell laptop for something and it just was such a breeze compared to the provenly faster processor and storage of m1. What's everyone's experience like?

Command+space t<Enter> for terminal (at first you’ll have to type “terminal”, but after 10 or so it becomes the first result for “t”).

The same for other aplications.

You can also, from terminal, do a open -a application_name if you want.

This is a very poor replacement for something that really should be instant and cerebral like app shortcuts.

This is what I use and it is part of muscle memory now. But this is a part of thousand cuts that make the experience less than amazing.

My friends couldn't stop praising the UX but even after a long time trying to get used to it I still am annoyed by the application switching keyboard shortcuts, lack of ability to set system wide shortcuts for launching basic things like terminal.

Hammerspoon is the answer to all of these. The common solution is to rebind caps lock (using Karabiner Elements) to be “hyper” (cmd + alt + shift + ctrl) and then bind global keyboard shortcuts with that using Hammerspoon.

I vaguely remember having tried hammerspoon but can't remember why I didn't continue using it. Will give it a proper shot. Thanks!

Okay. Just tried hammerspoon and I love it. Love the documentation as well. Thanks.

If someone were complaining about inability to configure keyboard shortcuts on Linux and you recommended a solution like Hammerspoon, it'd invite an onslaught of ‘this is why Linux is too overcomplicated and annoying for normal people’ comments.

Setting global keyboard shortcuts on Linux doesn't require you to learn a whole-ass LUA API. It's just there, for all the popular DEs.

Oh I absolutely agree. MacOS in general is not very good for power users out of the box.

Use iTerm2 and set the “hotkey”. That gives instant switch to terminal with one key.

Can you give other examples of command line app problems or keyboard driven workflow problems you’re having? I expect people here will be able to show you how to solve them.

Even on Linux I rarely bother hitting a hotkey to open a terminal. Why? Because I have it load on startup and almost never close it.

I just bought one and have to agree. I was aiming for the i9 because audio production tools hadn’t migrated fully but it wasn’t available anymore so I went with an M1. inside of a month any of the tools or plugins I’ve bought in the past have all updated for the m1. Including Waves plug-ins now.

Outside of software work I run Logic as my primary DAW and it’s like there are no limits. It’s fantastic.

I was going to replace my thinkpad with a new thinkpad, but when apple released the M1 macbook air I had to change my mind. I paid the same that I would have paid for a T series, but got something that has the sleek thin and light build quality on par with an X1 with performance of a P series and battery life that hasn't existed on thinkpads ever since they dropped power bridge. Oh, and it is fanless. If my macbook air fell into the abyss I would replace it with another air right away, it is that good.

If lenovo still made thinkpads like they used to: reasonably priced, easy to upgrade and repair, with large external batteries, and with top-notch keyboards, I might have opted for a thinkpad still. But they don't make those. All new thinkpads have so-so keyboards, they all have internal batteries (and often too small), and they're getting harder to upgrade and repair with every generation. Lenovo has chosen to chase after the macbook design, and that makes me less likely to buy thinkpads, because a thinkpad will never be as good a macbook as a macbook.

Not so, and here's why:

Apple is chasing a target, and so does Lenovo. But Lenovo is chasing the way a MacBook used to be, which is good in my opinion.

And Apple is skating wherever THE PUCK ARE THEY SKATING NOW SRSLY

> If lenovo still made thinkpads like they used to: [..] and with top-notch keyboards, I might have opted for a thinkpad still. But they don't make those. All new thinkpads have so-so keyboards

I've seen this a few times and am curious: I got a Thinkpad at the end of 2019, and the keyboard is waaay better than the various HP, Dell, and Asus laptops I've had in the past. Did I get lucky or were all of those just way worse than I thought? What's the difference between old and current Thinkpad keyboards?

It depends on your definition of good, as for me most laptops have bad keyboards, and so-so is actually somewhat of a compliment. I do think thinkpad keyboards are still better than macbook keyboards, but not by as large a degree as they used to be.

This article is a good summary of the keyboard situation: https://www.notebookcheck.net/X1-Carbon-Gen-9-Lenovo-has-to-...

The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts: I use one third of that with Intel...

Crunching some numbers, some benchmarks seem to place the M1 as three times faster. Through raw numbers, the M1 seems not much more "performant per watt" than the Pentium Silver - only slightly better. And, for a laptop, the importance is (in general) more on energy efficiency than in speed.

Edit: danieldk rightly noted below that TDP is a "high load consumption estimate". Official data for the "situational" consumptions are a bit harder to find.

The TDP of the M1 is between 15 and 20 Watts

That's the TDP. For light daily tasks (casual web browsing, e-mail, etc.) the M1 primarily relies on the energy-efficient Icestorm cores. While typing this comment and having some applications in the background (like Slack), package power use hovers between 40 and 300mW (roughly 100mW on average).

The energy efficiency of M1 MacBook is remarkable. My wife had an M1 before I did. She was in some video meetings on battery for some hours, I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining.

>I wouldn't believe her when she told me she still had 80% battery remaining.

Really? I feel like that's just having any 2021 laptop. I have a 13" Linux laptop with the i7-1185g. I'm not going to pretend it matches the performance/watt of an M1, but a few hours of video calling makes a completely negligible difference to battery life for me. 20% for a few hours of video calls just feels baseline.

I've never been in a situation where I needed to get back to a charger, and can happily go the whole day of development and meetings with charge left over to spare.

We should also compare the batteries to talk about "hours". This one is around 40Wh, according to `upower -d`; when it was new, I could do light work for 12..14h (Linux "desktop").

I have been trying getting some numbers from `powerstat`, intrigued by danieldk's results of 0.1W consumption: I am getting 3.7W during this browsing session. That 0.1W must be related to the CPU only. The result from `powerstat` is aggregate (if I raise the display lightness to an uncomfortable level the consumption raises to 4.5W). I do not know how to only get the consumption of the CPU. Trying to check...

Edit: I am really not sure how to disaggregate consumption and find a number comparable to that 0.1W. Maybe, danieldk, you could provide instead the aggregate consumption - the total (not just CPU) average consumption of your system? And eertami? Just to get an idea.

Really? I feel like that's just having any 2021 laptop. [...] 20% for a few hours of video calls just feels baseline.

I had a brief Linux/Windows excursion with a ThinkPad T14 Ryzen laptop. Three hours of video meetings was enough to drain most of the battery in Linux (worse power management, plus no hardware encoding/decoding in some video meeting apps). In Windows, it lasted a bit longer, but the battery would definitely be drained 50%, often more.

The ThinkPad was not a lemon. This seems like pretty normal drain if you look at people's experiences on the web.

The M1 is an SoC with CPU + GPU + NPU + NAND Controller and many others, being used in a Fanless condition under 10W on MacBook Air.

>Official data for the "situational" consumptions are a bit harder to find.

A single HP Core uses ~4W at peak. It's performance per watt is quite far ahead than anything in x86 at the moment. Intel AlderLake might help a bit. But will still be behind in pref / watt.

This system for example, according to `powerstat`, seems to work at around 3.5W, with minimum values below 3W and maximum around 7.5W.

It would be interesting to get a "powerstat database" of different systems for comparison.

Lol

No, he's correct on the side of speed. But that only ticks one of seven.

That was a significant development, six years late to the table my personal count. So yes, I'm aware.

If only it did not come packaged in a sissy mirror powder-box I'd love it. They flimsy keyboard with no travel, and the fragile glossy screen with no touch/stylus are deal-breakers for me. I did try use those at the store, no good.

From one point of view, non-x86 efficient laptops have been mainstream for Linux users for a long time in the form of ARM Chromebooks.

The M1 Air not having fans is the real game changer for me. If you haven't used a laptop without fans you probably don't realize how good things could be.

+1 absolutely correct.

I bought an M1 MacBook Pro early this year and it is a beast, performance wise.

I just started a new ML job and my company sent me a new Intel 17” MBP, and while it is beast-like, not a beast.

One trick to M1 is installing the M1 ARM version of Homebrew, so programs and libraries installed are M1 native.

AMD 5850U is almost as good as M1 and it beats it in power performance benchmarks as well in multicore performance:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v...

Both have TDP of 15 WATT.

I have Thinkpad P14S Gen 2 (AMD) and can work on the machine the whole day without charger and it never ever get hot.

TDP != actual power usage especially when they're pushed to the limit

I've been hoping to see a RiscV laptop for Linux, equivalent to the M1 Mac, but not seeing anything on the horizon.

>>> Apple Silicon M1 or nothing

I've used ARM based chromebooks. As well as ARM embedded boards running linux as a desktop. But I am intrigued by the Mac Mini M1 with 6K out. I wish I could get a demo of the 6K 32" Pro XDR Display. At $5K its hard to justify, but it looks like the only 6K monitor available right now ;)

M1 with official Linux will be perfect except for price (especially ram and storage price , I need 128gb ram and 2 tb ssd), I think m1 is 'cheap' because Apple is buying apple customers not just selling laptops..

Is this user specific though? I mainly still use a 2013 MacBook Air and I’ve never had power management issues. I can work 10-12 hours on a full charge. Recharge is pretty quick. 90% of my usage is browser, text editor, light terminal, and a pretty basic dev environment. The only times I’ve hit performance issues is working with video editing and graphics. I don’t game and don’t edit videos , so that was a minor pothole on this long journey.

If this is the main benefit of M1 I’m likely to be under welmed is what I’m thinking. I’ll upgrade to it next, but it’s not going to force me to upgrade. I expect at some point Apple will start making my device suck via MacOS updates like they’ve done with iOS and those devices.

0. Linux compatibility, I am not super picky about getting everything to work perfectly but I should be able to trust that the software I prefer to use will run and my laptop will connect to wifi and play audio properly and so on.

1. IPS screen (mostly a given nowadays, but this wasn't always so)

2. Trackpoint, I hate trackpads. Pretty rare option so I could possibly be convinced otherwise if the trackpad is particularly good.

3. Decent keyboard, any laptop will always be primarily a text processing machine for me. (tablet version) 4. User serviceability, with battery and RAM being highest priority but expandable storage is nice too, and all other replaceable parts are a nice bonus.

5. General ruggedness, the whole point of a laptop is being able to travel with it and it's the kind of tech I expect to last me for years.

6. Battery life, though I am not super picky about this.

7. Everything else including performance, higher resolutions than 768p, thinness, appearance, touchscreen (roughly listed in order of preference).

Posted from my trusty Thinkpad X230t which is the only laptop I'm aware of that ticks nearly all my boxes. It's bulky and makes a vacuum cleaner noise when compiling and the battery only lasts 4-5 hours of normal use, though. Still, good enough for web browsing, various forms of text processing, watching videos, listening to music and the vast majority of what you might use a computer for.

I did look into the Framework laptop recently but while it's probably the closet things in a long time the keyboard doesn't look good and there's no trackpoint (nor even physical mouse buttons)

Similar here. I've been spoiled by Lenovo, although it's not perfect. It's mostly a coding machine for me too.

0. Linux compatibility: minimal driver problems, hibernation can fail less than 1% of the time. 1. Touchpad with mouse buttons (ideally 3) is not negotiable. 2. A decent keyboard with all keys from the home/end/... block. Full sized arrows would be nice, half-sized are a no. 3. Not bigger than a sheet of A4 paper. 4. A non-glare, wide angle display. 5. Good WiFi sensitivity and performance. 6. A hard drive activity light is quite useful. 7. When it inevitable gets thermally throttled, it should still be useful for web browsing. 8. Mute/mic mute buttons are nice. So are volume buttons. 9. Open firmware: WiFi, coreboot, libreboot. I'm a hacker, and don't like fences.

Same thoughts about the Framework laptop. I hope it becomes an option in the future.

> I could possibly be convinced otherwise if the trackpad is particularly good.

Genuine question: what about Macbook trackpads? We have a MBP 2013, and it runs leaps and bounds over my Windows laptop which came out in the same year. I'm not sure if other laptops have caught up with Apple yet, but Macbook trackpads are commonly referred to as the best in the business.

I've heard they're good, but Macbooks tick almost none of the boxes in the list, so I am not very interested in them.

I will say that Macbooks are more rugged than they appear, and the battery life on the M1 models is best-in-class. That said, they're not very open or Linux-compatible (yet, at least). I bought an M1 Air and love it, but it's very use-case dependent, I think.

They are basically an iPhone digitizer in landscape mode, so yeah, they are very much OK. Trackpoint is still preferable for when editing text.

I’ve tried a lot of Windows laptops, and there’s still nothing on the Win/Linux side, even in Dell and MS laptops, that compares with the precision and natural feeling of a Mac trackpad.

Apple leapt ahead of other laptops again with their trackpad that uses haptics instead of an actually button. It takes consistent pressure across the whole trackpad instead of being more difficult to press as you get closer to the hinge. It feels ridiculously convincing that you're actually pushing a button and even has a cool feature where you have a second action by pushing harder. And it really does feel like you've pushed a button deeper.

Yeah, the haptic stuff is mad! I was amazed when I learned about it, I thought it was a real button with some sort of touch sensor.

You can literally change the feedback from the "click" (and the push-down strength) in Settings. Even in 2015 that felt decades ahead of its time.

If anything I still prefer that trackpad over a real button.

> I did look into the Framework laptop recently but while it's probably the closet things in a long time the keyboard doesn't look good and there's no trackpoint (nor even physical mouse buttons)

It also has a screen that needs fractional scaling which makes Framework a deal breaker for me, no second thoughts about it. I'm not buying anything with a fractionally scaled display if I can help it.

Why not? Waylanyd has gotten to a stage where I can use it as a daily driver and have a better experience than with X.

Is it X support or something else?

200dpi according to calculator, which is about right for 2x. What would you prefer?

2256x1504, 13.5”

https://www.calculators.tech/dpi-calculator#dpi-viewing-dist...

Says it is good from about three feet away.

200dpi on a laptop screen would ideally need 1.6x scaling, not 2x. It could vary between 1.4x to 1.8x but definitely not 2x. Not sure what's wrong with that website.

At 13.5 inches, it would've been better to take a page from some Surface laptops and go for 3000x2000 or 3200x1800, depending on the preference for aspect ratio. At ~260 PPI, 2x scaling works fine.

My tastes are fairly similar to yours. I'm curious which boxes aren't ticked by the more recent X200 series Thinkpads since the X230 in your view?

I recently purchased one, and I did a bunch of research before deciding which to get. I settled on an X270 because it's user upgradeable, supports two SSDs, has two batteries, has hardware VP9 encoding/decoding, includes a USB C port, and is hopefully much closer to the ruggedness of the impeccable X200-X230 range than the newer models. The only thing thing I felt like I compromised on was the lack of support for 32 GB of memory. I was able to purchase an i7 X270, 4TB SSD, 16GB RAM, and replacement batteries all for under $1k, and it blows any new laptop that costs twice as much out of the water for my needs.

The X270 has a 6th or 7th gen dual core CPU. If you get an 11th gen i5 like you'll find in the sub-$1000 laptop range you'll get something that is literally twice as fast as even the highest end 7th gen i7. That is a lot of performance to leave on the table.

you'll find in the sub-$1000 laptop range you'll get something that is literally twice as fast

That's true, but it would require some combination of major compromises on the SSD, RAM, hot swappable battery, build quality, form factor, and keyboard/trackpoint. I'm almost never CPU limited in my day to day workflows, even on a 2nd gen i5, and I have cloud resources available when I need to do something CPU intensive like model training for work. It's a tradeoff that isn't right for everyone, but those other factors are far more important to me than the CPU.

X220 is my primary computer. It never uses more than 4 of the 16GB RAM. I ran the fan almost all the time at full speed tough. The killer app (in a bad sense) is Zoom. It kills the CPU and can't handle virtual backgrounds.

How much RAM is used is determined by you pattern of application usage (and OS), not by your choice of computer.

I know. I just wanted to emphasize on Zoom being the only thing that makes an otherwise perfect computer not powerful enough (for me of course).

I feel like the X-series Thinkpads after the X230 are an unhappy compromise, somewhat better in some ways and worse in others. The further away in time you get from the X230 the more they sacrifice things I care about.

The X270 feels more like a side-grade, trading in a certain amount of ruggedness and maintainability for a better screen and better battery life, but a pretty minor performance improvement.

ApparentlyApparently 3rd party manufacturers are looking at building keyboards with trackpoint for the Framework laptops.

That would definitely incline me towards it a lot more, but I'd have to see it first.

Have you ever used a trackpoint-style pointing device from anyone other than IBM or Lenovo and had it be any good?

I think the current Lenovo trackpoints aren't as good as the IBM devices used to be in the late 1990s. I assume they were sacrificed on the same altar as the keyboards.

But the ones I've used from Dell, Toshiba and HP were so aggressively terrible I'd rather just carry around an external mouse.

So I like the idea of a framework with a trackpoint-style pointer, but I am afraid it's likely to be awful.

I have used some of them. Indeed not as good but useable.

Sadly Lenovo is taking alot of wrong directions imo, non-removeable battery, soldering memory now etc... I'd be happy to try something else and love the concepts behind the Framework.

Lenovo's descent into soldered RAM and the elimination of external batteries has me rooting for Framework too.

My daily driver is currently a T-480 that's about 3.5 years old. The relative stagnation of CPU and even IO in laptops has it still feeling reasonable to use. I'm hoping that by the time I want to replace it, Framework will really have found their stride and my decision will be obvious.

And I'd rather be stuck with a touchpad than a soldered SSD, which feels like Lenovo's next logical move.

How smooth is video playback of newer codecs or even higher resolution of any codecs at 4k? I thought about bringing back my w520 from the dead but the cost didn't seem worth it.

Coding videos below 1080p are harder to read and unless it's a school lecture, 720p is a minimum.

And is it you main, do you have a separate system for media consumption?

Yes you did describe explicitly a thinkpad. Why is trackpoint a preference?

Because it's just much more pleasant to use. Plus, being able to manipulate the mouse without taking my hands off the keyboard is also a big advantage.

I've never used a trackpad that did not have at least one of: bad palm rejection, inaccuracy around the edges, clicking that feels bad and/or makes the mouse cursor drift while trying to click.

Granted I have not used an expensive, modern laptop in a while and it could be much better now, but even then I just think the trackpoint is better UX and better posture, there's something uncomfortable about having to awkwardly squish your arm between you and the laptop to manipulate the cursor.

I see a lot of mentions of mainstream brands in this thread. If Linux compatibility is a criterion, why not a laptop built with that in mind?

Just a reminder that now exist, in no particular order: - Juno Computers - Tuxedo Computers - System76 - Slimbook - Starlabs - Pine - Framework - Manjaro Computers

Admittedly, the same chassis are reused across a couple of these examples, but there's choice

1. FOSS support and free + open + user-controlled, user-repairable, user-upgradable hardware.

2. Webcam and microphone with kill switches.

3. Battery life.

4. (added) Portable: about 13-14" screen, not too heavy.

5. Longevity, durability (sustainability).

6. Other factors: keyboard, touchpad, screen, wifi, quiet.

I'm fortunate that I don't need a GPU or extreme power for my daily laptop driver (and if I do, I have a desktop).

I'm also fortunate financially to be able to own both a Purism Librem 14 and a Framework DIY edition. It feels good to have my money support those causes, and the laptops are both perfect (except the Framework's battery life, so far).

https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

https://frame.work/

Once there's a framework keyboard with a standardized arrow key layout I'd probably buy one. It's an amazing step forward and I want to support the company's effort.

One of the cool things is that you could even buy now, and then replace the keyboard when a version you want comes out. They already sell tons of replacement keyboard types on their marketplaces

A high resolution screen. Meaning 200% scale — nothing else looks good. This is also a rarity these days, even though my 5-year-old Samsung ATIV Book 9 has it.

In the Windows world, sadly, things are a mess. Most new laptops including Microsoft's newest Surface Studio have fractional scaling, i.e., scaling set to a number other than 100% or 200%. As Steve Jobs said when he originally introduced retina screens on the iPhone, the only scale that looks good after 100% is 200%. Any other scale will have display artifacts. If the scale is 150% or 175% then horizontal lines on a web page will appear to have different thicknesses even when they are all actually the same thickness. This is a deal breaker for web developers and graphic artists, and for folks who just want the best looking screens.

I tried the screens of the newest laptops on display at BestBuy. Even 4k screens have this rendering artifact. Surprisingly, even when scaling is set to 300%.

Microsoft's now-obsolete Surface 2 and Surface 3 screens are one of the best. They have 3000x2000 screens and the dpi is 267. Most importantly, the display scale is set to 200%. Everything looks perfect. Sadly, Surface Laptop 4 and Surface Studios no longer use this screen. Their scales are set to between 100% and 200%, which means they have the aforementioned display artifacts. That's sad because the Surface Laptop 4 is one of the best Windows laptops in terms of industrial design.

Samsung Ativ Book 9 first released more than 6 years ago has 3200x1800 13 inch screens... one of the best in the industry. Sadly Samsung is no longer making Windows laptops with that DPI anymore.

All Macs have fractional scaling and AFAICT most people seem to have it on. For example my Macbook Pro has a native resolution of 2880x1800. The default OS resolution is 1440x900 (so 2x) but I have it set to 1680x1050 or 1.714

It looks fine and I see none of the issues you mention.

A big difference with Window though is that this scaling happens at a very low-level. The OS tells apps they are on a 2x display at 1680x1050, the OS then scales that 2x display (3368x2100) to 2880x1400. The DPI told to apps does't change on Mac.

The DPI does on Windows and because of various other poor? choices has some of the issues you mention

Actually, on windows apps that implement the DPI awareness API's aren't scaled by the OS at all, and if they implement them properly they even rescale when dragged between monitors of different DPI. So, that is arguably better than the way macOS does it, but only for apps that do the right thing, which isn't all of them. And when they don't implement it correctly, the outcome of OS-level scaling is often worse than on macOS.

This doesn’t really make sense. Your computer is still using all of the pixels on the screen (unless there is a GPU problem), it’s rendering everything bigger so that 2X pixels are used on a 2X screen. The OS isn’t scaling 1680x1050 bitmaps to 2880x1400, unless the apps are somehow producing bitmaps directly.

That's not really accurate for Windows. There's multiple forms of DPI scaling depending on what the application understands:

There's applications that don't understand it at all, in which case the system has the application render at 96 DPI and then scales it up. However, there is a an enhanced mode that was added partway through Windows 10's life which can adjust GDI+ drawing calls to render at the correct size for the target monitor. This can help a lot with making these applications render sharply.

There's applications that understand system-wide scaling. Applications in this category are told the scaling level of the primary monitor when they start up and will continue to render with that scaling even if the system's scaling level is changed or the application is moved to a monitor with a different scaling level set. When the scaling the application started with and the scaling of the monitor don't match, the OS will perform the remainder of the scaling.

Finally, there's applications that understand per-monitor scaling. These will not be scaled in any way by the OS. They receive notifications from the system about DPI changes so they can react to both being moved to different monitors and to the user changing the scaling settings. This was enhanced a little bit into Windows 10's life with a v2 that cleans up a handful of cases that weren't properly scaling.

Apple doesn't even do 200% scaling on most of their laptops by default. My 2018 15" MBP has a native resolution of 2280x1800 but the default is looks like 1680x1050 not looks like 1440x900.

Do you have difficulty viewing 1080p at 15" at 100% scaling? I found that very viewable on my old laptop so 4K at 200% should be fine. You can adjust the scaling if you're really bothered by fractional scaling. It's improved a lot too. Much better than it was in the Win 8 days.

> You can adjust the scaling if you're really bothered by fractional scaling.

Yes you can, but if you change it from the default then the fonts are either too big or too small.

It depends on the version of MacOS installed, it used to be the integer 2.0x scaling in the "best for display" default.

They moved to a fractional scaling default, and I seriously assume it's for short-sighted marketing reasons. 2x scaling is the sharpest & clearest - best for eyes - setting possible, and it's a shame they hide that option.

Personally I use a third party tool to keep the resolution at the 2x scaled (so 1440x900), as otherwise I get major eye strain.

That it doesn't get in the way of my work and life. Let me phrase it this way: A laptop is good when i don't have to think about it.

Super quiet, exceptional battery performance, lightweight, sturdy, excellent design, super fast, doesn't crash, doesn't reboot when it wants, does what it should do when i close the lid and never lets me down. Basically the M1, the first laptop that does fit my requirements.

I like Linux, but i have to be honest: Windows/Linux laptops can't compete in 2021 with the Apple M1. Maybe some day they will catch up.

What you describe reminds me of my time with the Pixelbook. Nothing since has come close to comfort and peace of mind that brought me.

Same, my ideal laptop is an M1 MacBook Air but with a bigger screen and more user serviceability. The M1 Air I have now is the first laptop since probably the 2012 15” Pro that truly feels like a generational upgrade instead of just an increment. For several months now I have not once had to think about performance, heat, volume, or battery life. And even though multi core performance benchmarks slower than some high end x86 devices, the M1 _feels_ faster. It’s a game changer.

I hope everyone else catches up soon, I’d love to buy the Lenovo (or whatever) equivalent of this and run Linux on it.

I never used a mac until my current job starting three years ago. I don’t think I could go back to random problems requiring me to reinstall driver or futz around with registry keys (never mind recompile the kernel). I have better things to do with my time at this point in my life.

I feel like I spend more time making MacOS like Linux than I do making Linux like MacOS. Certainly wastes plenty of company time, but my boss doesn't need to know that :)

Anecdotal counterpoint, but as someone who had to use a MBP for work, OSX has given me way more random problems. Installing a system update on an MBP still gives me anxiety and I would avoid it for as long as possible, since I never managed to do one without _something_ inexplicably breaking.

I have had my MacBook break but it was just broken at that point. I returned it to IT and got another one. The fact that I couldn’t do anything (or at least that was my perception) is a relief.

Same here, got a MBP from my work 2 years ago. I have had more issues with it than other non mac laptops in the past, both OS and hardware issues. Battery expanding, display issues, system processes using 100% cpu until I reboot as some examples.

I like Linux, but i have to be honest: Windows/Linux laptops can't compete in 2021 with the Apple M1. Maybe some day they will catch up.

Mostly because all the flagship laptops are stubbornly (or rather being strong-armed into) sticking with Intel.

> Mostly because all the flagship laptops are stubbornly (or rather being strong-armed into) sticking with Intel.

Intel sold StongARM (and XScale) along time ago. They might be in a much different place now if they didn’t.

Is this being sarcastic?

I thought the parent comment was making an intentional pun given intel’s well known history with strongARM.

High up my list is repairability, which is why I am a big fan of the Framework laptop.

Number two in my list. Hard to open? Hard to reach some parts? memory/ssd soldered on the mainboard? Go away.

Number one is immediate global availability so I won't have to deal with the customs or pre-order. Sadly the the Framework fails both.

Excellent hardware compatibility (full Linux support) is "number zero". I can only possibly forgive the finerprint scanner for being unusable on Linux (because these are not really necessary and the reality is they mostly are so I accept this).

> Number two in my list. Hard to open? Hard to reach some parts? memory/ssd soldered on the mainboard? Go away. Number one is immediate global availability so I won't have to deal with the customs or pre-order. Sadly the the Framework fails both.

I fail to follow your logic. Do you mean that Framework has memory/ssd soldered on the mainboard?

No, it's awesome in this aspect. I want one. But it's both US-only (AFAIK, I may be wrong) and pre-order. So I would have to both deal with the customs (extra time, money and papers overhead) and wait long.

It's US only currently, but they are looking at a global rollout (I'm patiently waiting in the UK).

I'll take a look at it when they do, thanks.

It's available in Canada too

Good point the current Thinkpad T14 and P14s and super difficult to open without breaking the plastic tabs

What's the solution if you break them? I broke some (if we are speaking about the same thing - I mean those little things that click and keep the bottom cover in place after you remove the screws) on one HP ProBook, now the trackpad-push clicking works unreliably. I thought of buying a whole new bottom cover on eBay but the serial number and the Windows sticker is on it so replacing it would probably void the warranty and other legal things perhaps.

The plastic tabs are ridiculous. Why do they use them when there are screws? To save an extra screw and a fraction of a penny off the price?

Screws have to be sourced. Stored. Present at repair site, etc.

That I can understand.

But the thing about broken tabs is that only some form of double-sided adhesive or drilling a hole and socket for a screw to replace the tab actually works sufficiently well.

So yeah, not a fan.

I'd totally invest my share in them (HP in my case) building a storage facility for extra screws (and the screws themselves can be manufactured anywhere - no real need to order from China and manage a complex and fragile supply chain). I bloody mean this when I buy a PRObook and an ELITEbook.

Drilling a place for socket for a screw in a laptop means drilling the mainboard - hardly a good idea :-]

At first, you broke some, but with some practice, you are better at this... Took me 5 or 6 to master this art ! But to get this kind of practice, you have to manage the laptops of a small company, that is only fun for the first day, after that, not that much.

Particularly with anything that wears. Batteries, fans, keyboard, flash storage. and maybe ports, need to be easy to replace.

Having no fan at all is a nice option.

Being able to upgrade the memory or storage also dramatically extends the useable life of a laptop.

i've seen all the hype but i have to ask: what is replaceable on these that you can't replace on a thinkpad t/pxx? (or p1)

Here are the parts they're selling. (A lot of them are "coming soon", though.) https://frame.work/marketplace

I'm not familiar with current ThinkPads.

i dunno. honestly it looks like a regular intel laptop made to look like an old macbook with bays for inverted usb-c dongles.

the whole "it's modular! here's your screwdriver! you can service your laptop by yourself and replace the ram! don't forget your coveralls, you're a hardware technician now!" thing seems a bit.. theatrical? but who knows, i've never owned a laptop with fixed storage and ram so maybe i'm not in the target demographic. also, who knows, maybe their inverted dongle thing will become a standard?

i've always just used thinkpads. they do a pretty good job of picking the right ports in the right quantities and have almost (excluding the ultra-ultralights) always allowed for replacement of ram, disk and sometimes have had a modular bay for cd-rom/dvd/additional disk/etc. quality seems to have dropped a little recently, but overall, still decent.

> honestly it looks like a regular intel laptop

That'd be true for laptops from 3-4 years ago. That's also what I thought about framework until I saw the recent crap Lenovo etc. are pushing in consumer segment. They have basically tablet motherboards. Everything else is soldered. No ram slots, no sata, no connectivity, only a single M.2. If you're lucky it'll have 1 ram slot. This'll only get worse and spread to all segments.

But that is only true for the consumer product line, isn't it? I have a Thinkpad T series and you can replace virtually everything and you can buy replacement parts super cheap on eBay because Thinkpads are so common.

I think it’s targeting the consumer market?

The usual replaceable parts are there in the Thinkpad P1 (SSD, RAM) but replacing the speakers, touch pad, screen or webcam is a much more involved process. I also haven't dared look at the keyboard replacement process. I also don't think you stand any chance of replacing the USB ports without a soldering iron once they start showing signs of wear and tear.

I think Thinkpads are actually quite fine for user serviceability, although I do find it was much easier to open my old HP Probook than it was to open my Lenovo P1 gen 3. Lenovo had me dig for a whole bunch of screws and tabs to pull off the bottom panel where HP let me access all the important parts with just one screw and a slide-off panel.

I ordered a Framework that should ship out sometime this month, pretty excited!

- decent design; no gamer laptops, blinking led monstrosities, etc. for me.

- decent performance; I'm an engineer. I actually lose time when things run slowly. Lots of time. Kills my flow and I bill a premium rate.

- decent screen. I look at this thing for the better part of a day. Also, I dabble with photography once in a while and occasionally some frontend stuff. So, HDPI/250 dpi or better.

- Decent ssd storage. I'm done with spinning disks. Not a thing in my life in the last decade.

- A keyboard and trackpad that are genuinely good. I use laptops as laptops and I hate having to plug in external peripherals for input.

- Linux compatible & hassle free.

Besides some of the led bling I find gaming laptops work pretty well as work machines (and some are toned down so much, they’re not embarrassing for adults). I also know a couple professionals that use them as their main machines (one does ed visualizations so the gpu..)

They tend to have lots of ports including wired Ethernet. Have great performance. Decent video cards. Are somewhat fixable/ upgradable.

Downside is power consumption. Sometimes the screens are just ok.

I ended up going with a system76 machine which comes with Linux so I didn’t have to futz with it. This model is a rebranded “Clevo” gaming machine too, but you wouldn’t know by looking at it.

The only comment my Razer Blade 15 gets is that it looks nice, when people notice it at all. The LED on the keyboard is programmable if you don't like that and I find it handy for low light situations. The triple-snake logo isn't that obtrusive either.

It also runs Linux great.

> HDPI/250 dpi or better > Linux compatible

I would not recommend getting a 4K. I have the 4K Dell XPS 15” and I wish I got the normal screen instead. Too much time wasted on resolution problems with some apps on Linux, and it only came with a touchscreen gloss finish - bad mistake.

> and it only came with a touchscreen gloss finish

Why do so many laptops only have a 3/4K option with a glossy finish? Personally, I can't stand glossy screens - sure, the colours look good in a showroom, but they're just too reflective in real-world use.

Sounds great, so what brand and model are you using now?

I'm a not out on the road a lot, need mostly just good CPU performance to compile one or two big projects and some "normal" things. I don't play games usually. But:

1. IPS, 1080p at least (and I think I prefer 1080p or may be the 4:3/3:2 variants)

2. Good keyboard with trackpoint. If the keys must have low key travel, no mushy keys at all. Prefer the security of knowing liquids can drain out if something were to happen.

3. Touchpad just needs to work without odd skips or pauses, which I have seen on a couple.

3. Linux supported hardware.

4. Good case, not fond of aluminum, particularly after seeing the shape of one really good macbook pro from a former colleague.

5. Good hinges with good support. No screws in plastic at all.

6. Matte screen. No touchscreen. My laptop is not a phone.

7. Good range of ports to not have to worry about ports. 2 USB, 2 HDMI, at least one USB-C to get new things and dedicated power.

8. Just enough power to take it from my desks for a few hours. I am always near a plug though.

9. I can use it for the next 10 years or more after getting it (writing this on my x220, and despite the screen, everything else is OK to me for a 10 year old computer). That means it must be repairable and have part supply for a long time.

10. SSD (250 GB is more than enough), 16 GB RAM

These things pretty much describe my t430s now (except a small points). I hope that framework can be that replacement.

Out of curiosity, has any HN customer bought a KDE Slimbook [1] or similar?

I want to buy a linux-first laptop, and I like the fact that they have configurable keyboards (i.e. those in layouts other than en-us, unlike System76!) a lot of configuration options, and linux-first support.

The "default" slimbook is aluminium, €899, comes with a Ryzen 4800 H, a 92 WH battery, actual physical ports, and relatively modest other specs. They offer much more "beefy" machines with linux as an OS option.

I've never used them. It's getting to the point where I want to replace my rMBP-2018 "Heatmonster" laptop and after Apple's latest directions, it'll be KDE as a daily driver for me.

[1] https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-kde/kde-slimbook-15-co...

1) Maxed-out battery (90-100WH)

2) Low-TDP modern CPU, ideally Ryzen

3) Bright, hi-res screen

There is nothing on the market that offers this. M1 mac is the closest option, but Apple shouldn't be given money.

I'm currently on a Thinkpad T480.

Why no money for apple ?

Anti-consumer behaviour. Multiple hardware design faults in macbooks. Actively working against repair, against software freedom, against the user (see recent CSAM fiasco). Non-removable storage. Preference of thin&light vs upgradeability/cooling.

I wouldn't mind that as I'm not their customer, but all the crap they introduce gets mindlessly copied by all their competition.

Adding to that, I'm afraid of the world moving away from the PC as a standard. Through a lucky set of circumstances, we were able to enjoy a relatively open and universal compatibility standard of computers for the last several decades.

I'm afraid of the computing world fragmenting again into several walled gardens in the likes of Amiga/Atari of old, nothing being compatible with each other, unable to run code not signed by the manufacturer.

The danger should IMO be obvious, but I watch in terror as my friends happily buy into the M1.

Seeing that, it seems like this is likely cyclical.

We’ll have 20 years of siloed hardware, and then some competitors figure out a way to get a foot in the door, or signed-only systems will become distasteful to consumers and Companies will revert, interoperability will become the norm again.

There are always barriers in computing and society will respond to it.

You dismiss 20 years of darkness like it's nothing...

PC-compatible hardware and software is not going anywhere...

Until everyone stops buying it and it becomes a premium thing which the little man like myself simply cannot afford.

PC like desktops are in _no_ danger of going anywhere. There will always been a huge gamer and hobbies market for them.

Laptops maybe, but the framework laptop is exactly what you want, seems pretty decent, and has a decent chance of taking off.

The real problem is that there is no competition.

Not a fan of Apple here but I use (and admittedly like) their products: I develop apps and iOS is solid on the app landscape, currently we don't even care about Android versions of our apps in almost any project that we use because most people who are "serious" about their apps are on iPhones and iPads. In addition, even though I have the hacker mindset of many out here, at the end of the day I need something reliable and good-looking, and well supported, which Apple has and others don't.

I don't like Apple's user-hostile behavior and would happily love to see some competition. For me:

Apple is bad, Microsoft/Google is worse. So Apple is relatively good.

PC like desktops are in no danger of going anywhere, there will always be a huge gamer and hobbyist market for them.

That's the premium you pay for the best.

I have a different definition of "best".

What is with this knee-jerk defense of Apple every time someone suggests holding them to a higher consumer standard?

You can sell good products while still embracing open technologies.

You pay $800 and you get your value. The market obviously decided that the value provided is good enough, since their sales are good. Just because you value certain things doesn't mean the collective does.

Just because some sliver (OK, large sliver) of their consumer base is satisfied with this shit doesn't mean that they didn't live a sizeable amount of people stranded for both hardware and software options. Because they did.

I used to be able to slam an MBP down on the woodworking table, open it up and start typing. Now there is no slamming, because they flimsy. No typing near dust, because they get stuck in the keyboard. Every app is a single window, so you can't chat with two people at once. Everything is in the cloud, so you wait on your very fast computer to do networking all the f.in time (even opening Finder). The UI has lost so much of it's legibility that I don't know what I'm looking at half the time anymore. Active window? Maybe not? What does that label say? Why is this a modal? Where is the "don't ask again items" preference pane?

We have parted ways, I think. I'm not riding with them anymore.

Flimsy? MacBooks? Are we in different universes?

Keyboard is/was a valid concern. But flimsy, I’m not seeing.

Pretty sure I could murder someone with my M1 MacBook Air, clean it, and then write code.

Or poke a hole in the screen by leaving a single speck of sand on the keyboard before closing the lid.

There used to be a thick glass panel in front of it, but no more.

Again, don’t know where you’re getting this. 2020 MacBook Air has a glass panel. Ctrl-F “glass” on https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/.

Would you please do something for me?

Open your new MacBook Air, place a single grain of sand smack in the middle of the keyboard between the G and the H. Close the lid.

Turn around and sit on it.

Tell me all about glass then. If you record it I'll have a listen.

Holy crap, now I have to sit on it? That’s a bit different than the original claim…

Only way to make sure.

Alternatively, throw a pinch of sand on the keyboard, close the lid, bag the Mac. Now, with some vigor, take it out blindly by any corner and trow it down on the thick wooden table, slamming it with it's own weight.

A few times.

And tell me how that gentle test went for you. :)

Send my condolences to any laptops you use.

Macbooks are easily the flimsiest devices I own if not for the display alone. I've dropped a Thinkpad out of a moving vehicle, and it booted up like nothing happened. My Macbook tumbled 2 feet onto a concrete floor and now the $600 topcase is destroyed...

This is the market being insane though, because they pay a premium because of branding.

Which is especially hilarious in low-income countries like mine. The cheapest latest iPhone (I don't remember what the current number is) costs about 3 median monthly incomes. Most of the population cannot afford one, so what do you do? get a loan and pay in monthly installments until the next one comes out, of course.

This isn't a rare occurrence, I'd say ⅓ of my acquaintances do this. The power of marketing at its finest.

It's protection of one's investment. One doesn't just buy a laptop from Apple but one invests in all the devices, apps, ecosystem and brand. It's why past apple users express so much hurt when the company crosses a line. To leave or even to criticise hurts psychologicaly and financially. Thus it is logical to protect ones investment and defend the brand on social media.

This extends to many brands of course for example AWS or anything where time or the person is invested but it's most easily noticeable with Apple on HN.

Yes. We live in a world where our only real freedom is our purchasing decisions. I think that leads to people making brands, TV shows, video games, etc. a big enough part of their identity that criticism of that thing feels like criticism of them personally.

How is a laptop an investment? Its a tool one uses, but it doesn't generate a return, properly speaking. Or would you say that all tools are investments?

It used to be, circa 2009-2015, for me and mine.

But not so anymore. Yes you pay. Yes the price is fair for what's on offer. No, it's not quality, and not the general direction I'm interested in, at all. Not in hardware, not in software.

> Preference of thin&light vs upgradeability/cooling.

I recently watched something[0] about the Macbook cooling (Intel, at least) and you seem to be right.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=0

Asus Vivobook 16X OLED? 1) 94 Wh battery 2) R7 5800h / R9 5800hx 3) 4K OLED screen that goes to 550

I think this is going to be my next work laptop. I have been eyeing the new M1X mac, but the attraction of Linux is too high on me. I will decide after Apple releases their better M1…

Just wondering, can we really feel the difference between 2k and 4k on a small screen?

Yes, other screens are ruined for you.

I'm currently dreading the time when I stop working from home and go back into the office, because at home I have a nice 4k monitor and a 3200x1800 laptop screen, whereas at work it's 1920x1080 or less - and that was fairly recently bought too.

My main monitor is a wonderful 27" Dell Ultrasharp 3K, and for my secondary monitor (which I keep in portrait orientation) I have a 24" Dell Ultrasharp FHD 16:10.

After seeing how crisp and clear the text is on my main screen, I was really annoyed with myself for not getting a 3K screen for my secondary monitor too :(

Very easily on text. Get a proper high-resolution display and you’ll never want to go back.

That 16″ 3840×2400 display means 283ppi; 1920×1200 would be only 142ppi. (Even a 13.3″ 1920×1080 is still only 166ppi.)

I went down from a Surface Book’s 13.5″ 3000×2000 (267ppi) to a Zephyrus G15’s 15.6″ 2560×1440 (188ppi) and although it’s definitely better than 1920×1080 it’s still definitely not as good as the Surface Book for crispness. (Most people probably wouldn’t worry about the difference, but they’d certainly notice it if going down to the 141ppi that 1920×1080 would represent.) That Vivobook looks magnificent: if I hadn’t just recently obtained my G15 and could actually get that Vivobook, I’d do so like a shot.

Sorry, 2k is a typo. I want to ask about the difference between 2880x1080 and 4k resolution (as I'm using a 2880x1080 display and I know the crispness is indeed a lot better than 1920x1200). I thought a 2880x1080 is already very good and further increase in resolution would be barely noticeable.

2880×1080 is a super widescreen ratio (8:3, or call it 16:6 or 24:9 if you prefer); I don’t know how you intend to compare it to a regular widescreen ratio (16:9) which is only two thirds of the width for a given height.

It also depends on the screen size. Such super-widescreenness is probably only found in fairly large monitors, and at that size I’d say that doubling the resolution (5760×2160) will have a massive effect on perceived text quality. At that size, and depending on how far away from the screen you use it, you could possibly even double it again and still tell and appreciate the difference.

Or for something not quite as good but more likely to be available, their Zephyrus G15: 90Wh, 5800HS or so, 2560×1440.

I have one and can confirm it has a great battery and is snappy. They're a little hard to find in certain configurations but for a "gaming" laptop it's a pretty decent daily driver.

I hadn't come across this laptop before - looks pretty good!

Do you own one? Keen to know what real world battery life is like, and if there are any tradeoffs/annoyances?

You’re on a ThinkPad, I’d rather not give Lenovo any money until they sort out the slave labour problems.

...which is so obviously not a problem Apple faces?

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428899/apple-suppliers-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/29/lens-te...

Ryzen still doesn't have Thunderbolt. For some -- like me -- this still excludes Ryzen.

And you are right that Intel U chips are rarely are shipping with 90Wh+ . But https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Zenbook/Zenbook-Flip-1... does. The Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 (Yoga Slim 7) has a 71 Wh, the Schenker Via 14 has a 73 Wh, the HP Spectre x360 15 72.9 Wh, the MSI Summit E15 has a 82 Wh.

Thunderbolt is Intel's proprietary technology, I don't think AMD will ever have that. I think you'll have to wait for USB-4 if the current speeds really aren't enough.

Oh of course, I didn't want to go into that detail but trust me I know all that, TB3 got donated to USB IF, it became USB 4 with a few extras (most importantly the USB packets on the bus). And then Intel took USB 4 and put a marketing name on "USB 4 with every optional feature on" and called it Thunderbolt 4.

And yes, likely next year, AMD will have USB 4 but -- not right now.

And the problem is not exactly the bus speed -- although 10Gpbs is not that much -- but the lack of external PCI Express (or any other DMA capable protocol but the last non-PCIe tech doing that was Firewire and that's gone).

Not necessarily so, ASUS as an example has released an AMD board equipped with thunderbolt 4 in the form of the B550 ProArt. In a laptop it’s perhaps a bit more problematic until USB-4 comes along in greater volumes, but by then Thunderbolt and USB-4 will be the same thing

> but by then Thunderbolt and USB-4 will be the same thing

see my reply below -- it already is. sorta.

The M1 Apple lineup has thunderbolt support, so I don’t see why an AMD laptop couldn’t do the same?

Because OEMs would give their left nut to sell to Apple, and that just isn't true of, say, Dell or Asus. Intel lost Apple as a customer for their CPUs, but they would bend or break the rules to license Thunderbolt to Apple even without an Intel CPU... because Apple is Apple, the company that invented personal computing and that has been the driver of every revolution in the industry since.

Because Apple implemented an USB 4 controller. Asmedia, due to covid, didn't finish in time for AMD this time around. It was scheduled for late 2020. https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/asmedia-600-chipset-family...

Well, there is an option.

1. Get a T480 with the i7-8650

2. Get the 95Wh battery option (24Wh internal + 72Wh external)

3. Upgrade RAM to 32GB DDR4-2400

4. Upgrade SSD to 2TB NVMe

5. Upgrade display to the T14 Gen2’s 1080p 100% sRGB 400nits display (available with custom brackets for T470/T480 e.g. here: https://www.xelent-store.de/Innolux-N140HCG-GQ2-400cd-Low-Po...)

Result: A laptop with awesome specs in all regards except CPU, and even the CPU is still respectable, replaceable everything, and a great display. For overall somewhere around 500-700€.

There’s nothing better on the market right now, especially as this gives you powerbridge, so you can keep two external batteries and just replace them when they drop to 0% instead of having to wait for it to charge.

And as the T470/T480 is easy to open up, you just need a small iFixit kit and 30 minutes to do all these replacements.

1. 13" , 14" laptop

2. IPS matte good quality display with similar resolution to 2560x1440p, Superb colors and peak brightness.

3. At-least 32GB RAM but pref up-gradable RAM to 64GB

4. Linux full support, preferable AMD

5. Keyboard similar to old thinkpad 7 row style. General going back to retro style with proper keys, Topre switches or why not a mechanical keyboard if possible.

6. Trackpad of high quality. Atleast similar to Apple. Not seen any that have it yet on pc. If not possible, add a trackpoint and remove the trackpad.

7. Ports! Please have many ports. As many as possible.

8. Hardware quality. hinges, case and overall. Make it durable.

9. Battery time, make it last.

10. No spyware or bloatware. Published schematics of the laptop and help the open source community.

11. Good quality parts in chipset for wifi, bluetooth, sound. Latest AMD. Should not be a issue.

12. No intel inside stickers or other stickers on my laptop. If have to put a logo on it, make the logo very small and not in your face.

Okey, so what can i be without to make the above possible and

- No frills or extras. - No touch display. - Medium powered CPU. ( think road warrior not full fledged desktop replacement ) - No discrete GPU needed if it makes my laptop warmer, or make battery go down faster. Integrated GPU is "good enough" - No need for fingerprint sensor, even if convenient. - No magic bars or other innovation someone thought would be good. - Weight and thickness is less important then manufactures seem to think. To a degree. Slim laptops get warmer, rather have it a bit ticket with more room for battery etc.

Do the basics correct. A modern take on the Thinkpad x220. Remove things that don't matter and make a classic awesome laptop for the ages.

Similar to what I was looking for after I ditched macs altogether. Closest were Razer Blade Stealth and X1 Carbon. I opted for stealth and linux just works on it (Pop).. and there's a discrete gfx when I need it. I opted for FHD instead 4k since I didn't see it as newded on 13".. colleague opted for 4k. I wish there was 32 gigs though. That's only thing I miss. Apparently there's an AMD 14" now available too.

The Razer Blade stealth looked okey, looked like good quality build? Still chiclet keyboard and unnecessary few ports.

It's the best thing I found and I am truly satisfied with it. Keyboard is good, especially coming from (good version) macbook pro ones, build quality excellent, battery great (for intel), screen great.. I would like to see an SD slot on it, but hey, and maybe one more USB-C or two. There are two of each, and you can charge on either side which is cool. No need for USB-A anymore IMO, maybe they'll go full four USB-C next gen.

I didn't go with X1 because I do occasionally need discrete graphics, it works with Razer Core out of the box as well (on linux, but probably X1 would too), no proprietary charger (it's USB-C), and I don't like Lenovo's trackpad - neither the feeling of it nor the two (for myself) unnecessary physical buttons and a trackpoint. I understand there's a cult following for that however, so to each their own I guess.

My process is I have a list of things I hate, and if you fail to do any of them, then I love you. But yeah, my preferences are:

* Don't make the keyboard key placement stupid. Make the arrow-keys and pgup / pgdn a six-key rectangle that all feel the same and you're dead to me.

* Backlit keyboard is a significant plus - yeah yeah you touch type but uncommonly-used shortcut keys in the dark sucks.

* NVMe storage is table stakes at this point, much like wifi and bluetooth. Give me at least 250G, preferably 1T on that NVMe.

* High DPI display, and ideally a 3:2 screen aspect ratio. I didn't know how much I hated 16:9 until I tried 3:2, it feels like a breath of fresh air.

* Easy to open / replace components / etc. Glue anything and you're dead to me. I also hate clips with a passion. If I need to ship my laptop in because RAM is defective, no thanks.

* It's gotta charge via USB-C. Battery life must be at least 5 hours, but more importantly, make it easily replaceable. A 10 hour batter is only a 10 hour battery for like 6 months.

* Ports should include HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, an SD card reader, and a headphone jack. Ethernet is a plus.

* Please put the webcam at the top (lookin at you, Dell XPS...) so people don't have to look at my dirty fingernails and up my nose. Built-in hardware disconnect / cover for the webcam a plus.

Don't really care about a GPU, I have a desktop for that. Also don't care about fingerprint readers. Touchscreen is actually a minus for me.

My reaction to some of the posts in this thread just make me feel old.

Backlit keyboard is a significant plus - yeah yeah you touch type but uncommonly-used shortcut keys in the dark sucks.

Can’t you just .. turn on a lamp? Why would you do this to your eyes?

Please put the webcam at the top (lookin at you, Dell XPS...) so people don't have to look at my dirty fingernails and up my nose.

Having used this myself for a number of years; I honestly in hindsight cannot comprehend how Dell could let their flagship laptop launch with this. How on earth did they try this and go “this is acceptable”? Boggles my mind.

Can’t you just .. turn on a lamp?

Usually yes, but not when I'm in bed and my wife is trying to sleep next to me I can't.

0. Linux support, specifically with the option to purchase without paying the Windows tax for an OS I'll never boot. This is a deal-breaker for me, meaning Dell are one of the few main-stream manufacturers I'd go with.

1. No touchscreen (I'd rather have a higher quality, low glare non-touch display).

That's about it, actually. Practically all modern laptops seem to meet my expectations on battery life and performance in a way which corresponds well with their cost. Weight is mostly a non-issue since I'd only consider a 13" chassis anyway. Screen resolution can be traded for battery life without concerning me.

An M1 Mac with a non-apple keyboard and full Linux support would probably be great, but I don't hold out any hope for another manufacturer matching the M1 without ruining it somehow (looking at you, Chromebooks).

Sounds like the framework laptop might be a good option for you! I am looking into it myself, plus I like the 3:2 screen ratio.

I was thinking the same, assuming it eventually goes on sale in the UK. Actually the 3:2 screen ratio is one of the new laptop developments I am less keen on; 16:9 or 16:10 feels a bit better for having 2 side-by-side terminals in i3.

1. Full size keyboard with a numpad. If I can't type on it then I won't buy it.

2. 1080p internal display. I won't buy it if the internal screen resolution isn't at least 1080p.

3. Works with Linux. That's a dealbreaker if I can't put Linux on it.

4. Discrete GPU that can be enabled/disabled without rebooting. Not for games, though that's a bonus. I write software that uses GPU acceleration and I need to test it in the field.

5. External display including connecting to a TV -- HDMI/HDCP, displayport, or USB-C passthrough. It doesn't need to use the GPU but that would be preferred.

6. Power management: when active, the battery should last a full work day unless I have the GPU/peripherals on; when I close my lid everything should suspend to NVMe and practically zero power use from then on.

7. User-upgradeable components: at a minimum, disks and RAM should be interchangeable.

8. Kill-switch for camera/mic which physically disconnects them.

9. Discrete audio / microphone 3.5mm jacks. The audio out jack may be a combined audio+mic jack, but I often have a headset which doesn't have an a combined audio+mic.

10. Discrete ethernet port. 1Gbit is outdated; give me 10Gbit! We've got 10Gbit USB and thunderbolt, there's no reason to not have 10Gbit ethernet.

I’d add that for most people, you should go higher than 1080p regardless of screen size. UHD/4k/Retina are all a huge improvement just when looking at text and it’s hard to go back.

Doesn't higher resolution really hit battery life though?

It definitely hits compute time and that also hits battery life. More pixels = more compute required even outside of the GPU.

> UHD/4k/Retina are all a huge improvement just when looking at text and it’s hard to go back.

I disagree. 4K is great on a big screen TV. But on a 15" (or smaller!) it just isn't worth it. I literally can't see a difference between 1080p and 4K on a 15 inch screen.

Very similar list to me, the only ones I've found that meet this, can be relatively powerful (H CPUs and 64GB ram) and don't force you to buy a Windows license are TongFangs. Any others?

1. Upgradable and repairable.

2. Linux and Qubes OS support.

3. 64+ GB RAM.

4. Coreboot and focused on verifiable security, neutralized Intel ME.

5. Hardware kill switch for camera, microphone.

Actually, there is only one such laptop: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.

I tried for years to get along with Purism but I've had three laptops with poor QC come from them. Broken hinges, unreliable touchpads, bad chargers. Never again.

I'm quite happy with my Librem 15, no problems. AFAIK they fixed their hinge in the latest model.

Which problems did you have with the chargers? Never heard about that on their forums.

My charger just stopped working one day on the first 13 v2. The touchpad would also just not accept input sometimes. Also, and this one I had forgotten: sometimes it would just experience sudden power loss. Returning the damn thing for a warranty repair was a nightmare. Finally they just shipped me a new 13 v3 which had a broken hinge.

You may just be lucky. The failure rates of Librems are well documented across their forums, subreddit and YouTube. I strongly urge anyone not to buy one, including the new 14, which has extensive reports of keyboard input failure, coil whine, terrible audio and generally poor fit and finish.

Librems 13 were indeed known to have the hinge problem, not so much Librems 15. Another commenter says Librem 14 is great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28887681

Here's just one of the few reviews lambasting the new 14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRBysG9ap3E

XPS 13 currently, and probably next as well. I look for:

- track record of linux compatibility. If it's Windows or out, I'm out.

- good keyboard.

- good screen, > 1920x1080 although 4K is overkill, preferably 16:10.

Macbooks look tempting, but I just don't trust Apple to not break any workflow that isn't editing videos about how great Apple products are. The current keys are good but - sorry, the (pre-butterfly!) keyboard on my OH's MBP is awful, easily the worst keyboard I've ever used on a >$1000 laptop.

> but I just don't trust Apple to not break any workflow that isn't editing videos

They broke that a while back too.

I hear you about Apple breaking things.

But we disagree on the keyboard. I'd say that all their mobile keyboards past 2015 are utter crap, and I'd wager that this can technically be measured in breakage, dust sensitivity, typing comfort and typing performance.

Since they switched back from the awful butterfly mechanism to scissors, their keyboards have been perfectly fine for me.

Yes, they are better for going back.

No, that's not going to do. I don't even live in a town. There are literally rafts (barns) all over where I live.

I can not escape sand. And a single speck is all it takes.

To poke a hole in the screen. To disable a key.

That's not good design.

I still prefer my 2015 MBP keyboard to the 2021 one. It’s honestly crazy that they somehow regressed on this given so much time passed.

Yeah, those were 99% awesome. If they were spill-drained they would be 100% awesome.

I have a Dell xps and will never buy another laptop from dell. It's an embarrassment how awful if is. Close the lid without full shutdown, warranty voided bad.

It's not exactly like that.

    Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The laptop will overheat as a result of that action.

Why would you put a laptop on a bag if it is still running and expect the warranty to cover any damage if it overheats? What's next? Expect the warranty to cover you taking showers while playing with your laptop?

Shut it down or hibernate and you won't have to worry about that.

Your own quote mentions you can't hibernate it.

And we recently could close laptops, have them sleep/hibernate and not wake up until you open the screen again so sticking them in a backpack was fine.

Not sure if the issue is Windows or the hardware but it's a recent thing.

Unless Windows is doing something weird, hibernate is no different that shutting it down.

Problem is with the drivers, many devices don't support resuming after hibernate.

I would absolutely expect warranty to cover damage from overheating. It’s supposed to have adequate protection to avoid such damage. Leave it completely turned on, cover its fans, stuff it in a warm blanket and load its CPU until it overheats (slowly, quickly, doesn’t matter) and if it sustains any permanent damage it is not fit for purpose.

Dell’s attempt to disclaim warranty in a situation like that won’t fly in Australia.

I guess you can always claim it didn't overheat in a bag but I still think that storing a turned on laptop in a bag or sealing somehow its ventilation it's a misuse and it shouldn't be covered by the warranty.

I agree, but shouldn't any computer's bios power everything off if temperatures get too high?

My laptop from 2013 does. Found that out the "oh, shit" way more than one time.

Yes, but I guess in a sealed bag everything gets hotter and hotter, not only the CPU/GPU.

Seems like the GP summarized what you quoted perfectly.

Not sure about user expectations but it’s the first time I heard about laptops overheating in standby mode.

> Close the lid without full shutdown, warranty voided bad.

That does not convey "placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin" in any way.

The difference between a laptop and a "portable desktop" is you close the lid of a laptop and put it in your laptop bag, stand up and leave. Be it from the plane, train, cafe, or anywhere else you please.

If a computer cannot simply have its lid closed before being placed in its bag it simply is /not/ a laptop. It should not be advertised as a laptop and it should have a big f&%ing warning on it telling you that it will break if you treat it the way you expect to treat a laptop.

Either Dell didn't know they messed up their laptop design and when they found out made the decision not to recall the faulty product or they knew and sold it fraudulently. "This is a laptop - but we know it isn't and will break if you treat it like one warranty void, sucks if you believed us."

Either way Dell made the decision to screw their customers. There's no getting around that. It's a choice they made.

Hibernate is a tricky term that doesn't mean the same thing to all people. The working definition I use is all state is dumped from memory to disk and then retrieved upon startup.

Sadly Hibernate is very complicated and has largely been deprecated from both Windows and Linux in favor of Sleep.

Since Hibernate is gone, let's take it off the list.

Sleep (S3) has been largely removed from these laptops in favor of a "low power mode" that emulates but does not actually sleep the device.

This is why it was previously very safe to keep your laptop in sleep or hibernate mode in a bag, but now isn't- not because user behavior has changed, or that software has changed, but because Dell's hardware has.

A shutdown and startup incur significant setup times, not just for the computer but mental workflow- remembering to open your applications back to where you left them, etc.

In the past (5 years ago) it was normal to expect a laptop to go to sleep when the lid closed and then wake itself back up.

If Dell is telling people not to expect to be able to simply sleep their laptop by closing it and then putting it in a bag, then they're not expecting people to treat the laptop as a laptop. Back in the 80s, we called such computers "Luggables".

A $2,000 laptop in 2021 should not be assumed to be a glorified luggable, it should be a laptop with the same functionality as laptops had in 2010.

I remember it worked normally back at the end of 1990s with my first laptops, just close the lid, open and everything is back up instantly, no heating at all.

Hibernate eventually began posing trouble for a few reasons. Firstly, as memory sizes increased, the time to hibernate became longer as you had to entirely serialize memory to disk.

Secondly, the number and types of peripherals were tricky to reconstitute and grab the state of, and this made working with the OS tricky. It would be possible that an application might be in the middle of an operation with a device that was no longer present, for example.

Sleep was easier, and yes, it "just worked".

It feels as though laptops are less functional now than they used to be because of stuff like this!

Has hibernate been deprecated in Windows 11? Because I couldn’t get sleep to work properly on my less than year old Dell laptop but turning hibernate back on works perfectly. It actually turns the machine off. I’m not sure by what technical means it achieves that (I thought hibernate meant suspend Ram to disk and then turn off) but it works. In windows 10 you can use “Powercfg -h on” to turn it on.

I went from one XPS15 (2017) version to the next (2020) and found that in the interrim the S3 sleep has disappeared.

Yes I find it very frustrating on Linux. XPS 2020 here as well.

Fwiw I’ve been using MacBooks for 7 years and maybe only a handful of times did my dev workflows break (and always in fairly minor ways). Home brew makes things pretty easy

However I am still on a 2015 MacBook.

I recently picked up a Mac for client work. I have a hard time with the muscle memory on keyboard mapping. I get there are legacy reasons for the differences, but would love a toggle option to switch mappings to Linux.

I'm the same way (switch between Linux, MacOS, and Windows) and use Karabiner-Elements on Mac to remap keys and standardize shortcuts.

https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

I have the same problem. I build different modes into my keyboard via QMK that I can switch via special key combos. It works okish, with the exception being that modifiers just work differently on Mac with Cmd not really cleanly mapping to Ctrl — don’t you find this annoying?

1. wifi has to be perfect, don't care about BT at all

2. Linux support

3. keyboard needs to be usable. ThinkPad is good, Dell is meh, HP is horrible

4. Noise. And no coil whine. I never even thought about this before my Dell.

5. No headphone jack would be an instant no. I guess I could live with a dongle for USB.

6. battery should not be completely bad. But unless it would be something for travel, not so important

7. I hate all trackpads (incl. Mac), so I prefer ThinkPads anyway

> no coil whine. I never even thought about this before my Dell.

Fuck Dell for not fixing this for a decade - it is a number 1 complaint on forums.

I’m gonna add good webcam and sound to the mix. These are essential for remote work.

If the rumours are true, the new M1X MacBook Pros being announced this Monday look perfect:

- high performance + battery life

- exceptional build quality

- great screen, sound, and webcam

- decent port selection

I wouldn't get too excited. Have the last gen Intel MBP 16". There is a known issue where after waking the speakers pop loudly and regularly making it unusable for audio. Before that the MBP 15" which had so many parts replaced I thought it was just bad luck. Apples product quality is not what is used to be, far from it in my experience.

I found the MBP 16 Intel version to be the worst macbook they have made. Great screen, but everything else wasn't worth the money.

They also introduced a crazy bug which when you plug in a USBC charging cable you can twig the temperature sensor on the macbook sending the whole CPU to 100% and it was a software issue not a hardware issue. Still not fixed.

I intend to get the nex M1X for the simple reason that it will be better integrated with the mac's and OS. I don't love Apple, but I consider them to make the best laptop so i'll be excited to see what they release on monday.

Webcam is rumored to be 1080p. At the price point of a Macbook Pro it should be a 4K webcam. We'll see, maybe the rumors are wrong. We know how long it takes Apple to upgrade their webcams so we might be stuck with 1080p until 2030.

Didn't film and TV make-up departments infamously have to do more/differently when higher definition cameras started to be used? I'm not sure I want a high resolution webcam...

It really shouldn’t. Most pro users absolutely don’t need a 4K webcam.

It should have a better camera, that much I agree with.

Quality and flexibility increase tremendously with external devices --- camera, speakers, and/or microphone.

Given the privacy advantages, I'd prefer systems without onbard video or audio capture.

(I'm aware advanced methods can be used to capture some audio signal via, e.g., speakers or device vibrations. I'm looking at risk minimisation / mitigation, not elimination.)

I’m gonna add good webcam and sound to the mix. These are essential for remote work.

I would argue this is almost impossible with a laptop. Even if the webcam could manage to capture a decent resolution, it would almost always be placed at an awkward position relative to your face compared to an external webcam.

External microphones are so far superior to internal ones that once you start noticing it’s all you hear when people talk via their echoey noise-suppressed-via-magic internal microphones.

I get it; I’m nitpicking. But my point I guess is that even good laptops have a lot worse remote conference setups than most people think.

here's mine, in the order of priority;

1. Keyboard - I love the old Thinkpad keyboard and hate the new chick-lets which seem to have become the norm.

2. Display - 13-15" , 4k and matte. I am currently using a surface book 2 and the screen while lovely is reflective enough to do my hair in between meetings.

3. Discrete GPU - I generally use a single laptop for both work and play and would prefer the laptop to have a good discrete GPU for casual games.

4. Linux as OS - I have recently become rather soured with windows and have switched over to linux.

Things like weight, battery life, looks etc don't matter much to me

Interesting, makes sense.

I still have a desktop for when I (rarely) play games and the lack of a discrete graphic card on my current laptop is one of the things I love most about it since it’s amazing for battery life and I don’t need any AMD or Nvidia software installed and needing updates.

I'd say you are in a very tiny niche for the SIM and stylus alone. Which vendors/brands does this leave you with?

Personally I previously searched for:

1. Super fast CPU (got the Ryzen) 2. With enough RAM (32GB, unofficially) 3. At a cheap non-Apple price ("gaming" laptop) 4. That looks somewhat professional (Lenovo won against the ASUS which screamed teenager) 5. That runs Linux well enough.

Since it doesn't seem to be listed often in this thread: noise and heat management

I have a Dell Latitude 7300 and it gets incredibly hot. They tried to optimize for size, so it has tiny fans that are incredibly loud when it spins up and they designed the aluminum body to act as a heat sink.

The problem is that when I close the laptop when it's docked, the screen traps the heat and the fans start to whine like a jet engine. Even when it's idling it's loud, so I have to leave the laptop open and on its side when docked to allow for proper heat dissipation.

If my laptop must break, I want it to break in well-understood ways.

I have a Dell Inspiron with some pretty decent specs but a lot of weird issues. The Wi-Fi card behaves strangely, the audio driver causes hard-to-debug unpaged memory leaks when used in certain ways, the emulated home/end keys (with fn+arrows) cause key down events but not key up events, and so on. I spend hours trying to make that Laptop do what I wanted it to, and I never managed to get Linux working right.

I bought an M1 MacBook Air in may and I couldn't be any happier. It's not that it doesn't have issues, but if I ever encounter one, I know a few people in pretty much the same situation as me, so figuring out a fix / workaround is usually trivial.

The same holds for the phone, iPhone-related bugs are usually well-understood and described somewhere. If one particular Android phone sounds terribly on Zoom, but correctly everywhere else, you don't even have an idea where to look.

Latest-generation AMD CPU

No discrete GPU, I don't want to pay neither money, electricity or weight for a thing I don't need.

Reparability. Removeable SSD is absolute requirement. With a soldered SSD, broken laptop = lost data. Upgradeable RAM is less important but still very welcome.

If I needed a new one I'd look at HP Probook, check their support channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxMMjSF4QFw

Just from the picture, this will fail my keyboard requirement. That is not a keyboard I'd type on.

Matter of taste, and use cases.

In my desktop I have mechanical switches in the keyboard, and relatively high requirements.

However, I only using laptop occasionally. This one so far https://i.alza.cz/ImgW.ashx?fd=FotoAddOrig&cd=NC106e7f5g-07&... the model with i3-6157U CPU. Funfact: after I bought that, required an e-mail conversation with Intel investor relations before the CPU appeared on https://ark.intel.com/

The only issue is that no AMD laptop has Thunderbolt support. It's supposed to come next year but currently it's a deal breaker of you want to use a dock.

Always fun threads, thanks for posting! I've learned a bunch.

Truth be had, I'm still loving my 2013 MacBook pro. It's bulky and the battery's not what it used to be, but it's fast and the keyboard is great but after 8 years of hard use, a couple keys are wonky. I'll probably pick up whatever Apple announces on Monday.

I've really want to like the XPS series, but I've bought and returned 3 of them in the past several years due to bad quality control - two would crash when the lid closed, one had a really wobbly trackpad. The XPS 15 or 17 is ideal in terms of form factor though.

A few others that I've had my eyes on:

- The surface pro 8 seems really versatile and powerful. High refresh screen, good battery, nice keyboard.

- I like some of the stuff Asus is doing with dual screens and propped up keyboards, so I'm definitely curious about those for a dev.

It’s really frustrating that the only quality build is incompatible with Linux. The XPS is flimsy compared to the MacBook it replaced. That said, I’m never going back to Apple’s ecosystem, if I can help it. My next laptop will be the 15” Framework when it’s out.

> It's bulky and the battery's not what it used to be, but it's fast and the keyboard is great but after 8 years of hard use, a couple keys are wonky.

I think the 2013 model's entered Apple's vintage list [1], but if you can find an Apple Store willing to do battery service for it, the battery replacement comes with a full keyboard and trackpad replacement for $199 USD [2].

Hurry, though, because the 2013 model's likely to enter the obsolete list next year.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

[2] https://support.apple.com/mac/repair/service

Thanks, that's great to know about! Unfortunately it's also experiencing random kernel panics, so I suspect there's more at fault here.

Are you using Hands Off as a firewall?

I experienced plenty of random kernel panics on my 2013 MacBook Pro (still going strong after battery service, and still my primary computing device), which went away when I switched to Little Snitch.

It feels like I have no laptop to choose form right now in the market, but here's what I'd like:

1. WiFi+Bluetooth and graphic cards which don't suck on Linux. No Broadcom or Nvidea.

2. Good body without any deck flex, and no flex in the trackpad either. Love the taptic keypads on macbooks.

3. Good power management. Since I expect to lose some battery performance running Linux, I'd prefer to have the laptop be slightly thicker rather than have a tiny battery backup. Also, S3 suspend.

3. Both USB-C and USB-A ports. Preferabel HDMI, full-size SD card reader too.

4. Upgradable RAM and SSD. This is a major one, as I've often doubled the life of my devices by increasing the memory a couple of years into the machine.

5. No 16:9 displays. Nope. Too tiny. At least 16:10. Never used 3:2 but shouldn't be too bad. And they should be able to get bright enough.

I respect #5 but what even exists at non-16:9 besides Framework and Apple?

Surface devices, and LG gram come to mind.

the current batch of dell XPS has a pretty nice tall screen.

> Bluetooth has to be good

Does this even exist? Never met a reliable (even in context of using within a single meter of range) BlueTooth in my life. Only Apple seems to offer reasonably good.

For this very reason (although my experience comes solely from earphones) I hesitate to buy a BlueTooth keyboard which I would normally prefer over occupying a USB port with a separate wireless KB dongle.

> Does this even exist?

What has your experience been with bt? I have the cheapest bt-dongle I could find (4 euros) and it never failed me and is super solid.

Connection breaks regularly (less often with more expensive headphones). Even when using an expensive Creative Bluetooth audio dongle. Samsung Android phone built-in breaks less often but in many cases the whole BlueTooth stack crashes.

Untolerable sound distortions start occuring every now and then. Even under Windows on a new EliteBook with reasonably expensive earphones. Often also with the smartphone when I jog in the woods (tried with different headphones and earphones).

With a cheap full-featured dongle I use on the office PC the sound quality is often untolerable (I mean distortions, not the bitrate, some days it would work Ok whole day, some days it just doesn't).

Built in BlueTooth in my old Dell Latitude only worked with Windows and occasionally with Ubuntu, other distros thought the device was a trackpad (could be fixed with some hacling but was not worth it because still worked unreliably so I used the Creative dongle instead).

Even with Apple (but non-apple headphones of the middle price segment) the connection breaks occasionally although not very often.

Are you in a crowded office with lots of Bluetooth devices? At my house, Bluetooth is rock solid up to 10 meters. But there are only a handful of devices in the house, and the neighbors are far away.

No, I'm not. I'm mostly alone in the rather big office (although there are neighbor offices above and below obviously) and I've specifically mentioned the woods. I probably just have a too intense aura and may need a new-age guru to get me a magic pyramid to harmonize it :-]

Is there a BlueTooth channel scanner by the way? Like the "WiFi analyzer" app but for BlueTooth?

> Is there a BlueTooth channel scanner by the way? Like the "WiFi analyzer" app but for BlueTooth?

I'd love that, but alas.

Besides, there is 0 things you can configure about BT, and that's intentional. I mean, if you could just upturn the signal x10 you'd get 50 good reception meters out of just that. But you can't.

The thing with the woods is actually because of the woods, surprisingly enough. BT often counts on signals bouncing off solid objects of which there aren't really enough in the woods (at least for signal bouncing purposes). You'll encounter the same thing crossing a wide street in the city where your signal might cut out in the middle of the street.

Well, let's say that if connecting my audio system and a keyboard and mouse at the same time causes problems with either, it's not good. And 95% of what I've used and seen is not good. Even in the world of Apple, it's about 60% pure frustration, depending on the model.

The solution is Intel bluetooth in my experience. The ax200/ax3000 and predecessors. Which is basically what you got in the Intel macs, but there is Windows PCs and usb dongles with the same hardware

I don’t see many mentions of weight, and that’s my number one. There are some incredibly light laptops available now, and that’s my number one criteria, how light can you get with a 13 inch screen. I’ve currently got a monster “workstation” laptop at work and having a haul a 6 lb laptop around is particularly irritating, but once I felt 2.5 lbs, any more than that was irritating. In practical fact I have a 12 year old laptop and a little netbook, and with sdd replacements for the spinning platter drives they continue to be just fine, so I’m not buying anything at the moment. But if I did, I’d choose by weight.

This. For when I'm on the go I've got a 17" LG Gram laptop with 24 GB of RAM. This thing is incredibly light.

That's the most important thing to me in a laptop: ultra light.

If you don't care about how light your laptop is, you may as well use a desktop (I'm ofc using a beefy desktop at home).

Something else: I've got a M1 Mac too, for the living room basically. The physical edges are way, way, way too sharp and it's simply not a comfortable laptop to use when slouching in the couch. The edges are so sharp you feel like you may actually physically damage your wrists. It's a long time standing complains about Apple laptops: I simply cannot understand how they can still get that so wrong (I'm sure, at some point, they'll come up with smoother edges but it's 2021 and we're not there yet). Now the trackpad on the M1 is way better than the trackpad on the LG Gram: feels way more sturdy. I like the very long battery the M1 has too.

I had a very low spec and cheap 11" Chromebook and found it was quickly my favorite because it was very portable.

Probably not what OP had in mind, but under the assumption that you want to buy a new laptop, one thing I would look for is low carbon footprint (many manufacturers publish this information), and low social impact in terms of the conditions in which the laptop is produced (still more difficult to have this information).

And how would you ascertain the veracity of said claim?

Like other claims that cannot be verified as a consumer, e.g., health safety claims: usually trust them and hope that companies have more to lose when making false claims than they have to win by lying.

Something labeled as low-carbon-footprint, local, organic, fair trade, etc., may not be all that it says it is, but in all likelihood is probably better that something with no labels.

Understood.

Unless there is a law, a fine, and an enforcing agency in place none of this local, organic, low-carbon stuff will come back to them in any meaningful way. They are safe to lie. And you provide them with a business reason to do so.

Your consumer decision impact might be the reverse of what you're hoping, is what I'm saying. Did you do your research?

I'd at least wait until the 18th to see what Apple is about to announce. Even if you don't get whatever they announce, it might be good to view your options in light of the new products.

Agreed, but I don't have my hopes up. Their keyboards have been atrocious for the last few years. Everything in their current lineup has the stuck-by-dust-particle problem.

Anecdata but: I bought the 16" MBP when it was first released and have never had a problem with it (or with any of the work-issued MBPs I've been issued in the interim as well). I had a butterfly-keyboard MBP from work for a couple years and while I didn't like the feel of the keyboard (I'm happy with the post-butterfly MBPs' keyboards), I never had the dust particle issue with it.

When you leave home for a day, come back and slide a cup over your table – does it screech?

Things I actually care about these days that aren't already basically universal:

Good screen. Bright and High DPI, and an OS that takes good advantage of that.

Good keyboard. I'm gonna type a lot at least sometimes and use Vim, I don't want some mushy accessory keyboard.

Good trackpad. Reasonably big, but not so big your palms constantly make it do things despite software that tries to prevent that. Highly responsive and supports scrolling and dragging without trying to hold down a physical click mechanism.

Can run both a real modern web browser, as in with rapid automatic updates, and as good of a Unix-y command line as possible.

A good selection of ports is a nice plus. As is touchscreen and flexible orientation.

Having regular security updates is good, though it should also not be too pushy about forcing restarts for them. Ideally, it would never lose state, short of me rebooting it by direct command or being unplugged and letting the battery run flat.

It's also nice if I can leave it in "sleep" unattended and off the charger for a week+, open it up, and it's ready to use with the battery still pretty full.

I like a Unix-y command line, but I'm pretty meh about trying to keep a bare-metal Linux install running and updated.

What I actually got recently is a mid-high end Chromebook. I'm pretty happy with it - the current Linux it now supports turns it from a basically browser-centered thing to a very practical developer workstation, assuming you live in the terminal like I do.

I'm personally in the market for an as-close-to-infinitely upgradable laptop. Ideally, I'd like to be able to mod it as much as I can do with my desktop rig, in a format that I can carry around.

- Need a bigger battery? Here's some OEM batteries for you.

- Your chipset is getting old, here's motherboards you can buy

- Need an OLED screen? Here's a couple

- More memory? Sure, there's 4 easy to access slots in there

Ideally in a format that fits in a backpack

Been dreaming about something like this for SO long

https://frame.work?

Gave it some thought a while ago!

I'm still struggling with the customs end of getting one though.

Uruguay where I now live isn't exactly amazing at managing electronic imports, although if one ever showed up on Amazon I'd be jumping on that right away as there are companies that helps make this process easier over here.

Fellow "charrúa" here :)

Greetings ...

I have one of these on order, and it looks like the perfect personal laptop to bring along with the MBP I'm saddled with for work.

1. Linux support

2. Upgradeable RAM/storage

3. Preferably AMD GPU and CPU

In roughly that order. Sadly I couldn't really find that recently ): Searching for upgradeable RAM is a pain, and current GPU shortage prevents me from being picky about GPUs as well ):

Wait, so your list is just 3 items, and they can't make a thing for you? That is so sad.

I understand myself to be a seasoned sceptic, and hard to please after seeing my own list, having typed it out. But you...

It is just weird you can't find something that will satisfy. Have you looked at the AliExpress crop of no-name lappies at all? They sometimes do on par with name-brands, I hear.

1. Two sodimm slots

2. Close to 100% sRGB color gamut, min 1920x1080 14"-15"

3. Reasonably priced!

4. Bonus: good enough CPU

That's it.

I spent almost 9 months looking for a starter to mid range recent laptop (10th intel or 4000 amd) meeting at least 1. and 2. .. and I couldn't find anything in the 300-600 GBP which I thought would be reasonable for something like that.

I went to a large showroom to compare different screens, modern laptops with IPS panels, claiming to be 45% NTSC, IPS 72% NTSC.. and even OLED screens on higher-end laptops (1200-2500GBP)...

I opened the same picture of a girl on my phone which is supposed to be 400 nits 98% sRGB and on every target laptop.. Cheapest TN panels would show white or gray on the girls cheeks where it was supposed to be a light pink... The 45% NTSC IPS panels would show almost accurate colors, but never as clear/bright as on my phone, the 72% NTSC panels were pretty accurate as well, except for the sensible colors like said pink, it would display it a little darker.

To my utmost surprise, the high end OLED screens, would show that problematic pink correctly, except it ended up pixelated!! The entire picture was as clear as it could be, except for the girls cheeks: pixelated...

My 12 year old inspiron with a TN panel (if you decrease blue by 20% from the intel graphics driver) will display colors a little more accurately than most IPS panels they put in low-mid range laptops today.

So I ended up buying a Latitude E5470 for 170GBP, best ever display panel for this price range. Thinking of buying a second one, to make sure I have enough spares if something happens to this one.. Or maybe a Precision from the same era.. but they seem to go ~500GBP, not comfortable spending that much on a refurbished laptop.

I look for 3 things that vary greatly between brands/models:

    1. Modular build. E.g. with new thinkpads you can’t even remove the battery. That sucks.
    2. Good keyboard.
    3. Linux support

Everything else is usually pretty great by my standards.

Noise. I don't care if it slows down a bit, i don't want my computer to sound like a plane taking off when I'm compiling. Which is why I went from MBP to Air this year, and at home I use my huge radiator cooled desktop PC to work.

For me, it has to have a matte screen. So I can work outside.

Even in an office setting, I find matte displays way more comfortable.

You say:

    Stylus or touch-screen that doesn't glare

I have yet to see a touchscreen with a matte display. Is it even possible?

My mom's flip-tap Lenovo does have that matte touch display. But it's way underpowered with it's mobile Intel. And the keyboard is not what I'd consider a keyboard at all.

For me the laptop must have at least these minimum features if money is no objection:

1) Weight about 1 kg. I do carry another e-ink reader in my bag thus a lighter laptop is a big plus.

2) Minimum 2K resolution. Once you have used 2K screen the Full HD just don't cut it anymore.

3) Military grade certification for drop. I once dropped my laptop bag from shoulder height containing less than a month laptop but because it has military grade for drop it did survived (albeit some scratches) until more than 2 years later, today.

4) At least 128 GB RAM (preferably ECC) if I am buying a new laptop because you can never has enough RAM :-)

"2K resolution is a generic term for display devices or content having horizontal resolution of approximately 2,000 pixels." (...) 1920 × 1080 is the most common 2K resolution"[0]. How are you distinguishing between 2K and 1080p?.. are you thinking of 1440p (2.5k wide), or of a non 16:9 aspect ratio?

Have you ever found a laptop like this? 1kg is sacrifice a lot of corners in the name of weight (battery, screen, glass, ram, cooling, drives, processing and GPU), while workstations are are the likely place to find 128GB ECC.. they focus on performance over weight (they're getting better at style). Sounds like you want a workstation laptop in a ultrabook's body (and who doesn't.. I think there's a guy at NASA that would like you to bring it in for study)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K_resolution

Yes for me 2K is QHD or 1440p. It just easy for me to compare display resolutions for example 0.5K for 720p, 1K for 1080p, 2K 1440p, then 4K, 6K, 8K, 16K, etc [1]. Buying laptop with less than 1440p display today is just beyond me.

They are many 1 kg laptops around at the moment by most of laptop manufacturers. For GPU personally I have an external GPU or eGPU via Thunderbolt interface.

Currently they are many laptops 128 GB RAM around, they just need to put it in a lighter laptop based on i7 or i9 [2]. Heck even the cheaper Intel's 10th Gen Celeron CPU can support up to 128 GB RAM [3]. It is not a rocket science to put 128 GB RAM inside a lightweight laptop today.

[1] 720p vs 1080p vs 1440p vs 4K vs 8K – Which Should I Choose?

https://www.displayninja.com/720p-vs-1080p-vs-1440p-vs-4k-vs...

[2] Top 10 Laptops with 128GB RAM:

https://www.reinisfischer.com/top-10-laptops-128gb-ram-mobil...

[3] Intel® Celeron® Processor G5900:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199268/...

You are using that display terminology differently from everyone else. 2K, 4K, etc. refer to horizontal resolution, and 720p, 1080p, etc. refer to vertical resolution. 0.5K would be something like 512x384, an ancient resolution lower than VGA (I used it sometimes in the 1990s), and definitely not 720p, which is 1280x720. 2K, 4K etc. came from cinema and filmmaking, but 720p, 1080p etc. come from TV and computers; the "p" stands for "progressive scan", contrasting with "i" for "interlaced" (a lot of HD TV broadcasts are 1080i).

>128 GB RAM

What do you need, a mainframe?

Qubes OS?

Not sure you are trolling or not, but I will bite. One of the very RAM intensive stuff I'm doing with my laptop is that I am using many VMs in GNS3 set up for networking simulation with Linux VMs running Quagga, LiSA, etc thus the more RAM I have the faster and smoother the simulation.

Why so many people go berserk when you say you need more RAM? The new workstation CPU from Intel namely W3300 can support up to 4 TB RAM, RAM amount of 128 GB is practically peanut compared to that.

* AMD cpu that supports S3 sleep

* At least 16GB of RAM

* 1kg auw

* 16:10 screen, that’s not 4k

* 14”

* Metal body

* Repairable

* NVMe ssd (not soldered)

* USB-C charging (and video etc)

* No gamer LEDs

If someone has any suggestions I’d love to hear them!

I just ordered yesterday a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 PRO AMD

Ticks a lot of that, except

Not sure about S3 and repairable

Its 1.4kg not 1kg but tradeoff is high build quality and not flimsy and beautiful 14" high res not 4k oled 2880x 16:10, and with 90hz refresh rate.

Wish it had a matt touch screen but thats the one thing missing for me.

Processor Up to AMD Ryzen™ 9 5900HX Mobile Processor Operating system Windows 10 Home or Pro Display 14″ 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED display with glass,16:10, 90Hz refresh rate, 100% DCI-P3, 125% sRGB, 400 nits, VESA Certified DisplayHDR™ 500 True Black, Dolby Vision®, 243 PPI, 91% AAR Memory AMD Radeon™: Up to 16GB DDR4-3200; Dual Channel NVIDIA® GeForce MX450: Up to 16GB LPDDR4-4266; Dual Channel Battery 61Whr Lithium-ion Polymer Storage SSD PCIe M.2: Up to 1TB Graphics AMD Radeon™ graphics and/or NVIDIA® GeForce® MX450 Audio 2 x 2W s Dolby Atmos® certified speakers Camera IR Camera Dimensions (H x W x D) 312.4 x 221.4 x 14.9-17.9mm

Hinge 175+/-5° Weight 1.39 kg

Awesome, thanks for the suggestion!

This is about 80% there for me, thanks. I'll keep an eye out for when they get matte screens, or for after-market options.

A slim design, good screen and doesn't sound like a jet engine when under a heavy load are my main factors. Battery isn't as much of a concern to me, 99% of the time I work with my laptop at a desk connected to power and a monitor etc.

Repairability and customisability are also usually on my mind so anything Apple is completely out of the question despite their machines ticking most of my boxes.

Maybe that will change if right to repair laws in the EU improve but that's not a something I'm expecting to happen anytime soon.

1. AMD CPU

2. Modular design & replaceable parts (à la https://frame.work)

3. Physical kill switches for camera, audio, Wi-Fi (à la Purism/Librem)

1. Overall aescetics - even though it's just a tool, I must feel great while having it on my lap and working with it. Don't like bulky, plastic, RGBalike workhorses. Once I was able to pay for what my eyes like, I've bought Zenbook UX32LN (which still has my wife, after 6 years of power use (great machine, still work flawlessly)). Now for 2 years I was using Surface Book 2 15" (which I bought solely because I fell in love with hinge design and screen quality). This year I was waiting for some update regarding the hinge though but Microsoft introduced Surface Studio, which I don't like because its overall design so I decided to keep SB2 for a bit more as I don't see any nice looking laptops currently on the market that would fit my taste.

2. Keyboard - it must be good quality with fine font (again, aescetics :)), must have highlight, chiclet type, would be great if had extra right key column with PGup/PGdown/home/end buttons (I'm really sad that so few models has it - I've found it really handy for heavy programming)

2.1. Touchpad - must be good quality, support gestures and have nice surface to interact with (preferably glass)

3. Battery life - no need for whole day, but at least for ~4 hours on normal performance is totally fine.

4. Since I use Surface Book 2, I'm really into 3:2 screen aspect ratio - it's really great for work.

> two fast external storage ports

At least 4 USB ports (2-3 USB-B, 1-2 USB-C).

At least one of them full USB-4 Thunderbolt unless the computer is very cheap.

100% USB-C with no USB-B is a serious annoyance. Lack of a head-set jack is an extreme annoyance I would only excuse if the computer is really great otherwise.

Built-in Ethernet port is very nice to have but not necessary.

Built-in SD card reader is also very nice to have. I actually dream about every computer to have such so people would just use SD cards instead of USB-attached thumb-drives.

Manufacturers probably prefer extra USB ports to a dedicated SD slot since it occupies less internal space than an SD slot and is not single purpose.

Doesn't seem so to me. They just rarely put more than 3 USB ports and there doesn't seem to be any obvious correlation between the number and lack/presence of the SD port.

Are usb sticks typically faster and cheaper than SD cards or am I remembering this wrong?

You can get usb sticks that are faster than top end SD cards because you can just put an entire SSD, dram cache and controller included in a usb device, but the average usb stick and average SD card are equally poor

Don't you mean USB-A instead of USB-B ? I don't think I've ever seen a laptop with USB-B ports.

Good point, USB-B is used on printers.

I obtained an hp Chromebook free of charge recently. Honestly it's just so stress free to use. I don't need any special applications so it works just fine.

Also consider warranty, repair, and accidental damage protection: My Surface Pro 3 had extended warranty, and there used to be stores to drop into. I had many problems with the machine, but the horrible part was that they could only be swapped out, so I had to restore my data (easy) and setup windows all over again (kill me now). This has been addressed with their ‘for business’ series with removable SSD.

My mother, never drops her laptop, works in dusty environments, uses the same computer for years. No ADP, no extended warranty, I just replaced her Asus laptop she has been using since 2013 without any hardware issues. Remarkable.

My friend, who is careless, has endless problems with his HP, and requires ADP. His last machine lasted barely 3 years and has been into the depot at least twice. He wants on-site this time as he was without a machine for a week at a time.

I had a Lenovo with full extended on-site warranty. Machine was a damned nightmare for problems, but I was never without a working machine. I am careful with it, it hasn’t been abused, and I believe it was a product design problem. Lenovo sent out many parts and technicians and finally contacted me to apologize and address the obvious satisfaction issue. They replaced it with a completely different model that I am happy with.

My Gigabyte gaming laptop is an older beast. 4 years old, no extended warranty. From a computing perspective and hack ability, I generally love it, but there have been problems and not one of them is resolved. Their support is through a terrible web portal that takes days to respond, and after weeks of back and forth, they will offer to let you ship the device to them for a repair estimate.

I admit that I'm probably kind of a contrarian here. I tend to buy cheap refurbished laptops from NewEgg, something reasonably recent but not utterly leading-edge.

I've told people: My warranty consists of being able to throw it away and buy another one with the money I've saved over the years from following this strategy.

I'm also fortunate that for me, a lot of "development" time is spent sitting and scratching my head, so my laptop doesn't really need awesome computing power. My computer is more or less a half-smart terminal. That's just related to the kind of work I do of course.

These days, same strategy for desktops and cellphones.

An amusing story: I was checking out of Best Buy one time, and the cashier offered me an extended warranty. I told her: "I have a plan through my bank that covers everything I own." Of course she took the bait and asked me what the plan consisted of, and I told her: "The contents of my bank account." Fortunately she had a sense of humor about it.

1. Hardware driver support in Linux/bsd. I’ll never suffer another broadcom wireless nic.

2. Accessibility of hardware. Is it easy to open and swap parts? Or do you need to dismantle the whole thing?

3. Availability of replacement parts, and history of availability. Ram/HDDs/NICs are universal. Screens, keyboards trackpads are not.

4. Runs off battery? Or adapter when plugged in. In a few years when the battery is toast, will this be a brick?

5. Everything else.

- Hardware kill switches, to disable mic & camera.

- Hardware kill switches for both the bluetooth radio and the built-in wifi adapter.

- Needs to look good at 1024x768 resolution (I only code at that resolution, because although large resolutions are great, I have to put in extra effort to see code at higher resolutions)

- Built in camera cover that slides closed, which, alongside a kill switch gives me extra peace of mind (incase my OS gets compromised through silly mistakes like running malware laced office documents). Yes, some would call this paranoia, but paranoia does not work retroactively; you have to be proactive.

- Don't care about the keyboard, since I have only ever used external USB office keyboards.

- If the processor is an Intel, I want the Management Engine removed, preferably by someone else as I am at a loss as to how to disable that thing

- I only ever use the mains power supply to power my laptop. Why let a battery degrade over time from being constantly at 100% charge? It would be cool if I could just take out the battery and have the laptop still work with a mains supply.

> I only code at that resolution, because although large resolutions are great, I have to put in extra effort to see code at higher resolutions

You can increase font size on the system, without using a low resolution.

I prefer a low resolution, because some windows don't honor my zoom state and I have to manually press CTRL & +

With a low resolution, my productivity goes through the roof. Zoomed in text just doesn't cut it

Also, consider if you really need a laptop. A lot of people seem to use one by default even if they don't need it on the go.

I have four desktops at my house, two of them operational, one in constant use. But good point, yes.

Some people might be better served by a tablet or whatever.

AMD processor, support for 32GB of RAM, matte 16:10 FHD display with >300 nits (14" - 16"), less than 1.8kg, camera in the lid, at least 2 USB-C ports (with at least one supporting DisplayPort), not too loud under load, good battery life, thin bezels to reduce the footprint and improve aesthetics.

Apparently this is a big ask though :(

That isn't my use case, but yeah – it is a short list.

I see no reason for that not to exist as an immediate option.

Good thermal management. Doesn't throttle down to unusable speeds under high CPU load or combined CPU/GPU load.

Are there any Laptops with dedicated GPU that won't throttle down under use?

Why do you prefer SIM over WiFi? Almost everywhere I've been it's been slower and more expensive than WiFi.

Not if you're in Taiwan, WiFi is considered inferior to 4G LTE due to the latter extensive coverage and reliable connectivity. You can even get more than 300 Mbps internet access with 4G on a moving train!

I happen to live and hang out in an area where it is cheaper. I have two operational desktop computers at home, so the laptop is for when I'm not at home, hence SIM is preferable to have.

These days I've become a bit picky, with a couple of absolute deal breakers:

Today I run an older xps13 which is quite close. My next will probably be a framework (immediately) when they get a matte screen option.

!: matte screen, >350nit, >150dpi, >12", <1.66 aspect (want vertical space).

!: good keyboard. subjectively of course.

!: >10h, full day's work on battery.

!: good linux compatibility. I'll run my own and don't need the headache.

!: dead silent and cool. I run underclocked mostly, with fans off.

!: <1.4kg

Things I don't need:

-: very fast cpu. I mostly run seriously underclocked, have a small cluster to offload compiling and heavy work onto.

-: design. Just plain, simple, no flashy-flashy nor logos nor stickers.

-: touch screen.

What I would like:

:) >16h battery.

:) <1kg, ca A4 format, great if I can detach the screen to put it in portrait in front of me.

:) oled or similar, 300dpi. Best would of course be primarily reflective instead of transmittive. If we're already dreaming.

:) mouse nubbin thingy, or eye tracking (!)

:) good on board sound and a 3.5mm jack.

The eye tracking thing I've tried doing at some point, a few years back. Unless you have hardware to support running neural networks it turns out to be way too power-consuming, even if it's push-to-point (you have to depress a key to move the pointer to where your eye is/was).

A4 format would be great, yes.

I switched employers and am using a PC now instead of a Mac and man, I hate it. I’d get 4 or 5 hours of battery life on my 15” Intel MacBook Pro, and get maybe 45 minutes while doing identical tasks. Even the MacBook literally running Parallels and Visual Studio on the MacBook could last for a few hours. Its absolutely insufferable, the laptop is barely useable unless it’s plugged in, and it has a GPU (but I’m not playing games and a 1080p screen. Why the hell is it using so much power? Is this just what it’s like for Windows laptops, and why?

And Don’t even get me started on how the Bluetooth audio stack constantly messes up and has problems, Slack will randomly tell me it can’t find my audio device. My Mac just never had these issues, aside from a few problems initially on running a dock that supported 3 4K monitors.

M1 MacBook pro no competition

Considering OP lists touch or pen as a requirement (4.) the macbook is not an option. Not to mention that a macbook pro with 16GB ram and more than base storage starts at $1700. Sure, it might be good but at that prices it better be.

Out of interest how bad is the compatibility of the M1 macbooks with other OSs? That might be a dealbreaker as well.

Does M1 come with a 15 inch like the Macbook Pro Retina Mid 2014 ? I am interested in M1 but my current Macbook Pro runs like butter and really not interested in replacing it until something much better comes along.

The ones to really look at will the M1X models that will (probably) be announced on the 18th, which will bump up the screens to 14/16 inch in the same overall form factor (smaller bezels) and have even more absurd performance than the M1 laptops people keep raving about.

I've looked at those. They are glossy. But that's not even the thing that turned me off. The keyboards did.

One speck of dust and that thing gets stuck. The keys have no travel, that's no good. And having typed on it a bit, I can attest there is not much difference between those keyboards and typing on straight up glass, feeling-wise.

I love what they are doing with the CPU, GPU, no significant interconnect overhead so that everything is way snappy – like the big 2TB RAM machines I used to maintain back when I coded for a living.

But they aren't thinking of me and people like me when they create those past-2015 products, let me tell you. There is much to hate about the current crop of them.

It is first MacBook for me, being a windows guy for whole my life. I started to love Linux few years ago for development and was using wsl fulltime since it was released few years ago. I started to hate slowness that this brings and overheating etc etc... Then I said to myself, you are a professional so get yourself a professional tool and then I decided to buy MacBook and God I am happy. It makes me so much more productive.

The most important thing for me is that I can open my laptop and start working in 3 seconds. Without loading, waiting, something randomly freezing etc..

I have a good evidence for this effect being real. My git commit graph skyrocketed since I can open my laptop for 15minutes, do some work and then close it. With windows that was never the case. Either a long programming session or nothing

None of the M1s have the infamous glass keyboard; they switched back to the old style. (Which is still relatively low-travel, but much better than the glass one, and does not have dust issues.)

I've seen those and touched them. One speck of sand is all it takes, keyboard or screen. Bust.

No thanks.

I'm typing this on a M1 MacBook pro, but only because that is what my employer mandates.

1) The M1 MacBook Air is better value and has a better keyboard.

2) Properly rugged business PCs are still better hardware (hardware is more than just the CPU).

3) Kubuntu or Linux Mint are a better OS.

> 2) Properly rugged business PCs are still better hardware (hardware is more than just the CPU).

Any models you’d point at? After 5 minutes with an HP thing the employer gave me, I’ve never touched it, that thing was an abomination. I’d like a good alternative.

AMD CPU & Repair-ability. Framework looks promising, but I'm not eager to buy an Intel processor.

> I'm not eager to buy an Intel processor

May I ask why?

As good as they started over the past decades they made many shady business moves which eventually put them in the place of being the (de-facto) only CPU option around. Then they blew it all with Spectre.

It's not like I especially like AMD, but I'd love to support a little more competition in the x86 market. Eventually I'd love to see consumer grade ARM available for non-Apple devices. Their premiums and lockin just don't make it attractive to buy an M1 MBP to install Linux on it.

Spectre effects all cpus, though…

Apple's are better. AMD's can be better. Why look to Intel at all, if not for availability?

They removed S3 sleep and don't have the performance:battery usage as AMD.

Afaiu, they're planning on offering CPU upgrades/changes by having the whole system board replaced.

I guess in this age of soldered CPUs (and other stuff), it's as good as it gets, but I wonder about the price.

1. Runs Linux. 2. External Display Support - USB-C 3. Fast storage. 4. 1080p screen. 5. Small. 4. Cheap.

I really dislike using Laptops since they tend to be slower, have worse ergonomics, and are more expensive than a 'equivalent' desktop. I just don't 'like' working if I don't have at least 1 large 4K screen and I prefer 2 (and more probably wouldn't hurt).

Since a laptop is necessary sometimes I just want to have a 13" standard Dell XPS that's small enough I'll actually take it places. If I start traveling more (I am already WFH) then I might start wanting something with a larger screen + a decent portable second screen option. Although at that point I'd probably just put the effort into using a VR type screen system.

Just a portable (13—14 inch) device that has a powerful, but efficient CPU, supports Linux and has a dedicated GPU for occasional gaming / video editing.

I bought the Asus G14 over a year ago and this model fits my needs most - at least back then, things have probably changed until now...

When I read you first paragraph, I was like, "This guy's gonna love an Asus Zephyrus G14". Glad to read that you already have one.

How has it been for you?

After a couple of months my motherboard got fried while using the power adapter and left power delivery slot simultaneously - which apparently was an issue other people experienced as well last year. But this got fixed pretty quickly by the official repair partner and I haven't experienced that since then (around a year of usage since the incident), even though I still use both ports at the same time. ASUS probably solved this problem with a BIOS update.

Other than that I'm more than happy with this device and it works much better than expected - especially the Linux support. I'm running arch as my main distro and never had any issues. Power consumption runs at around 7-11 W in regular use using my energy efficient profile (dGPU off). CPU temp during normale use sits at around 35-40 degrees celsius but can bump up during heavy gaming.

Looking back I'd definitely buy this laptop again.

I think the screen is what I look for the most. Its specs needed to be <15", >1080p resolution, >95% DCI-P3 color gamut, prefer OLED, prefer touch-enabled

Also mattering was lightweight and easy to travel with (including power supply), respectable battery life, >=16GB RAM, processor preferring performance over price, Thunderbolt or USB4

In a different world, I would want something from an OEM with Linux focus, Coreboot, and repairable, but the screens on all of those machines are trash. Last year I picked up a ASUS Zenbook Flip and slapped NixOS on it. My only complaint is that the body isn’t very rigid and got crack in the glass (not over the display) when my bag fell from a shitty bathroom stall hook.

While we are here, can anyone recommend a laptop with a crazy bright screen and a good battery? As in "I am sitting by the pool for a couple weeks and need to work, too." Will be Chrome and Office so most every other spec is secondary.

iPad Pro 13 with the keyboard accessory? A bit pricey for what it is but I run my whole workflow away from my workstation on one of these. Super bright high resolution screen with excellent colours and iSh can be used with tmux on a vps if you need some light code editing.

Framework is almost perfect. The only problem I have with it is immediate global availability. Otherwise, I'm very pleasantly surprised. Also by the price - it's not very cheap, but also not overpriced like Apple's equivalents.

1. It must be thin. Really thin.

2. Light. Thin and light.

3. Curved edges. Also curved edges. How could a laptop today not have curved edges? Yes, we said the same thing about the sharp edges of yesterday’s generation. But this time we really mean it.

4. Short battery life. Who wants to carry a huge battery with them? Easier to plug in everywhere you go anyways. Also goes directly against number 1 which is obviously more important.

5. Colors. Almost forgot it. Could you believe it? Specially crafted colors. Colors you’ve never seen before! I can not understand how some say it’s just rolling dice on the color spectrum. It’s totally new colors!

Has anyone mentioned fanless? I want my machines, laptops included, to be quiet.

Modular. Because it implies repairable. User replaceable battery. Does not have to be ultra thin or paperweight.

Convergence. This extends modularity, increasing flexibility at the cost of size/weight. Enough USB-A/USB-C ports (Don't need a SIM, these work with MiFi or USB.)

Magnetic charger. Though USB-C can be made like that the magnets are relatively weak.

Trackpad (Apple Magic Trackpad 2 quality, good luck with that) or trackpoint.

Ryzen with Radeon GPU, alternatively Intel GPU or something like M1.

120 Hz OLED, at least 1440p.

That implies some decent specs, I need at least 16 GB RAM, and a SSD (both user replaceable).

Maybe in 2027... I got my hope on next gen Framework.

1. Open source hardware, preferably audited and not leaking data

2. Linux compatibility

3. Easy to remove/replace battery from the outside (like it was in the past)

4. A battery that lasts for a day with a quick recharge

5. Physical knobs to turn on/off the mic and camera

Full Linux support. Battery, SSD, RAM swappable with no glue involved.

Good cooling. I don't want to use 60% of a throttling CPU when I paid 100% of the price.

Ethernet, HDMI or Displayport, and a headphone jack without dongles. Also USB-C charging just in case the manufacturer decides to use the flimsiest cable for the proprietary charger and stops selling it after a few years (hi, Microsoft).

Would be cool to have hardware switches for camera and microphone.

So in short, I hope the Framework laptop makes it to the european market at some point. I don't really need a new laptop, but this would be a reason for one.

For me:

1. Good keyboard with real F-keys and fn-arrows that do home/end/pgup/dn or real keys that do those near the arrows. No numpad so it is centered. (Never again for apple, been burned too much by their crappy keyboards.)

2. OLED screen

3. Thunderbolt or USB4

4. At least 3 or more USB/TB ports

5. 32G+ RAM

6. 2T SSD, preferably socketed, or two sockets

7. A disable-able discrete GPU is nice; but quiet in normal operation is good

8. Slim - do not care about battery, but my back is not what it used to be, including the power brick

9. Nice but secondary: HDMI/DP, Ethernet, SD, fingerprint or other biometric, good mic, good webcam, good speakers, WLAN, WiFi beyond ac

On the one hand your list is not that bad. Could probably be satisfied.

On the other hand it's 9 items. So comparable to mine.

I don't think I'll be buying a laptop this year. Again.

Nothing satisfies.

I think it would be useful to know what kind of profile you fit, because everyone's must-haves are slightly different. For example, I would add:

- at least opens 180 degrees: I often find myself having to do the odd bit of work in the car - which is a nightmare generally, but having a laptop that can open flat is essential.

- Fingerprint reader (that works well under Linux): this is one of the saddest things about my current computer. It's a nice to have, but a very nice to have - especially if I end up doing work in a coffee shop with a thousand CCTV cameras.

We are in the process of finding out, I've listed above what I think, and am combing through the comments now.

Thank you for the ideas presented, I appreciate the time taken.

As for the laptops built-in screen 1920×1080 resolution is the only I want, also reasonable colors and preferably anti-glare screen. For external displays it must support 4K unless very cheap.

What is the reason you want resolution that low? I find high dpi and high refresh rates to be just so nice. I prefer smaller text and UI elements, but even when text is large it just looks so much better.

For me, higher resolutions add little for what I do. If I needed to look at super tiny text for whatever reason, like in images, I can use them, but that rarely happens.

My work computer has a 2K screen, BTW. I lower the resolution instead of scaling.

I have a colleague that scaled his monitors up a lot to something that looks hard to use, but he works fine with it.

For me it's always an optimization problem between weight, GPU, battery life, and cost. Generally, doing better in any one of those dimensions trades off with the other three.

As long as it is a normal laptop and does not support some kind of special tablet mode, I would skip the touchscreen part. My last laptop had a touchscreen (because I thought I would use it), but I never used it in a meaningful way. Instead, it created problems because at some point KDE detected it as a mouse and disabled the touchpad during boot until I took the time to solve the problem...

Price doesn't say much about build quality and I would search for a high quality laptop.

1. Excellent thermal management (i.e. temps under 90C at max load and fans that don’t sound like a turboprop)

2. Backlit keyboard with more than a bare minimum of key travel

3. IPS display with at least 300 nits of brightness and 100% (or close to it) sRGB coverage

4. Six core or better CPU

5. Dedicated GPU with at least 8GB of RAM

6. NVMe M.2 SSD (at least 512GB)

7. 32GB of 3200 MHz or faster RAM

8. From a major brand with decent reported reliability (e.g. Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo)

Willing to spend ~$2k, but I am very patient and good at deal hunting so I expect to get it for a little less.

What I look for:

1. Unfortunately due to eye strain, my bare minimum requirement these days is high DPI displays (around or better than 200 pixels per inch) combined with pixel-perfect integer (2.0x) scaling with no blurring at the OS level.

That means if I want a 13" laptop with a working resolution of 1440x900, the native display resolution needs to be 2880x1800.

2. Good build quality - excellent trackpad, decent keyboard.

3. Battery life - more than 12 hours would be swell!

4. Weight - a light laptop makes life so much better.

5. Performance

1. 120Hz screen with a HIDPI resolution. 60Hz feels very stuttery after using 120Hz on my phone/tablet/desktop.

2. S3 suspend or at least a good S0ix implementation.

3. Good support for replacing UEFI Secure Boot keys.

4. No numpad so that the keyboard is centered.

5. Absolutely no coil whine. My Dell XPS 9560 had this since day 1, while my work MacBook Pro and Lenovo P1 developed it over time.

6. Biggest battery possible. I don't care about charging time or weight.

7. Good Linux support (including firmware updates via LVFS).

> 4. No numpad so that the keyboard is centered.

I've had that preference (strong preference) for as long as I can remember. It has recently changed, as I've discovered the convenience of scripting the UI and tiling my windows.

Now I'm using the NumLock as a "dead key", that triggers a script or a layout change if followed by one of the num-pad numbers. It is a life-changing hack, I have to tell you.

> 5. Absolutely no coil whine. My Dell XPS 9560 had this since day 1, while my work MacBook Pro and Lenovo P1 developed it over time.

In a similar vein - I don’t know what you call it, but the sensation you get when you run your finger over the case of a charging MacBook is just so gross.

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem an M1 Air.

If you’re not, a framework laptop.

Thank you for those suggestions, I am aware of both.

But both are about 80% there for me.

My #1 requirement is a 4K OLED HDR screen, ideally 16" or larger.

The #2 requirement is a decent keyboard with full-sized arrow keys and dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Ins/Del and arrow keys. (Why $5000 laptops skimp on $0.01 keys just boggles the mind.)

Everything else is a nicety, or can be compromised on. But I look at the screen and I touch the keyboard for 8 hours a day. If they're not good enough, I'm not buying, end of story.

Personally I just want a Macbook Pro style laptop that runs Linux really well. IMO the build quality of the Macbook Pro is second to none and I really enjoy the keyboard (now that it's fixed) and the beautiful and super useful trackpad. But ... I am getting tired of all the hoops I have to jump through to run Linux-y things and would like to just run Linux (even though I might go back the option is nice to have).

Can I drop it, that's number one for me over the years, imagine, your most important meeting, you need your laptop, you get there and it works, or it doesn't, the biggest factor out there in the 'real world' is can it handle real life, baggage gets thrown around without your choice, if it doesn't work when you need it then it doesn't matter how nice the keyboard is or the screen is :)

2 or 3 Nvme slots

2 user-friendly ram slots

minimum 4 usb ports, 6 would be better

Sd card slot

2 hdmi ports or 2 mini display ports

gigabit lan port

minimum 1080p@120fps or 2k@60fps or 720p@240fps camera

oled panel

white keyboard backlight (like macbook airs)

headphone jack

100% linux compatibility for all components out of the box.

Comment not related to OP's wishes but I miss the 16:10 laptop screens of 2010 extremely hard. It's the one thing I miss about my HP 8740w.

The last great Elitebook. RIP

I miss not having desktop 16:10s. I would love to replace my Dell U2412m monitors with a 3840x2400 24” DCI p3 display. But those don’t exist in the consumer market.

The latest (gen 9) Thinkpad x1 carbon is 16:10

I hear they have keyboard flex and aren't great with Linux.

Bought an X1 recently and the Linux support is amazing: all components work more or less out of the box, and with `fwupd`, you even get firmware updates.

This is my first Linux notebook after ~4 years and I am really blown away by how easy it was to set up!

Not sure what you mean by keyboard flex, but so far, typing is really good...I am mostly using this for text work (research papers, proposals, presentations), so the keyboard sees a lot of use.

Which X1 did you get?

Gen 9; did not get a model with additional SIM support, though.

Thanks, I'll take another look at Gen9 X1 TP

Microsoft's Surface laptops have 3:2 screens, which is just as good or even better.

I don't think I will buy another laptop any time soon. For work I prefer a desktop machine, and most of the tasks away from a desktop I can handle with my phone. I am thinking about travel pack of compact keyboard, mouse, HDMI cable and a USB-C hub to plug it all into and be plugged into the phone, but in current circumstances I don't see a situations where it would be really necessary.

I caved earlier this year and got an M1 MacBook Air, $1000 (for the 16gb of ram model) and it’s significantly faster than my (2 year old but much more expensive) thinkpad, it doesn’t have a touchscreen but meets every other requirement you have, and you can now put Linux on it and it works pretty great, and will only improve as marcan and team keep up their great work

I was very excited to try those at the store. Failed on glossy screen that gets punctured by a single grain of sand left on the keyboard. Speaking of which, the keyboard gets stuck by the same.

So no.

What apple has for sale, newest, more ram/ssd and that's it.

It sounds obtuse, but, I enjoy selling my macbooks at 60-75% of purchase price 3-4 years later, and if needbe, applecare - which itself, is outrageous but it's nice.

Alternative would be Surface, but for the money, eh.

XPS 13 too, they're great but there have been some defects but for me they're perfect.

Apple has a different kind of customer in mind the last few years, I don't find what the do to their products in any way interesting anymore. Now that they have changed to not having ridiculous amount of interconnect and so sped up things considerably I did walk in to take a look.

But the finicky keyboards and glossy displays turned me off of them again.

I've looked at the latest crop of Surface, they are very nice. But way underpowered for the price.

XPS 14 would be interesting to me, provided it actually meets me where I want it, and not the usual "in the middle" as it goes with Dell products.

Only problem I've had with a Dell XPS13 9370 is with the Killer brand WiFi failing to wake up from sleep.

Unfortunately its soldered in so can't be replaced.

I only use Linux but I'm told it affects Windows users too.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I recently realized my MacBook has 16 Gb RAM in 2021. My 2012 MBP also had 16 Gb. I know it’s possible to get machines with 64, but 16 is still a standard developer machine in many organizations I worked at. I was even considering asking for a non-MacBook work laptop with 32 Gb(to get it cheaper).

For me, No. 1 with a bullet is a mechanical keyboard.

I type endlessly and I type fast -- without mechanical keys, I'm replacing the keyboard (or even the whole laptop) every 18 months.

This irritatingly leaves me stuck with gigantic gaming rigs; the first company to build a relatively lightweight laptop with mechanical keys has my business for life.

Display with 3:2 ratio, 2K or 4K resolution. Good keyboard (high end surface devices have the best keyboards IMHO).

Wow, that sounds interesting, are there any 3:2 laptops that you like?

Interesting how none of the top comments have weight in their lists. Number one for me is probably weight as I carry the thing around all day. To meetings, to work/home, etc. This includes weight of the charger.

Next comes battery life.

Next the time it takes to be usable after opening the lid.

Trackpad quality next.

After the other regulars like screen, keyboard, etc.

I think I've attracted more people that don't laptop at the office but in the field. My question framing might be to blame.

When I bought mine a couple of years ago I wanted a machine with enough computing power for my needs.. I did not care much about the hardware but I wanted a laptop sold without any OS. (no Windows) depending on where you live and if you want it in 48 hours it is apparently something not so easy to find.

Good keyboard and a good touchpad with discrete buttons. No buttons, no buy.

The other vital thing is a non-touch matte/anti-glare screen. I want to look at my code, not myself.

Of course there's heaps more I'll be comparing when choosing a machine, but if the above aren't met I won't be looking at that machine.

It's super annoying when I accidentally move the cursor when clicking the touchpad buttons that are not physically separate. Why has this become the standard?

Hardware kill switches for camera and microphones, as well as for wireless.

I wonder if one for an internal NIC would be overkill.

What about the screen? High resolution, better aspect ratio than 16:9, oled, refresh rate,...etc.

You interact with the screen, the keyboard and the pointing device all the time and they cannot be changed, so all these have to be good. Things like good wifi or bluetooth are nice, but there are dongles.

I'd love a 5:4 or even just 4:3 screen, but those usually are reserved to tablets, shamefully. I don't realistically expect to find something like that, ever.

High refresh rate is desirable, high resolution is nice-to-have, for me.

Sturdy and reliable. flimsy and poorly built laptops are horrible. I can tolerate a lot of features not being there if it's built as if vibranium was used at some point. Minimal plastic usage! Add hardware kill switches and you almost have perfection, at least to my preference.

In order, Very good screen nits 400+minimum( I think its improving with mini led) , high ram 64gb+ better 128 ( would be good with dd5 I think), efficient sleep and working hibernation, replaceable battery , usb3/4 charging of the battery from a power bank and power supply

That's a reasonable and short list.

But you're in my camp, you want to use the machine, not admire it. Still, I bet you can find something to get excited about this year, while I may not be able to. Again.

1. A good hinge. A really good hinge. Hinges are the Achilles heels of laptops.

2. Power connector in a sane place. Power connectors are the other Achilles heels of laptops, just like phones, and everything you can do to prevent mechanical failure of either the cable or the on-board socket is good.

1. 13-14" high resolution(2560x1440) display with good brightness 2. ARM processor with Apple silicon performance/efficiency 3. Fast SSD of atleast 256 GB capacity 4. Macbook like big and nice trackpad 5. Good linux support 6. Good webcam

The Framework laptop came out around the same time I spilled juice on my Lenovo and fried the keyboard. Now durability user repairability are my top priorities. Hopefully Framework sticks around and makes a Ryzen option soon.

I can't stand laptop with numerical keyboards. These keys are a waste of space and moves the rest of the keys & trackpad to the left making hands position not aligned with the center of the device.

Portability is important, a 17" notebook is not really a notebook for me.

Agreed. I use a Dell XPS 15 and its just the right size for me (eyesight getting poorer over time).

OP here: so, from the amount of comments I surmise that my like-minded crowd is either not hanging around here no more, or aren't really numerous.

Thanks everyone for participating in this discussion, I appreciate you all.

UPDATE: this seems to have blown up a bit.

Combing through once again, thanks everyone.

What is that crowd that you mention? BTW, what do you use the laptop for?

Not mention, describe. Therein your answer.

I would use the laptop for rendering and modelling, animating and music production, video encoding and massive compiling. Maybe a few virtual machines. If it can handle it.

EDIT: of course a lot of reading, coding and writing.

UPDATE: in the two days this was up, having combed through the comments on three separate occasions – the following seems to be the general consensus, in rough order of relative importance:

1. S3 standby/sleep support required

2. low weight for luggability, 2.5lb maximum

3. survives table-to-floor falls

4. always-on-AC battery deaths unacceptible

5. survives being in a bag, accidental activation

6. Linux support for all hardware

7. trackpads on par with Apple, at least

8. keyboards with clear actuation, spill resistance and backlighting

9. kill switches or modular hardware for camera and mic

10. bright matte screens, with vertical space

11. memory and I/O performance approaching Apple's M1 SoC

12. HDMI, USB-A, 3.5mm, 10gbE, SD, USB-C periferals are what people own, support that

13. trackpoints are great for text-editing

14. quiet operation, no blinken-lights

15. prefer no webcam over shitty webcam, no BT/WiFi over shitty BT/WiFi

After the Apple event streams I shall post a list of laptops people seem to have a history of enjoying.

Cheers.

A beautiful UI that comes out of the box that I don't have to spend hours tinkering to get it just right. A Unix-like kernel (WSL2 comes pretty close). Not too bulky.

That realistically only leaves me with MacBook Pros.

Gnome 40 or Elementary OS might be your cup of tea then.

System76 makes them "out-the-box"-ier. You should check them out.

Tall screen, 16:9 is a scourge. 16:10 is merely acceptable, but I prefer even taller.

Linux support required.

Less important, but I wish they still had some ports on the back. Don't want the more permanent cables all over the desk.

Quiet ... I'm typing this on a Lenovo P15s whose fan only stops when the laptop is off. Not sure if it would be so loud as a hackintosh but constant fan noise can really harsh your mellow

I have a dirt cheap Chinese laptop. It's branded as an Infinity o5. It's a Ryzen with no flashy features, the simplest bios I've ever seen. I love it. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Yeah, I've been eyeing the Chinese no-names. They seem to be getting better. Thanks for the data point.

Look for non-Intel solutions. There is absolutely zero reason to adopt Intel CPUs until Intel has proven that they can ship CPUs that do not contain expensive-to-fix security bugs year after year after year (you're on a laptop, every CPU cycle counts to keep heat down and battery life longer).

Several companies make Zen 3 APU (Ryzen 5000 series models)-based laptops that have good keyboards, good screens, and the usual other features.

The only thing you'll have to give up is "head-set jack", which you really mean to be a 3.5mm TRRS jack. Just use a USB-C dongle here; the rest is fine: laptops have entirely USB-C ports nowadays, with USB-C used for Power Delivery to charge.

Also, I'm not sure how you'll achieve a touchscreen that doesn't glare: due to the use case, they have to be Gorilla Glass to survive being touched by human hands. If you want a matte screen, you give up touching, and there are no good coatings to actually reduce glare on a shiny glass screen.

As for Wifi and Bluetooth, no laptop really performs badly anymore, everybody buys the same 2 solutions, Broadcom or Qualcomm's. Intel still makes a Wifi chipset, and it used to be good, but it kind of sucks in the 802.11AC and AX eras, and you only see it used in Intel AMT corporate laptops (or a shared platform being sold also for consumers) that necessitate the use.

The only laptop I'd absolutely say don't buy is anything with Apple's name on it. Basically, fails almost all of your requirements, while being one of the most expensive examples. Truly sad as well, I like the M1 CPU, and I wish Apple would antitrust'ed to spit PA Semi back, but the entire build around that M1 is pretty trash.

Something like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YD1JLJF/ is probably the least expensive option that doesn't footgun you. $6xx, good 14" 1080p screen, 8GB of ram (16GB variants exist), enough SSD on a decent M.2 NVME, an 802.11AX+BT5 chip, good enough keyboard and trackpad, works in Linux, is only stingy on the ports by having 3 (so get a cheap hub if you want to plug in something more than USB PD brick to charge + 3.5mm TRRS dongle + external storage at the same time), supports Modern Standby (deep clock-halt S1, instead of needing to transit in and out of S3; works best on Zen 2/3, iffy on Intel series 9/10/11; Intel is planning on fixing for 12; but also can use S3 just in case you need a laptop to sleep for 24hr+ and retain significant charge), and doesn't have a dedicated GPU (which is a win, the APU's GPU is strong as hell, even can do mid-tier gaming without cooking the laptop).

> There is absolutely zero reason to adopt Intel CPUs until Intel has proven that they can ship CPUs that do not contain expensive-to-fix security bugs year after year after year (you're on a laptop, every CPU cycle counts to keep heat down and battery life longer).

this is simply not fair. other architectures and CPU manufacturers also suffered from security issues.

It is absolutely fair. The ballpark figure for losses over Meltdown/Spectre fixes is about 20%. This means, on a laptop, you produce 20% more heat or your battery's charge lasts 20% less.

AMD's worst fix for Spectre/Meltdown lost about 3%, and that was for the original Zen 1. Would you rather have 20% of your CPU/battery just evaporate without warning, or 3%?

On top of this, Intel does not make any really competing parts: Intel laptops cost more and flat out perform worse per dollar, with a lower upper limit on maximum performance.

The next chance Intel has at being competitive is with their first full scale Cove family core (instead of the Lake/Cove hybrids, which isn't going to be out until Series 12.

Side note: Series 12 is already shaping up to be bad, the most cost-effective desktop part is going to go toe to toe with Zen 4 per "real" thread, and have 4 big SMT2 cores and 8 little Atom-like SMT1 cores (so 16 threads, with half of them on smaller and slower power efficient cores, so like how ARM does it), but the competing Zen 4 Ryzen will be 8 real full scale cores (and also 16 threads), which ends up putting it in the ballpark of being around a third faster with the same power usage and pricing.

Intel must compete, and I hope Pat Gelsinger can turn the ship around. CPUs take about 3-4 years, from early planning to retail shelves. He became CEO this year, so I don't think they have anything they can do (other than drop pricing significantly) until the Cove that goes up against Zen 6 comes out (which is 2025+).

Everyone fucks up. But Intel fucks up big.

> There is absolutely zero reason to adopt Intel CPUs

I’d live to ditch Intel, but quicksync is just so good for video transcoding. 10 or 20 high bitrate video streams can be attacked without any noticeable load on the system. Its excessive from what I need, but it’s just so good. Maybe I’m too easily impressed.

AMD and Nvidia's encoding engines can handle more load, do it in lower latency, and also be higher quality in less bits. The last time Intel impressed me with Quicksync was in the Haswell days.

I’d far prefer to user onboard graphics, and AMD is ahead as you describe, more so than I’d appreciated. I am impressed with the UHD630, but AMD beats it easily. https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/features/amd-vs-intel-integ...

A lot of ports. A few usb of a few flavors (add one more if one is needed for charging) plus hdmi plus whatever I'm forgetting. Personally I'd even prefer a built in rj45 port.

I just look for an Apple logo. The newer one that's not backlit.

Maybe it goes without saying but

- fingerprint sign in

- at least 16 gb ram, up to at least 32

- VG+ screen. It's the only thing you use 100% of the time. Even the KB and touchpad isn't as often. Don't skimp on the screen.

Unpopular opinion here for sure, but my main thing is going to be the ability to run macOS so that keeps my options fairly limited! High hopes for Monday's announcement.

Expandability, repairability, ports, toughness. I dont want to spend over $1500 on something only to find I cant expand the ram, change the battery or replace the ssd.

Fingerprint reader so I can log in frictionlessly. Laptop locks instantly, but I can swipe my finger to log back in, so the security requirement isn't onerous.

This saves so much time during my day, where I have to be called away regularly and my laptop auto-locks which I leave enabled for paranoia.

Are you under the impression you're worth spying on? Why don't you just Ctrl-Shift-F12 or something to lock it when you actually want that?

I had bad experience with fingers as ID. Any spill on the scanner surface will disable it for days. And sometimes my prints change enough by being callous, or not fat enough or whatever. Just change. And then – no dice.

I am worth 'spying on' in my organization by the tens of non-workforce 'clients' that come into our office every day, including when I'm away from my machine. I don't 'just' Ctrl+Shift+F12 because I don't know when I might be called from one end of the office to another building, and I won't necessarily remember to stop and go lock my machine.

I don't drink by my laptop because that doesn't seem to be a worthwhile endeavor based on past experience. If my prints change then I can re-register them in about a minute or less. Enjoy your password/pin/whatever.

Alright, you seem to have your reasons and your use case.

Glad I'm not in that situation.

- unix-based under the hood so normal dev work is easy peasy

- low maintenance so I have more time and energy

- popular so app ecosystem works

- unbreakable

For work I haven't seen a competitor to macbook pro's in a decade.

Your requirements seem to match a Thinkpad quite well (good Linux support)

Thanks for the suggestion but I'm not talking about good linux support from the hardware. Running linux is not low maintenance, app ecosystem and ux is not comparable to mac. Mac manages to be best in class for those while also being able to be linux-enough to easily develop for linux environments.

I check for the following three only.

  + 3.5GHz WiFi.
  + Backlit keyboard.
  + Nvidia graphics card for ML.

The rest are mostly common in all laptops.

Before I had a desktop it was a balance of everything. Now it’s battery life for too priority. If I need more computation I’ll just ssh into my desktop.

1. 15inch screen 2. Runs Linux well 3. AMD GPU 4. Keyboard that isn't crap 5. Recent Ryzen CPU 6. Good build quality

Couldn't find anything that matches

Pretty much has to be a macbook so I can test developer experience on OSX and the product with Safari.

Otherwise I develop on a 64GB 16/32 core workstation.

Fast cpu, quiet fan, and huge amount of ram. 512G SSD of any kind.

Plus if there’s dual video output.

Yes I would use it as a workstation always plugged in sitting on my desk.

1. Good and replaceable battery;

2. Multiple USB on BOTH sides plus headset jack;

3. 16GB+ RAM plus 512GB+ SSD;

4. Solid frame for frequent travelling;

5. No touchscreen;

6. Keyboard that feels like one;

7. 15'+ screen;

8. Touchpad that can be disabled easily

A good keyboard. This is surprisingly hard to find.

1. Open source compatibility

2. Battery replaceable

3. Screen replaceable

4. No soldered on RAM

5. Full shutdown, always on is a bug not a feature

6. Durability

7. Ports a plenty

8. I should be able to drop it from any angle from my couch and it should not break

An Apple logo tbh.

The 16" Macbook Pro that's going to be announced on Monday.

I've never anticipated a product announcement more than the new Macbooks.

A touchscreen with some sort of good pen support, ideally a tablet mode as well.

I use a desktop for most things, so the tablet is for drawing, etc.

Once 7. (specifically a discrete GPU) is a requirement, your choices become very limited. Either a gaming laptop or a workstation.

No, no, I didn't mean it like that. Rizen and Apple's current crop will suffice. Just not some mobile Nvidia or Intell bullshit, that won't do.

Linux Support. Decent battery life (7+ hours).

An exceptional trackpad. I heard windwos laptops are coming close to the Macbook trackpad, but I've gotta try it first.

1. No soldered ram or disk.

2. Bulky, heavy with 17" screen and good cooling.

3. CPU has to be XEON with ECC support.

4. Lots of USB-A ports and other ports (HDMI, etc).

Wait, you want a bulky and heavy laptop?

One that DOES NOT have those ridiculously small up and down cursor keys. So many modern laptops are like that now.

A comfortable keyboard, battery life, good sleep mode, and great hardware software integration are what I look for.

If you use your laptop near a power outlet a lot you might want to require it to have smart charging capability.

Good on-site warranty support and/or spare part availability whether it's from the OEM or Ebay.

Good thermal management. Ability to sustain loads without throttling. Hardware with Linux compatibility.

at least 8 cores, Nvidia GPU, at least 1 tb of storage, the bigger the better as long as the power brick isn't too big. I don't care about battery life since I regularly max out cpu/GPU and will eat through any battery.

I don't care about portability since I lift.

> I don't care about portability since I lift.

My man. I'd stop at 15in though.

There are indeed many responses here. But how does one find any answers to the good questions?

I might do a summary or a survey after Apple talks. That's after 18th.

Thunderbolt 4, especially since I use an eGPU to turn my laptop into a gaming machine.

I often wonder about the experience of using an eGPU. What are the tradeoffs? I travel a bit for work now and I'd like to have a more mobile gaming setup.

Tradeoff is that your performance will be bottlenecked by your CPU. I can't wait for AMD's Ryzen 6000 series since that's supposed to support USB4 (which includes TB3).

Linux support. If Linux doesn't support most/all of the hardware, skip.

On the 18th I’ll be looking for a 16” screen and the next rev of Apple Silicon.

1. weight <= 1.3 Kg

2. display >= 13.5"

3. 3 USB ports (nowadays they come as 2 + 1 USB-C, but that's ok)

4. HDMI port for projectors (2013 Toshiba z930 ultrabook used to have both HDMI and D-Sub ports!)

5. Keyboard with cursor keys not squeezed as on most modern laptops

6. Home/End/PgUp/PgDown proper keys, not through Fn combo (because then you can't do things like Shift+PgUp to select a lot of text)

7. If possible, without Windows

Other parameters are negotiable and upgradable.

Keyboard + USB requirements eliminate most laptops, including Frame, Mac and Think/IdeaPads (plus 13" ThinkPads weigh like a brick).

My choice is formed by the way I use them: I plug it to a monitor and keyboard, but often carry it to a cafe, so I want to be able to type on the keyboard, navigate texts (with a full-size cursor keys) and edit a lot of texts without pain that many laptops create (Lenovo Idea pad has very inconvenient delete/home/end keys). I have a USB wireless mouse (touchpads are inconvenient), and often plug extra devices (external drive, SD adapter, etc.). With just 2 USB ports I would often run out of ports having to unplug.

Weight is very important, since I walk and take transit with the laptop. Anything heavier than 1.3 Kg becomes noteable. 3 Kg is painful to carry even for 20 minutes, especially when you're tired after a working day.

The best I've known are:

* 2013 Toshiba z930. 1.05 kg, 3 ports, HDMI+VGA, SD card, 3G card!

* 2005 Panasonic Toughbook, consumer edition. 1.3 kg, passive cooling! 2x USB, Floppy drive xD, CD-ROM.

* 2019 MSI Modern 14. 1.3 kg, 2xUSB-A, 1xUSB-C, bright screen

Unlocking laptop with my fingerprints was a game changer for me

My fingers don't always have prints.

Sometimes they are callous.

There must be a better way to conduct this "survey"

There is. But is it worth the effort of unfamiliar UX? No.

Define "Good GPU". What do you want to do with it?

Depends on whether a GPU is present. But yes, all the things.

Encoding video, modelling and rendering, compiling large code bases, sleeping for a week at least.

Good.

EDIT: Oh, your question was about the GPU, not the CPU, soz

Well, I don't care if it's part of the CPU SoC, in fact I prefer it to be. That's faster for memory access.

But it has to do all the things, as described above. If it is also not a nuisance, like downloading 120MB of driver-and-friends every time the wall clock bangs, then I'll be double happy with it. More than happy. Criminally and institutionally happy.

I just buy a MacBook Pro that’s upgraded within my budget.

1. 4 USB-C ports minimum

2. Thunderbolt on both sides

3. touchpad as good as Apple's

4. Built in cellular

battery, trackpad, screen.

MacBook Air M1, MacBook Pro, Microsoft Surface Go (if you want touchscreen) fit the bill. I'm optimistic about Framework laptop as well.

Combination Surface Book & Framework is what I want

Hear hear.

I'd add, "from Apple".

Surface Studio Laptop. I have one and am 100% satisfied

My criteria for a laptop:

1. Display

2. Price

3. Ports

4. Repair-ability / expand-ability

5. Thermals (especially if high-end GPU)

6. Keyboard + build quality

1. 1920x1200 display at a minimum. 3:2 is even better as long as the width is still there. I don't care if there are black bars on my movies, I want a tall screen. There is no technical reason to require a squinty screen ratio in order to get 2 documents side by side.

2. The things I touch don't suck. decent construction, rubberized plastic or aluminimum, decent keyboard, decent trackpad.

3. Reliable components. No killer wifi. I will check the arch wiki to make sure linux won't be death by a thousand papercuts. I don't mind if there is some setup as long as I can put that entire setup into a single shell script. I don't need a discrete gpu.

4. memory and ssd cannot be soldered.

5. anything else.

Dpi Frame rate Battery life Weight Responsiveness

3.5mm jack and at least one USB that isn't C

I got myself a Dell Precision 7750, but without the discrete GPU option as the price was getting ridiculous.

My main requirements were similar to yours:

- SIM card: Supports 4G but you have to disassemble the laptop to insert the SIM. A dongle may have been a better option, as I doubt the SIM module can be upgraded to a 5G one when they come available.

- I quite like the keyboard

- Screen is great

- Fast charging with the Dell adapter only

- Loads of GPU options

- Standard components are user upgradable. I installed 128GB RAM (max) and another SSD myself. It supports a total of 4 SSDs

- There was no AMD CPU option at the time I bought it, but those seemed rare/unavailable from other vendors too.

It needs to boot NixOS without much hassle.

1. MacOS

2. No touchbar

3. HDMI ports

4. 32GB ram, 512GB SSD

Hopefully we'll get one of these in a few days.

Thin, quiet, fast, and a good touchpad.

Super high performance, comparable with high performance desktop. I mean nvme, cpu that does not throttle, etc. I need 2 hrs on battery maximum.

macOS

I’ve tried going back to Windows and it’s just a terrible OS. macOS has its faults but nothing in that scale.

Seconded, its defaults match my preferences well enough that I don't have to customize it much. It's also great to not have to climb up a huge learning curve and invest a lot of time just to make and keep the OS usable, as I'd have to with Linux.

One looks for a Mac, and buys it.

Decent RAM, it is never enough.

1. [must] Runs Linux

2. [must] HDMI, RJ45, >=2x USB-A, >=1x USB-C (2x if it's also used for charging), headphone jack, card reader (preferably one where the sdcard clicks into, so I can leave the microsd adapter inside and always handy; currently my laptop has it half sticking out so it would break off). I can understand that a serial cable requires a dongle, but network cables I still use daily. Install one of those openable ports if you must, but I won't buy your laptop if it doesn't have a network interface built in.

3. [must] Changeable RAM so I don't have to buy an overpriced 32GB laptop, but can just buy a regular laptop costing half as much and spend 70 bucks on an upgrade.

4. [must] Changeable SSD. Same story: large SSD with no HDD (because with an additional HDD you again have all its downsides like noise and power draw) is overpriced, and I don't feel like reinstalling everything anyway, so I prefer to just transfer the SSD from my previous laptop and toss whatever they stuck in the new one.

5. [must] 1080p screen so no scaling bugs or larger-than-necessary power draw. I don't see more pixels anyway and 95% of the time I'll be looking at an external screen; if you work 8h/day on a laptop you should probably be looking to change that.

6. [should] Fast CPU cores. When I selected my most recent laptop in 2018, CPUs had actually nearly gotten slower than the previous one in 2012. But they draw less power! Whoop tee doo... good job intel on power saving by just doing less. I'm buying a daily computing driver, not a phone, and I am very rarely more than 1.5 hours removed from a power socket. Also, I still can rarely use more than one core per task (and am doing just one thing in the foreground; dual core would be fine), but I suppose it's the only way these days to get any sort of performance. Still, I'd rather have 4 cores with 100 benchmark points each than 32 cores with 75 benchmark points each. (And hyperthreading counting towards the number of cores is misleading, as it adds only a few percent performance.)

7. [wish] WiFi 6

8. [wish] Buttons above the touchpad are nice. Keyboard: the more buttons the better, basically. I actually use home/end/pgup/pgdn/scroll lock/printscreen/pause/menu/function keys/media keys/etc. unlike what laptop designers seem to think. There's so little choice in this that I guess I'll just live with whatever I can get at this point. Also, death to the combined up/down arrow key.

9. [mkay] GPU is cool but, often, time thermal restrictions make it only a little faster than the nowadays pretty performant and efficient integrated graphics. Useful for hashcat though.

A. [wish] My current laptop has taught me that not all LCD displays are made alike. The vertical viewing angle on this one is so terrible that the colors are always distorted on at least one part of the screen no matter your viewing angle. I have no idea how to objectively look for this, but a nice screen is a bonus. Then again, as before: I won't spend 95% of my time looking at this screen anyhow.

1. Is it a MacBook Pro?

And that's it.

Current crop of MBPs is not like the 2015 MBPs. The 'Pro' has been beaten out of them.

Otherwise, agree.

One word: repairability.

Good Linux support

Numeric keyboard

ISP screen

As much CUDA cores as possible

>= 32MB RAM

Thunderbolt Port(s)!

1440 or higher res

1) availability!

Are you buying them in droves? Shiploads?

I need a few laptops for work. We have lead times into next year or pay 20% premium

Linux support.

physical front camera cover

Silence.

I just bought a laptop for the first time in 10 years or so and I've spent quite some time and effort looking for it (bought 4 laptops, sent them all back and bought a 5th one).

My priorities were

- best keyboard possible - good layout you can get used to (ANSI vs ISO, dedicated pgup, pgdn, home end keys not too far from each other and arrow keys), good tactile feedback

- case stability

- good touchpad. I prefer physical buttons instead of or at least next to clickpads which is getting increasingly difficult to find

- decent cpu perf, measure what's important for you (turns out for my use case AMD 5800U's 8 cores didn't make a difference compared to Tiger lake for my work)

- upgradeable RAM or at least 32GB soldered

- OK screen (350+ nits, reasonably color accurate, preferably matte)

- battery life 6h+ on wifi

- thermals and noise - does the fan make high pitched noise, how often does it kick in, is the case/keyboard warm

- no nose webcam

- USB-A AND USB-C ports (+placement: both on both sides), ideally also HDMI, headphone jack, thunderbolt

- fingerprint reader/Hello, hardware TPM2.0

- 3 year warranty, on site service

- after all this also portability

I tried HP Zbook power, HP Firefly 14, HP Elitebook 840, Thinkpad X1 Carbon, Thinkpad P14s and Schenker Vision 14 and settled for the 840. The Carbon is also a nice machine, the P14s is massive while not bringing any major benefits, the Schenker had some built quality issues but otherwise looks great.

I've found HP's keyboard just so much nicer to write on - there is such a crystal clear pressure point: it's either pressed or not pressed, on a TP you can get into an in between state. Plus the layout on 840 and Firefly 14 (column on the right with home, pgup, pgdn and end) is the best IMHO.

In the end you will have to settle with what's in stock anyway as lots of configurations have insane delivery times 3+ months.

EDIT: here are my notes, perhaps someone will find them useful

zephyrus m16 - keyboard without pgup, creaking, hot air on display? battery life ~4h

ideapad 5 pro - overheating? keyboard without pgup, shitty touchpad

legion 5 - terrible design, bad touchpad, amd version has shitty realtek wifi

thinkbook p16- no hdmi, bad battery life?

inspiron 16 plus - crap touchpad, throttling

aero 17 - nose cam

zbook - touchpad? runs hot

thinkpad p1/extreme - weird cpu heatsink issue, creaking

dells - power button in corner, xps-no usba,

envy and spectre - fingerprint reader instead of ctrl, gloss

ThinkPad X1 Carbon G9 - ok, 16:10, throttling, typing/touchpad lag?, shitty support?, non-touch has 4-5 weeks lead time

What do you mean by nose cam? I initially thought you meant "no noise" but you mention nose twice so I'm curious.

Guessing he means laptops where the camera is below the display and is pointing up at your nose when in use

I wasn't aware there were any laptops like that, I wonder what the reason for that design choice is?

Smaller bezel. Most manufacturers want an "edge to edge" display because that looks nice (and reduce the overall size of the laptop) but then they don't know what to do with the webcam.

Some remove it entirely (some Asus), some put them under the screen and Huawei even has a webcam under a fn key in the keyboard.

thinkpad

If it has the Apple logo you'll be fine.

Seriously though, the Intel 16 inch MBP or the M1X 16 inch due to be released in a few days are the best choice hands down, if you can afford it.

Sounds like you could also benefit from an iPad Pro M1 plus pencil and LTE, which I can't recommend enough.

I would say since 2015, the premium laptops have improved further still, the display and battery life specs are outstanding and unprecedented.

But the cheap ass laptops like what Lenovo make after buying the Thinkpad name from IBM, are even more flimsy and a really bad deal all round. You want an M1X device, get that and load Linux if you need it. You can use a VM or native for some distros

For me what matters is that it runs macOS reliably. I’m spoiled by its ergonomics and I run Adobe and other graphics intensive software which doesn’t run on Linux.

My 2015 MacBook pro still runs. I’m not looking forward to giving up the USB ports, the MagSafe, the hdmi and sdcard ports.

That said, I'm excited about the new generation - if I can use one laptop for coding, image processing and video editing, that would be worth my money.

Unfortunately the mass produced engineering disasters that Apple has become synonymous with (the keyboard fiasco, the short display cable, the insane repair prices) have diminished my trust with the company.

Most likely I’ll still give them my money.

The keyboard issues are fixed. The 2019 16 inch MBP is the best laptop I ever used and I feel very privileged to have the opportunity.

Apple is expensive there's no getting around that. They have the best product on the market, it can't have been easy to design and manufacture, and they want to paid what it's worth. On the other hand, it is in fact worth every penny. Enjoy your new machine. I recommend the larger display models.

> I’m not looking forward to giving up the USB ports, the MagSafe, the hdmi and sdcard ports.

Rumors are that the ones being announced on the 18th will bring back most or all of those, along with getting rid of the Touch Bar.

Intel 16 inch is NOT good. Runs too hot and throttles.

Will the new MBP get an LTE modem?

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