Ask HN: Are Laptops Getting Better?
If you agree, than which features did you feel improved the mobile workstation experience.
If you disagree, than which issues were most memorable for a given model.
Cheers, J
If you disagree, than which issues were most memorable for a given model.
Cheers, J
But then Apple Silicon came along and showed the world how much better laptops could be. They are a huuuuuuuuge leap forward.
And that's coming from someone who used to love ThinkPads before. Apple really changed the game there. Soooo much better, faster, cooler, quieter.
In every single aspect of Laptops. Speakers, for Example. MacBook has always had better speakers than all PC Notebook for years if not decades. If it wasn't for Youtube reviews, no PC marker would pay attention to speaker quality. They just use the cheapest one to save cost.
Trackpad.
Keyboard - although I argue that has regressed in recent MacBook even with the new scissors.
Processors. We now have passively cooled SoC. Fast enough to do 90% of what consumers demands.
Screen. We are still some years away from 120Hz, 260PPI, High HDR, Ultra Thin, Energy efficient Display. Something like Nano-Rod OLED.
Batteries, Both in Cycle Count and Energy Density.
Thunderbolt 4. And hopefully Thunderbolt 5.
Web Cam Display.
Durability, better capacitor and PSU designs.
NAND- Faster IO.
WiFI, and WiFI 7. You now get wireless transfer speed that exceed 1Gbps. Hopefully some day integrated 5G as well.
There are still loads of improvement that could be made to Laptop. In 10 year time we could have a laptop that would resemble the MacBook in 2014. But much better equipped in performance.
Asus ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED is close. It has a 120Hz 16:10 2.8K (2880 x 1800) screen. By my calculations thats 234PPI. It's not cheap though.
https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Creators/Zenbook/Zenbook-Pr...
I have just tried to mentally compare a MacBook Air that I have now, with an HP from the 2000s that I used to borrow from my mom a lot when I was a kid.
Honestly, I can't think of a single feature that lets me do my work much better (and yeah, I'm taking the performance increase in 20 years for granted here).
Yeah, the touchpad and the screen are infinitely nicer than they were before. But if I hadn't ever tried a high-resolution screen, I probably wouldn't have minded.
The biggest improvements seem to have come from everything surrounding the laptop — software, internet infrastructure, ubiquitous mobile phones, etc.
- I have internet connection everywhere and it's virtually unlimited.
- I can buy a server with one click for $5/mo.
- Modern browsers can be used to instantly deploy nearly desktop-grade apps to everyone.
- Very advanced tools (languages, libraries, IDEs, databases) are free.
- Not everyone has internet connectivity all the time, but the niche of only serving always-connected people is big enough that for a while (or several years!) I can just not care about offline mode at all and not solve the hard problems that occur there.
- Things that don't impact my work as much but do impact others' work: high quality video calls, free map services, free translation services, good TTS & voice recognition, fast OCR, ubiquitous TLS and fairly common E2E, very cheap storage, etc etc etc.
Perhaps the only work-related improvement that comes directly from my laptop's hardware (again, not counting performance!) is CPU-provided virtualization support. I don't know whether a 20-year-old laptop could run Docker, but.. probably not. Without Docker, matching production and dev environment would likely be much harder.
1. mobile internet
2. Lidar (iPad Pro)
3. graphical tablet layer (iPad w/ Apple Pencil, and others)
4. high quality cameras
All of these enable people to use the tablet to get work done that was previously impossible if you are limited to just one "mobile workstation" device with no add-ons.
I can't imagine staring at a greasy fingerprint smear for hours a day... I'd need a miniature squeegee available at all times... =)
I have all of those on a 2012 Sandy Bridge notebook. They were a workable solution at the time. Thunderbolt 3 is just way better and comes by default on Intel chips, and in the form of USB4 full spec (thanks to Microsoft) on AMD too since Ryzen 6000.
They're getting better:
- they're usually lighter
- they're usually thinner
- the batteries last longer
- unless you're going for desktop replacements, they consume a lot less battery
- screen quality is much better
- 16:10 are finally becoming the norm
- usb-c/thunderbolt is just awesome
However...
- the mania about thin&light means less and less components are replaceable
- they're getting less and less repairable
- you basically cannot upgrade them anymore
- thunderbolt/usb mostly means fewer ports, all of the same kind... this means that most of the other hardware you already have is trash
I still remember fondly:
- on the ThinkPad T42, you could swap the cd drive out for a secondary battery, or another hard disk
- on the ThinkPad X220 you could have (and I did have) 16GB ram in 2011-2012... Yet ten years later I'm still seeing laptops sold with 8GB ram.
- On the ThinkPad X220 you could load up to three disks (internal disk + msata disk + a weird format in the express card slot).
Heck, even newer thinkpads are becoming trash. I was on the market for a new laptop and was saddened to see that X380/x390/x12 laptops had soldered ram, and many came with 8GB only... Also the T-series apparently now has only a single ram slot, and soldered ram on board, which means: no dual-channel (worse performance) and if the on-board ram fails you throw away the whole laptop.
----
The framework company gives me hope, but they don't ship to my country yet, so I had to buy a second hand ThinkPad X270 in the meantime...
Generally speaking, it seems that (as for example, with the car industry) 99% of the market is ignoring environmental consequences of their choices, in hope to be able to make profits again in a few years. Needless to say, Apple is the worst offender in this space, as they sell things that break very easily and will actively try to get you to buy new hardware as often as they can.
It is silent, fast and just works.
What’s new about it is the uncompromising quality + reliability, MacOs’ incredible integration with the Apple ecosystem including AirPods Pro, messaging, the iphone and iPad.
It’s taken a lot of work but at this time things feel intuitive and “just work”-ing in a way that I can only describe as technology from the future.
There's no credible competition to the M2 MacBooks yet sadly. Doesn't seem like MS is too interested in their flagship surface laptops either
My first laptop could do just over 2 hours when its battery was brand new, and it would be dead in about 18 months. My Macbook Air easily goes over 10 hours (likely more, haven't ever tried it). I can't see any dead pixels, in fact, I can't see any pixels at all, the speaker is better, the camera is better, and so on.
Plus it weighs a lot less.
=)
No, worse. No ethernet, no optical drive, one socket for microfone and speaker, cannot turn off camera.
That said, I had a T520 about 8 years ago, that was an okay machine, it had a real docking station and reasonable performance.
Yet I agree for heavy GPU CUDA workloads, the desktops can offer a more economical and tolerable noise level option. Some studios will use ridiculously long HDMI cables to locate a box in another room. =)
Qualitatively, they've given me a similar experience due to the form factor and always running some form of Linux. I preferred the 12" models when flying several times in a week but 14" when spending weeks in one place. I think this will remain true, much like smartphones have found certain form factors and just keep iterating on numerical specs while fitting the same hands and eyes.
IO and expansion went from serial, parallel, and PCMCIA slots to PC Card and USB, to mixtures of USB speeds and now primarily USB-C. Other oddball IO like firewire and e-SATA came and went.
Communications went from external to integrated modems, external to integrated ethernet, and external to integrated WiFi. Now, wired ethernet is starting to disappear or at least shift back to some kind of dongle.
Removable storage went from floppy to CD-ROM to DVD and went away entirely. Other oddball devices came and went. Now mostly it is just networked storage services or potentially massive USB thumb drives.
External display connections went from analog VGA to DVI, DisplayPort, and HDMI.
Internal LCD backlights went from fluorescent to LED.
Internal LCD aspect ratios went from 4:3 to 16:10 to 16:9, and now seem to be moving back to 16:10.
Internal LCD resolutions went from terribly low (800x600 etc. at 14") to acceptable (1920x1080 at 14") to ridiculous (4K at 14").
Batteries went from NiMH to Lithium ion and from removable to built-in and not really user-serviceable. Some machines gained long battery run times, but often the advances seem to have been invested in reducing sizes instead. Better idle efficiency allows a machine to be on and connected for "a whole day" (by someone's definition) but actually running them at full load still depletes the battery in a small number of hours (or less).
I'm hardly an apple fanboi, my house has been something of halfway house/shelter for abandoned corporate dell's and lenovo's for many years.. but dang everything I see about those m1 chips is impressive, and I dont recall hearing a single serious complaint about the laptops.
That's said.. so long as you don't go too underpowered on the cpu, and put an nvme drive in it, almost all modern laptops are pretty amazing, and they last so much longer in terms of useful life. A 2000 era Satellite Pro was almost certainly junk after 3-4 years. My newest laptop is 3 years old right now.
However, Apple Silicon is not likely to influence the rest of the industry, for now, because Qualcomm is shit and doesn't care and everyone else who wants an Arm CPU for a notebook is stuck with Qualcomm. Therefore x86-64 will dominate unchallenged.
Proper nice looking design on a Windows compatible device (since the MacBook brand and MacOS X Tiger with BootCamp) was a much more industry wide influential aspect, especially since the transition to uni-body construction. Previously, iBooks and PowerBooks were nice looking too, but they were rarely cross-shopped. Today, all brands have aluminium notebooks.
Switching to High Density displays by default was an industry wide influential move.
Non-removable batteries were maybe the most influential move. And I kinda hate them for it. Arguably, there are ways to make the battery replaceable even in today's thin devices. But Apple proved to the market that consumers do not care about removable batteries in any kind of device so now phones tablets and laptops have non-removable batteries, often times glued.
Soldering CPU, RAM and WiFi, was also influential, in a bad way, though they are arguably necessary tradeoffs. Thankfully no one copied their proprietary flash storage non-SSD, yet.
Even the TouchBar was copied by Lenovo and Dell, without even learning why it was hated and why it was loved. It was hated because it replaced the Fn-key row even though it was a genuinely awesome HID.
Hopefully no one copies the notched screen, because while on macOS it is not an issue because of the global menu bar, on any other OS it would be major annoyance.
P.S.: I actually still have a P4 era Toshiba Satellite and it still works even if the hinge is a bit weak. It survived admirably better then some other notebooks I have.
The best mac laptop at the time was 1680x1050 and almost double the price.
Like everything Apple, they don't invent it or be the first, but they know how to market it to the average muppet to suddenly want it.
=)