The hunt for a perfect laptop continues
pointieststick.com
pointieststick.com
Then there's the cheap laptops with what I call a "Shenzhen Special": a 1366x768 TN screen. Those should never have been a thing. Even cheap phones 10 years ago did not have screens that bad, but laptops 5 years ago do.
I disagree, sometimes all you need is some sort of screen, a keyboard, a wireless interface, and the cheapest x86 processor invented by man.
A whole laptop for less than 400 USD is a great thing for the other half.
I paid my "new" ThinkPad X13 Gen1 400 Euros + 29 euros for shipping, less than a month ago, from eBay. It comes with a 8c/16t ryzen cpu, a full-hd touch display and 32GB ram.
Even if it was 500 euros, it's an incredibly better value than a "Shenzhen Special" piece of trash.
Please stop promoting e-waste.
Recently bought a Thinkpad x390 for my significant other for 170€ with a brand new battery. Works well enough, is small, light and quiet, has a decent keyboard and fullhd screen. Very little battery drain when suspended. Brand new laptops at twice that price offer a much crappier experience.
happy that works for you, but for my data center environment, where I need a bunch of cheap, simple laptops in the colo -- and in some cases, burner laptops for dubious countries with data centers -- cheap and simple is the requirement.
2nd-hand and refurb create question marks as to security and reliability, and we already have enough holes and questions.
It think a modern under 400 laptop would not have all of the above issues.
Lenovo did themselves a disservice by discontinuing the W15 which I thought was worth a solid shot until they started putting spyware in everything.
Until recently I was a die-hard macbook-er, but Apple has turned evil (look at iOS, there's another article on HN about iOS browsers are still webkit based, even though EU has apparently slapped their wrists or Airpod buds which are closed to developers (Zuck was complaining about this recently)).
So I use a Thinkpad Carbon, Linux and hope RISC-V will come from on high one of these days.
The author of linked post is a KDE dev.
Asahi doesn't work on M4-series Macs and it doesn't look like anyone will be able to make it work in the next few months at least.
Having simple tiers rahter than multiple offerings with different focuses at similar price points and also a diversity of price points works really well if you aren't competing that way, but not everyone can be Apple.
My laptop now is a Dell Precision and I hate it. It is Ubuntu certified and yet suspend and the Webcam is broken. It's a work laptop which I don't use much, but I'm considering getting a new private laptop, and it's very disconcerting that even a "certified" laptop have issues with Linux..
All I want is decent battery, hardware which work, medium sized with ideally high resolution screen.
Wow, that looks good. These two caught my eye:
https://in.starlabs.systems/products/starfighter?variant=552...
https://in.starlabs.systems/pages/byte (Mac mini equivalent)
Open firmware! and accessories and parts available separately!
https://in.starlabs.systems/collections/accessories https://in.starlabs.systems/collections/parts
Wanna see reviews as well, let me know if you get any recommendations.
How is the sturdiness? Does the firmware have any particular issues with linux? I mean bigger than usual problems with things like suspend/resume/laptop lid/usb autosuspend.
How is the battery life?
Also, how is the shipping time? I read a lot online about folks not receiving it for a year+
I had to remap the home/end/ins keys which were oddly placed. It has that useless and totally annoying CoPilot key that cannot be remapped either since touching it sends multiple keystrokes both down and up.
MacBook Air M4 is sufficient for almost everything (except maybe gaming), but that depends on how much you want to get caught up in Apple's ecosystem.
-Has an NVIDIA GPU
I'd probably suggest the M4 Macbooks, as there are not many AMD graphics based laptops out there at the moment, and the battery life of an ARM based platform does not seem to be compareable to an x86_64 yet assuming you won't need a x86 processor.
I've been hovering over the "buy" button on a StarBook as I get increasingly frustrated with the MacOS experience.
My chief worries are battery life and speaker quality..if you have a StarBook are you happy and can you speak to those?
As a plus if you know your way around hardware the whole thing can be disassembled and upgraded, you can even buy it as a DIY package if you want.
It's pretty high on my wishlist as a system for non-gaming purposes because I don't really think the integrated GPU in the Ryzen AI HX 370 can cope with that very well. But Linux and Wayland should run terrific on it.
What do you guys think?
So it's a no for me.
Only plus is that it can run Linux well.
1. A 1080p screen with a reasonably good backlight. 100% scaling is just fine thank you.
2. Totally agree with the keyboard, if you can fit a numpad on that thing even better.
3. A functional touchpad. Precision and lag measurements certainly dont matter to me. I mostly won't be using it anyway.
4. Gigabit Ethernet, at least 2 usb-A ports, at least one hdmi or displayport port.
5. 3.5mm jack.
6. Reasonably modern cpu, it doen't have to be super fast.
7. Discrete GPU is a nice bonus
8. User replacable RAM, User replacable nvme drive.
This was to allow for a nearly-universal established workflow where the right hand would shuffle the papers or maintain a pointer at a ledger as the data was entered to a mechanical adding machine, without taking the eyes off of what the right hand was doing. The #5 key with the tactile marker is the home position for the middle finger.
The adding machine sitting to the left of the desktop (sometimes on a cart) didn't need to be observed at all, it printed each entry on the roll of paper as you went along, subtractions or negative numbers optionally in red ink. Which could be audited later if necessary if there were any questions about correct data entry. Printing calculators having a financial mode have mimicked this like forever too.
Nobody would have ever expected IBM to be able to sell a calculating machine of any type without maintaining at least this particular backward-compatibility feature.
So it could be seen as more easily integrated by those businesses adopting their first computer of any kind.
I do remember having issues with accidentally touching the touchpad.
Now days I almost always have a keyboard with me.
My latest laptop purchase I view largely as a bonfire where I burned $1200 in effigy, and not from lack of marketing, but from lack of real options.
Lenovo has lost a customer in me for life, and it taught me a very important lesson. If the options don't exist anymore at a reasonable price point or reliability you just have to build your own.
For the recent purchase (2 or 3 years ago), here is a running list of failures. A required Lenovo Advantage firmware update (same day as delivery), bricked default power charging preventing charging and running while plugged in. This forced an RMA when the battery died without any way to power the device on.
The new one received 2 weeks later headphone jack failed. 2 months later and several separate USB PHY ports had failed requiring a USB hub on the remaining functional port. by 6 months, HDMI became intermittent. 7 months the Webcam microphone and video had failed enumeration. Just shy of a year the WIFI, and especially bluetooth became intermittent.
I sought out a business laptop capable of video editing. I got a dumpster fire, and worse it didn't function at all under Linux so I didn't even try; the failures were W10 the entire way.
Anyways, nowadays you just have to build your own cyberdeck using distributed computing principles. The old macs used several chips in parallel, why not RISC?
I know some people have already done it, and the performance they are getting isn't half bad and the work I've seen seems light years beyond where security is today providing peace of mind that people once had with regards to firmware malware/bad state (you could always reset to a known working safe state where it wasn't accessible to the internet).
Imagine the peripherals, basic display, attachments, boot all controlled by an elevated privileged FPGA that you dock to which oversees the other equipment that does the performant work which is offloaded to a distributed backbone.
Most off-the-shelf mainboard chip combos today run ~$500 minimum, for a ton of features that aren't needed, or wanted, and just slapped together. Even a basic case runs at least $100 now with fans that fail. within a month.