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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I think optimising for thinness is a stupid goal. I get wanting to reduce weight, but volume and mass are two different metrics. Thicker laptops can have better cooling, bigger batteries, easier maintenance, a bloody ethernet port, and probably better keyboards.

For some reason Lenovo has made the ThinkPad keyboard worse with every new generation. They're still better than other laptop keyboards, but my goodness the margin is shrinking.

And while David Hill may claim that Lenovo TPs are as good as (or better than) IBM's, the number of repairs mine have had tell a different story. Since the x230, every single ThinkPad I've owned had to have its mainboard replaced. Sometimes even twice.

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When something is large and light, the consumer view is that it is cheaply made. That's a problem when trying to sell an expensive product.

I believe that impression comes from the laptop feeling “hollow” more than it does from it being light.

This could probably be engineered around by doing things like holding the battery up against the laptop’s palm rest with a rim of TPU or similar between the battery and the case to deaden vibrations and make it feel more “solid”.

Haven’t some products been found to have weights inside just to make them feel more premium?

In cases where there’s no component that would naturally add weight in the right place, yes.

I asked the kids not to unwrap their xmas presents.

Yeah. Dense = quality (and thus expense) is something people think.

I don’t know if it’s innate or learned, but I would certainly like to.

My theory is that this is a sense that people picked up on thanks to the outpouring of various cheap electronics from China from the 90s onward. They tended to be enclosed in thin plastic shells that were sometimes larger than necessary in attempt to increase visible differentiation from competitors sharing the same internals. This made them feel hollow, and people associated that feeling with cheapness.

By contrast, high end electronics brands like Sony used thicker enclosures that were made with a thicker, less resonant plastic or even metal and focused on miniaturization which naturally lent itself to more dense products. People then associated that denseness with quality.

I suspect you’re probably right, but also that it goes back further.

Think well-made solid mixer, like an old KitchenAid stand mixer, versus a similar thing made of plastic. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as heavy. And it’s obviously much cheaper and wouldn’t feel as solid.

I guess I’m with you that it sort of came from the plastic age maybe? I wonder if it was really much of a thing before that.

then again it’s also easy to tell that a solid oak desk, or some other heavy wood, is better than something made of press-board or balsawood. so maybe it is even older.

Yup. The most prominent I can remember are the Beats By Dre headphones, where about a third of the weight is from metal parts that are either purely decorative, or whose functionality does not at all depend on being made of metal, based on a 2020 teardown [0,1].

[0]: https://beneinstein.medium.com/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by... [1]: https://beneinstein.com/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-beats-w...

> When something is large and light, the consumer view is that it is cheaply made.

That depends on the context. If it also looks cheap and squeaks when you pick it up, the impression is that it's made of junk plastic rather than the wrought iron and solid gold presumably being used by the competition.

Whereas if you can give the feel that the thing is from the future with titanium alloys and carbon fiber (even if it's really still just aluminum and plastic), people get a different impression.

Of these laptops 95% are not going to consumers but to enterprise users so who cares what consumers think?

This. The 5% that go to home users is even shittier. Profit is key. Expensive R&D and expensive materials hurt profits.

That very much depends on the product type.

No one pedalling a heavy bicycle up hill ever thought it was better made than a lighter one, even if it was.

It’s almost first thing people do when looking at a bike is pick it up for weight.

Heavier aero bikes can be fast. Heavier 4-pot brakes can work better but still we notice the weight and want lighter.

I like my Z13. Despite the non-thinkpad look, they finally did a bit of engineering together with AMD to get the cooling working again (copying from the Mac as well). It the least Thinkpad I ever had (no hardware track point buttons), but I am still quite happy (the x395 was a cooling catastrophy IMHO). However, i agree wrt repairs. I had my mainboard, my screen and my keyboard replaced, due to broken cables and switches, which ridiculous. My case is fully intact opposite to all my other think pads. The worst thing however is the firmware of the USB/charging controller with this laptop. It often does not really pre-boot with USB connecte, it often needs to be hard reset to get charging to work again,... Lenovo firmware/BIOS is a huge mess because IMHO they simply have too many models. They should offer one X and one T and make those good ones again. (Or just sell the ThinkPad brand to someone producing good keyboards for framework laptops and as external keyboars: i actually spend nights on eBay trying get an external ThinkPad Keyboard with German layout, because they seemed to have stopped production. Prices are skyrocketing: used ThinkPads are cheaper that used keyboard: tells you a lot)

cooling was an unsolved problem in any laptop I ever had (most but not all of them being thinkpads). with thinkpad fans often needing replacement

Ya for me that was the major selling point. My T490s still had a decent keyboard. My T14s gen 3 really sucks though. Almost no travel and very bad tactile feedback.

And these laptops are made for enterprise users who actually work on them and aren't dicking around on tiktok all day.

Thickness does change the ergonomics when typing

Thicker keys absolutely do change the ergonomics when typing.

> I think optimising for thinness is a stupid goal.

I don't WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet

I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer

[...]

I will pay extra for it to be heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death.

https://www.tumblr.com/canadiangold/675666527469568000/i-don...

I understand that different people want different things. Lots of people like thin light laptops. Maybe they're happy with the wireless peripherals I despise.

But can't those with other choices be offered something too?

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