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Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

When people stop buying cheap bric-a-brac with just-enough-for-youtube-480p integrated graphics from HP and Dell for 499.

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my previous (bought in 2005) laptop was a dell inspiron 1440 that had a 1400x900 screen. when i replaced it (in 2009) the best i could do for a similar price and cpu performance was an inspiron 15 that had a 1366x768 resolution. it's not a matter of people being cheap, screen resolutions really have retrogressed.

I think a lot of manufacturers took the shift to 16:9 as an excuse to sneakily reduce resolutions.

At the low-end, I think they've actually been going up on laptops:

    1024x768 -> 1280x768 -> 1366x768

but the trend reverses at the high-end:

    2048x1536 -> 1920x1200 -> 1920x1080

Apple's 2880x1800 display is an exception, but so far the rest of the industry doesn't seem to be trying to imitate it.

Integrated graphics aren't bad these days.

Last time I bought the cheapest dell laptop with a discrete card it was maybe $600, now it appears to be $719. That's only on the 'small business' more brick-like ones, though. The 'consumer' ones don't even offer discrete, but hey you can get Skull Candy[TM] speakers for an up charge!

Even the cheapest comes with a dual core processor, though, so you can share your memory among 2 cores and an integrated graphics engine. Progress it ain't.

Joe Q Public had been subsidizing performance for quite some time. I think that era is ending because most of Joe's use cases can now be met with a ~1.5 Ghz arm tablet. I think the high end of the market is going to become more expensive unless a use case emerges where everyone wants that performance. Intels been hard at work trying to invent such a use case, but so far theres been little to show for it. Making games more realistic is one reasonable use case but those efforts have recently been stymied by content creation costs.

If people shopped smarter, they could find laptops with discrete graphics for significantly cheaper. After the deal I found, I'm paying about $420 for a system that comes with an i5 Ivy Bridge, 6gb RAM, NVidia 630M... And it came with a free bookbag to boot.

And what's so wrong about them? I bought those when I was a student and I was pretty happy with the result. They're very reasonable quality and they're definitely enough for any work that doesn't require 3d, or heavy virtualisation. They're also very likely to be supported by linux - a long time has passed since that hardware became available.

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