Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop

And then you have the various drive options, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, game bundles, day one edition. We are talking about dozens of variants.

For example, see Mandy Mantiquila interview with Nick Chapsas, if I remember correctly it is one of them.

/s

Right now there's about 5 lines of Surface devices with each their very specific purpose and tradeoffs. I'd be shocked at someone buying one solely based on the how the name sounds or what they assume it means without looking at the actual product pages.

What I'd want in a hack laptop is a full size TKL keyboard (and full height, or close), with a trackpoint (or 2 -- add one near the arrow keys).

Compared to the thinkpad trackpad, it is light-years ahead. It is also more robust - functions with a little bit of dirt/oil/dirt/water. Get some oil on the thinkpad trackpad and you need to spend 10 mins wiping it away for it to work without driving you nuts.

Even hardcore thinkpad fans have grudgingly admitted to the superiority of the Macbook trackpad. Check the thinkpad forums to see their envy.

Yes, that's the gist of it. Classic laptops gave way to an acceptable interstage, the T-hinge convertible (with many great examples especially from IBM/Lenovo, HP, and Fujitsu), which was then superseded by the best of both worlds: the detachable. The latter chassis design, taken to its logical conclusion, is the best form factor for a modular, ultramobile to mobile general-purpose computing platform, i. e. it can technically be implemented as anything between a UMPC (i. e. a smartphone-sized and -styled slab) to something with a footprint of maximally 14 inches (example: HP's discontinued ZBook X2 G4 mobile workstation). Anything bigger I consider an antithesis to the form factor and therefore would not buy it, but that's obviously in the eye of any beholder.

One possible unrealistic "dream" design for me is, as weird as it sounds, a cross between a Nintendo Switch/Lenovo Legion Go (complete with detachable controller options!) and an improved Panasonic Toughbook G2, reworked as a professional-grade, maintenance-friendly mobile workstation (or a scaled-down, more maintenance-friendly and otherwise improved HP ZBook X2 G4 with ECC memory).

> "What 'market realities' are you noticing?"

Well, the above mentioned design is unrealistic as it would amount to an expensive general-purpose machine that needs a long-term support infrastructure. Not many companies on the market that are in a position to deliver on that promise for at least three continental zones (say, the Americas, the Eurozone and major parts of Asia). Or willing to do so.

Furthermore, the comment was a reflection on what is available on the market for the foreseeable future. I'm eyeing such a small mobile workstation for a) 2D graphics work and b) analysis of historical and archival data. I am even willing to put up with a classic laptop if I could get an ECC-equipped model. But none of these machines are mobile, they're all 16-inch+ brutes. No thanks.

So I have to look for other machines. ECC-machine? Fuck, most likely some mini-PC in addition to something mobile without ECC memory. Keeping that in mind, what are the options that come closest to the above ideal? Essentially only overspecialized, maintenance-averse gaming machines with pathetic battery life and a support quality somewhere between questionable and utterly inacceptable (Lenovo consumer division, OneXPlayer, Asus).

A Panasonic Toughbook G2 10-incher could be an acceptable alternative, but I'm not gonna fork over Panasonic-money for a non-ECC ruggedized machine without a DCI-P3 screen and a digitizer that's even worse than an Apple Pencil (I think they use either Microsoft's Pen Protocol or Wacom's AES tech).

Everything else is locked-down garbage with some sort of Fisher-Price OS, e. g. everything Apple, Samsung's Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro, etc.

Traditional laptops have their place, but I think most people would be better served by other form factors.

For instance a good amount of people use their laptops basically like a desktop and dock it to an external screen 90% of the time. For that specific use case, a tablet form factor will have better thermals, and lend itself better to have a separate and better keyboard and pointing device. The other 10% will still be a decent experience with either the detachable keyboard or straight bringing along an external keyboard if the work sequences are exepected to be long enough.

People more on the go but needing a powerful setup when needed now have access to devices that can expand the screen real estate beyond the 15" traditional limitation. Lenovo has been pushing the enveloppe on that front, and the build quality isn't bad either.

Gaming laptops are better served by Steam Deck/ROG Ally type of form factors etc.

The market is decently diversified and the form factors I'm describing are as far as I know selling better numbers than people clinging to Thinkpads and macbooks would expect.

The reality that a certain crowd, I count myself among them, has to/or might have to choose laptops because machines in their preferred form factor either a) implement too many inacceptable but technically entirely avoidable compromises, or b) don't exist at all. That market reality. Like, when you have to settle for a laptop.

My laptop can go on for days as well as long as I plug it in to a power bank. I just need to lug them around, defeating the purpose.

As a counter example - look at macbooks which are about as un-customisable as they come, but a large portion of developers use them. Meaning the market exists even if it's currently dominated by Apple (which as you/the post points out is slipping)

It's hard to recycle electronics, because separating materials that are chemically bonded together is very labor intensive and isn't worth it from the price of aluminum, copper, lithium, etc alone.

It would have to cost more to dispose of a laptop for this to work out financially.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Whether repair of such devices is economically viable is one thing and that's up to the market to decide, but making repair intentionally harder is a choice of the manufacturer and has nothing to do with how slim the laptop is.

And if there's not enough to go around to begin with, it might as well be a niche of some kind, you can't expect everyone to choose the most expensive option by any means.

Now if the user base is nowhere near the majority, and you're already in a high-dollar niche anyway because of the desired performance level, might as well escalate from the merely expensive, to the glaringly overpriced in addition. That's a well-worn playbook.

When the sweet spot is hit with loads of customers striving to afford the top-shelf items, while in actuality everyone is settling for a shadow of what should be offered by the biggest business machines companies, it's not the hardware that's the problem. Too few people are grumbling and accept they just have to make do with what they have.

Most buyers do not use consumer electronics as money-making machines, the genres and cost-structures have undergone generations of evolution to be optimized for consumption of the electronics, as actually opposed to the business machines they once were.

If you want to use yours as a money-making machine, it will probably pay for itself even if the purchase price is a small multiple of the popular budget consumer version. But way more money is being put into making it difficult to tell the difference, more money than most small companies are even worth.

>supported by a company that is user aligned.

Interestingly, you can't buy that with money, even from the most financially-oriented of companies.

Microsofts support for these is still kinda bad ime, which is easily the biggest impact on their battery longevity.

Furthermore, Most super intrusive and performance hindering spyware aka antivirus is only deployed on windows, hence it gets double-punched by having subpar processor support and wastage in the processes running in corporate environments. The latter being the biggest performance impact.

These are however all software, not hardware bound issues

That's your assumption - my point is that I don't care as long as it's actually good. The only part I really care about is the battery because it has a limited number of cycles that is shorter than the lifetime of the rest of the components.

I work for a small org, the laptop was bought from Dell and shipped to me. It's running vanilla Windows 11 with OpenVPN and Windows Defender, with a decent sized dev drive. There are so many issues with it - keypresses being 10-20 seconds delayed, random window tearing/partial display updates, the machine deciding to ignore sleep and just dying while the lid is closed. These aren't things that will be solved by replacing the SSD, or the RAM, they're likely CPU (and as a result motherboard) replacements.

> Also, an 8 GB RAM upgrade makes little sense nowadays but a 16 -> 48 GB or 32 -> 64 GB or 32 -> 96 GB upgrade can actually make an otherwise reasonable device better if the amount of RAM becomes a bottleneck.

There's practically no devices (framework is the only one that comes to mind) that will ship with that little RAM and allow an upgrade by that much, even in the desktop space. My 2015 Macbook pro (the device before this) has 16GB RAM , giving it an extra 32GB isn't really going to help it much, the problem is that it's "i7" is an order of magnitude slower than a 3/4 year old replacement device (and ironically probably closer to the Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 258V which is in my work machine)

Don't get me wrong, I like the approach, but if you want a laptop, it's the wrong tradeoff and not one that 90% of the users will take. Sure, _some_ will choose this, and small companies can do well to sustain themselves but it probably won't do a dent in ewaste numbers and you won't see iphone like adoption numbers, relegating it to just a niche product.

HN was so enamored with him when his deal was about hacking eating into being more productive by not having to chew