Hacker News Reader

It makes me wonder, does Apple have some insane patent on unibody construction? The pre-Retina unibody MacBook Pros were easily upgradable and very solid. They had a ton of room in the chassis, and hell, the first year of them the battery was toollessly removable. Aside from the keyboard and the screen, it was all latches and a few common Phillips #00's.

Why have no manufacturers copied this obviously great construction technique? It's not like a Framework is wildly cheaper than a MacBook, we're already paying a premium, so the costs of subtractive CNC can't be it.

I think the costs of milling a solid piece of aluminum that precisely and in those quantities can be “it”.

https://youtu.be/lJx6cF-H__I

I am not an expert, but it seems to be an engineering achievement, given that no one else does it. I doubt milling methods are patent protected, but rather Apple can use its volume and vertical integration to drive costs down and spend more on the chassis than other laptop designers.

Apple is #4 in laptop sales. Lenovo, Dell and HP each have at least as much volume. Apple also has higher margins than those companies, implying that any cost savings they make on other components aren't making it into the price anyway.

It's probably just that it costs a little more to do it and most customers wouldn't pay a premium to have it.

>Apple is #4 in laptop sales. Lenovo, Dell and HP each have at least as much volume.

True but they divide their sales among several models. Gaming models, 2-in-1s, 13" to 17" and so on. Apple not only has fewer models they often keep the same case design between generations which also benefits economies of scale.

Just curious in case somebody knows. Are OLED displays in laptops bad at low light? He cites that as a reason he doesn’t want OLED, but I’ve never noticed such a problem on OLED phones.

I'd say the inverse is true: OLEDs are the best in low light, as they generally dim well and black means zero illumination of the pixel. Author is ill-informed. Also, OLED burn-in is a non-issue with current displays in any normal situation (e.g. not a kiosk or arcade or other sort of always-on static dashboard).

> always-on static dashboard)

Like the taskbar, dock, menu bar, etc.?

No, those are generally not always-on in normal use. People let screens shut off, open up fullscreen apps, etc. Most OLED firmwares also have subtle pixel shifting and pixel refresh on shutdown routines, as well as very conservative brightness settings. OLEDs in normal use are actually less susceptible to color shift deterioration than LCDs in normal use.

I'm using an OLED X1 Carbon right now in the UK. I use it all the time in low light.

I just turned all the lights off (even the Christmas tree) and ran through a handful of usage situations and couldn't see any issues. I turned some lights on and did the same, I couldn't see any issues. I asked Claude, and got told to do the finger test, and that is barely perceptible. I then used my phone to record the screen and yes - I can confirm that there is an effect that my pixel 9a's camera picks up, barely noticeable at 240Hz, and definitely noticeable at 480Hz.

Maybe the guy is particularly sensitive, but from the framing of the rest of the article I think he's blowing a few things out of proportion.

I probably should've done a better job at clarifying this, but my issue with OLEDs isn't just that (at least historically) they tend to be too bright even at lower brightness, but also the other issues they come with such as burn-in and text potentially looking less pleasant compared to IPSs displays. Burn-in is probably my biggest concern here, especially since it really seems to be a case of winning the lottery or not (i.e. for some it's fine for years, others get burn-in after just a few months).

Basically I just trust IPS more than any other technology :)

Burn-out probably depends on the model, not a lottery, but shouldn't be a major concern for typical usage patterns in recent models. The text issue is caused by a pentile subpixel layout which are no longer common. I love OLED for low-light evening usage because IPS displays always have some backlight bleed, whereas OLEDs can display true blacks/pure warm tones which I find much more pleasant in the evenings. IMO power consumption is the only major downside of OLED displays for general-purpose laptops and phones.

I've only recently bought OLED laptops so I can't speak to burn-in but out of the three I've tested, they have a lower minimum brightness than my other IPS laptops.

In terms of text clarity, "2k" OLEDs (1920x1200) are a bit blurry. IPSs and 3k OLEDs are noticeably sharper, with not much difference between each other.

For the brightness issue, if you are running X:

allow dimming display beyond normal max dimming:

  xrandr --output eDP --brightness 0.5

restore to normal brightness range:

  xrandr --output eDP --brightness 1

(substitute the actual output name for your display instead of eDP; run xrandr without args to list)

nice! didn't know about that. Thanks!

Someone was upset about it. The comment was down voted?

Try to be helpful.

Maybe they're upset you're not using Wayland?

Then again, every Wayland compositor family has their own tools...

A lot of computers with OLED displays use PWM for the low brightness levels, and he seems like the type of person who would be sensitive to that sort of thing.

PWM is the only useful way to drive an LED and the people who deny this are, to me, hilarious. In fact for the author's stated use case of low light conditions PWM really is the only way to do it without wrecking accuracy (and efficiency).

My no PWM laptops look fine to me for watching movies. Sure, less efficient. But if I can't look at it for more than 30 seconds without my eyes burning then what's the point?

OLED phones are bad because of flicker

On iPhones at least you can disable PWM dimming at lower brightness level at the expense of color accuracy. It's in Accessibility/Display settings.

Now tell me a model which has this given that OLEDs are here since iPhone X

Hint: the only one was released in a year that ends with 25

Only if you’re sensitive to that flicker, which most aren’t. Otherwise they’re pretty great.

> a PC laptop with Apple build quality and display quality, and there definitely aren't many options

There’s been a bunch of Windows ARM laptops that aim to directly compete with the M series Macs. Linux compatibility will depend on make on model.

As far as I'm aware, all of the Snapdragon ARM laptops are existing chassis designs with different motherboards. I'm not sure how ARM affects build quality. Moreover, Snapdragon X support on Linux is still heavily a work in progress with issues with sound, power management, webcam support, and video acceleration. I don't know why anyone would go with a Snapdragon laptop today when Intel Lunar Lake excels at the exact same workloads Snapdragon X does, has similar battery life, and Intel actually works on getting device support upstreamed in a timely manner.

> having to deal with x86 emulation (inherent to an ARM laptop)

How so? Is this because some proprietary software that isn't available on ARM on Linux?

Most server and embedded oriented software has been compiled for ARM 7 & 8 for a while now, but in my experience, software you'd use on a desktop might not have ARM builds unless it's popular with RPi or handheld gaming enthusiasts.

But what do you mean by having builds? You should hardly ever need to download a pre built software from the Internet, outside of the repositories, unless it's proprietary software?

Repos don't always have everything, and if software is offered via AppImage, Flatpak, etc, you're likely to be working with x86-64 compiled images.