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Comment by huddert | Hacker News Reader

"Even 4gb of memory is fine", "even 720p is fine", "even 2ghz CPU is fine", "even a membrane keyboard is fine", "even USB 2.0 is fine", "even 2 hours battery life is fine"...

Yeah it's all "fine". If these were the specs of the only laptop available to me then yeah it would be "fine". I could get things done. One or more of those things are deal-breakers for an awful lot of people.

For me, a rubbish display is a deal-breaker. I can't accept that they would compromise in this aspect, presumably to save a few bucks.

It's likely as difficult for me to understand how you could possibly prefer battery life over refresh rates as it is for you to do the opposite. And I'm not even talking crazy refresh rates here, 120hz or even 90hz at a minimum.

Would you buy a high-end laptop with 15 minute battery life? I'm not buying a new laptop with a 60hz display.

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You're entitled to your preferences. In my opinion:

Functional: - battery life - screen resolution (binary, <2k and >2k for laptops), brightness (binary: works in the sun or not), viewing angles (binary: good enough vs not), color (binary, good enough vs not) etc - connectivity options - ram - build quality etc etc

Aesthetic: - color - finish - refresh rate - OS theming, animations and all that - material

When you say "why won't they do 120hz?" I hear "Why won't they release a magenta colored device". That's fundamentally different than "why won't they add usb c"

I don't think there's any value in 120hz. Nearly all content I consume is in 30-60 fps anyway. I don't need to see marginally smoother os animatations lol and thats nearly all 120hz is good for.

PS Gamers might actually functionally need high refresh rates. I'm not in that space, but I recognise that for some specializations it might be absolutely deal-breaker.

I understand it not being a priority for a lot of people but it's odd to me that there appears to be resistance to it. It is very easy for you to reduce the refresh rate if you need to maximise battery life, but I have no option to increase it beyond what the hardware supports.

I wonder how much reduction we could see in eye strain, nausea, fatigue and headaches if higher refresh rates were normalised.

I remember one time showing a non-techy person the difference between a "Pro Motion" iPad Pro vs a lower spec iPad. They probably had no idea what refresh rates were before I took a moment to scroll up and down in the web browser for about 5 seconds side-by-side. They had their "ohhhhh" moment and bought the much more expensive Pro on that basis alone.

Enjoy your blissful ignorance, I guess?

These are business class laptops, there's no dedicated GPU. Where are you're going to utilize this high refresh rate? I'm pretty sure 99% of the time the integrated graphics would be working hard to churn out 120 frames of static views.

I bet the vast majority of people would be perfectly happy to have 60hz display, longer battery life, and save a few bucks at the same time.

Funny bonus anecdote: I reinstall my OS in december, only a few weeks ago did I realize it wasn't set to 144hz but 60hz, since I was busy with work since and didn't play any games I did not even realize.

> "Even 4gb of memory is fine", "even 720p is fine", "even 2ghz CPU is fine", "even a membrane keyboard is fine", "even USB 2.0 is fine", "even 2 hours battery life is fine"...

No these things aren't. 60 hz is fine though. What does it matter that it's "old"? It matters whether it's functional.

I for one prefer battery life over refresh frequency and will always choose 60 hz when available.

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