Hacker News Reader

Comment by neallindsay | Hacker News Reader

I also raised an eyebrow at "the vast majority of laptops are only sold with a specific proprietary operating system: Microsoft Windows", but after looking at some estimates it seems legit. Probably only about 1 in 10 laptops is a Mac. Software developers really just live in a different world than normal people.

It got me thinking though: what is a laptop? People probably count Chromebooks, and that seems fair. Is a SteamDeck a laptop? Is an iPad with a keyboard case a laptop? Is a Microsoft Surface Pro a laptop when it has its keyboard attached?

View on HN

A laptop is whatever uses a rigid clamshell form factor with a screen that folds down over the keyboard. A screen with a flippy floppy detachable keyboard is not that, so:

- A chrome book is a laptop, it uses the laptop form factor.

- A Steamdeck is not a laptop. It does not use the laptop form factor.

- An iPad is not a laptop. It does not use the laptop form factor out of the box, it needs peripherals to even pretend to be one.

- A surface Pro is also not a laptop, but the Surface Laptop is. Just "having a flippy floppy magnetic keyboard pre-bundled with it" doesn't make a tablet a laptop. Having a rigid clamshell design makes it a laptop.

And yes, that makes the Asus Zenbook a laptop, because it is. It just has the circuitry in the screen instead of the base. Hell, Asus literally calls them laptops themselves.

Where does this definition come from? Or is this just the commonplace accepted definition? For example why is the definition not "A laptop is any self-contained device that can sit wirelessly atop your laptop without the need for any extra peripherals?"

I can't think of any software engineers I personally know who use Mac. In my industry, pretty much anyone who uses Mac is in a managerial position.

all of our engineering teams use macs except one dude who carries his early 2000s windows4life gamer energy with him wherever he goes. as it turns out if you aren't specifically like doing cuda or dx stuff having unix and being able to compile quickly, emulate or translate every deployment target architecture, great ppw ... lends a lot of credit towards many domains of software engineering. it feels like it collapsed multiple devices into one. i just spin up a windows environment if i need to support some janky legacy windows only thing.

... I guess I know a couple of software engineers that use Windows.

Every engineer at my job uses a mac. Same for my friends job.

In fact, the only people who use windows are finance people, HR, etc

I forgot this thread was about Windows, lol. Most of the software engineers I know use GNU/Linux.

In my experience as the head of data science in a corporation, everybody uses Windows on their local machines and Linux remotely.

Yes it's always entertaining when people assume that their specific computing culture bubbles are universal.

Software devs absolutely live in their own little world. Regular people don’t even know what an OS is. All the details of computing have become so abstracted away from the user that they’re completely unaware.

> what is a laptop?

There's actually a very simple answer to that! A laptop is a mobile device with the set of functionalities that macOS has, but iPadOS hasn't :)

I wish this was ironic (I'd love to use the iPad Pro as laptop), but it isn't.

So a Surface Pro is a laptop then. Does a SteamDeck become a laptop if you install Windows on it?

> So a Surface Pro is a laptop then

That's exactly the situation with the iPad Pro, with the exception that Microsoft didn't castrate it. I've had one and used it for professional development; it's not very ergonomic when used on your lap (but still usable), so it's not to everyone's liking. Still, I'd use a modern one if it were 100% Linux-compatible, and wouldn't miss anything.

> Does a SteamDeck become a laptop if you install Windows on it?

Whether a laptop requires a hinge to be defined as such can b matter of personal preference. For me (and, again, for Apple), it's not a requirement. 7 inches is a dealbreaker for me, although I think Stallman used a 7-inch laptop.

A portable IBM PC is a laptop (lawful good).

An iPhone with a Bluetooth keyboard is a laptop (chaotic evil)

Anything resting across my legs while sitting is a laptop (true neutral)

Your girlfriend is a laptop.

Is the Commodore SX-64 a laptop?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64

Try finding a PC manufacturer that lets you choose Linux instead of Windows when customizing your PC. I remember one or two companies offering it, and even giving a discount for it (~$100?), but the rest simply default to Windows.

Others let you choose Linux, but you have to pay to remove Windows. They can't install their bloatware (or are unwilling to, anyways), so you have to pay the unsubsidized price.

Even the ones that offer Linux might not have it in stock for the configuration you want. E.g. when I bought a Dell laptop I could only get one with the keyboard I wanted with Windows.

> Software developers really just live in a different world than normal people.

They actually don't, which is why the vast majority of software developers would never "raise an eyebrow" to the very well known obviously true statement that the vast majority of laptops are only sold with Microsoft Windows, regardless of what they themselves or their coworkers use.

> It got me thinking though: what is a laptop?

A cat.

No, a cat is a barcode reader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Clearly a computer is a laptop if you can use it comfortably while it’s sitting on your laps.

Or as Apple once (in)famously asked, "what's a computer?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S5BLs51yDQ

bro, ethernet and cellular data is called WiFi now

Reply on news.ycombinator.com