The creation of the modern laptop | Hacker News Reader

The creation of the modern laptop

arstechnica.co.uk

46 pointsbootload22 comments

I just wish glossy screens were something in the past and that all new laptops had matte screens or at least an option for it.

You could argue that glossy screen gives better color representation but I can not personally stand the reflection I get on glossy screens.

When I sit on a matte screen, do I think about that my colors are slightly worse? No.

When I sit on a glossy screen, do I think about that my colors are slightly better? No, but I do think about the reflections all the time because sometimes I can not even see what is on my screen because of all the reflections.

I have a Thinkpad with a matte IPS screen, it appears that this will be my last laptop given the trend at the moment.

Can't agree with you more. I've been given a Dell XPS 13 at work and I need to get one of those anti glare screens... Lenovo did it better for sure.

I agree wholeheartedly. Glossy screens have their place, and that place is as a desktop display in an area where light is controlled so there is no glare. On a mobile device they are nothing but a pain.

Unfortunately, I'm uncomfortable with giving Lenovo any of my money after Superfish and all the computing technology that interests me is only available with glossy screens (Microsoft's Surface tablets are particularly cool, but I still haven't been able to take the plunge).

> I'm uncomfortable with giving Lenovo any of my money after Superfish

That Superfish thing was never for business models of laptops. Not saying you should forgive Lenovo or anything, but it did not affect every model out there.

Oh, I know. They just lost a lot of my trust for doing something so terrible in the first place. They may earn it back at some point, but I'm in no hurry to give them any of my money.

It was such a big and public mess, let's hope they'll give twice the effort to make up for it. After all, they backpedaled on the track point buttons.

I buy laptops for the hardware, not the crap software that always certainly comes with it. Anything preinstalled is of no significance, as long as I can wipe it out and install the software I want. Modifying the hardware is a far more difficult thing to do...

I don't disagree, when I use Thinkpads I tend to use Linux on them, and even if I didn't I would prefer a clean install of Windows.

But I absolutely refuse to reward Lenovo for engaging in shady business practices. If they were willing to let such an egregiously bad piece of software on their machines, can I trust them in the future not to include hardware keyloggers or something else difficult to eliminate? As you say, modifying hardware is very difficult. Much as I love the trackpoint, matte screen, and magnesium chassis, I can get comparable specs elsewhere.

I would suggest you have a look at Clevo / Metabox laptops, the 650SG has an option for a matte screen. Sharp IGZIO 15.4 3840x2160 4k / UHD / QFHD http://affordablelaptops.com.au/contents/en-us/d496_metabox-...

Agreed on the screens, and I'll add to that the trend of cut-down keyboards with missing/non-standard key arrangements and absolutely flat keys.

Low key-travel to actuation is fine (and actually makes for faster typing), but there needs to be a soft "damping" stop past that to cushion and rebound the fingers, otherwise it feels excessively rough and abrupt to type on.

Then again, seeing how many people just can't seem to type without looking at the keys, or barely use the keyboard at all, it's not surprising that evolution has removed the features of keyboards that don't give any advantage for them.

I think a lot of keyboard preferences come from habits.

I'm a bit of a thinkpad addict, mainly because of the excellent track-point, but also for thier good keyboards, or so I thought: I've been using my current x220 for 4 or 5 years and cannot replace it right now. I'm a vim user and sure enough, the escape key was the first (and for now only) to go. It's completely gone, all there is instead is a piece of circuit board, but it actually works if you touch it. Well, I've been using it like this for a couple of weeks now, got used to it, and it's not as bad as I thought it would be, now I think that I could actually use a "touch" keyboard with no keys.

I replaced my Lenovo T60 keyboard something like 5 times within the 3-year warranty period. Half the keys would stop working intermittently, and flexing the board up in the middle would make it temporarily mostly work. Also replaced the AC adapter like 6 times for insufficient strain relief (one of those times the replacement 2-prong had so much leakage current they asked me to send it to their engineering department and upgraded me to the 3-prong CE version). And lest you think I'm just into laptop sports, my previous IBM T22 had 0 keyboard and maybe 1 AC adapter replacement over its 5-year life and I was actually more mobile with it.

If you get sick of your psuedotouch esc, you should be able to find a replacement X220 keyboard for maybe $40/$80 (used/new) and it's one of the easiest parts to swap.

Also, I can't express how happy I'll be when this shortscreen fad is over.

I'd like to add touchpads with a pair of discrete buttons.

I'm the first to admit that my hand-eye coordination on touchpads sucks, but my finger has a tendency to move when clicking on those Apple style, pivoting touchpads. More often than not, it moves the pointer away from what I'm trying to click onto something I don't want to click.

Of course it's a preference thing, but I love the ability to click wherever my fingers may be - I also have never had my fingers accidentally move when clicking. I also really like having all the space to use for gestures without the discreet buttons.

I'm really happy the rest of the world is finally catching up with Apple's trackpads. No more unresponsive synaptic driver nonsense.

I'm sure in the next few generations of the Macbook Retina or Surface Typecover we'll just have flat surfaces with pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback.

This is the only thing I hate about my MBP, using it outside is a nightmare. Wearing polarized glasses do help a bit with the glare though.

I got a T540P for that reason.

Unfortunately, the industrial equipment to bore tiny holes in MacBooks on a production line in China didn't yet exist. Ive's team of experts eventually found a US company that made machines—at $250,000 a piece—that could be adapted to do the job. Apple got the equipment provider to sign an exclusivity deal, then proceeded to buy "hundreds of them." Within a few years, millions of Apple laptops and peripherals had a growing green light.

$25 million just so the green light can shine "through" the aluminum.

No mention of the Kaypro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaypro

Random stories: I think I have an old T3100 (later version of the Toshiba in the picture, but which looks about the same). Someone gifted it to me circa 1999 - it came with some obsolete DOS TCP/IP stack which operated over a serial cable PPP link and I submitted to the nmap database just for kicks... virtually any invocation of nmap (even TCP half-open scans) would crash the thing. I'm sure I had an older, huge, really heavy box-type portable as well. It wasn't an Osborne, and as far as I can tell from online pictures and foggy memory it wasn't a Kaypro. I didn't see it featured in this article, either. Not sure if it's still around, but the thing worked on 5 1/4 or 8 inch disks and had a horrible monochrome display. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100

Well to be fair, and in terms of notability for the purposes of the article, the Osborne 1 was the original "commercially successful portable microcomputer" [0] you could run CP/M on with disks and a proper monitor. The Kaypro etc just copied and improved upon the idea, as did Compaq, IBM etc.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1

Its interesting that if you want an actual lap mounted laptop (not a transportable) you want one of these from 1983:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

I had one of these about 30 yrs ago, it was pretty awesome.

I would _love_ a modern version of these - a cheap, long lasting, "fast enough", super portable and durable machine to run a lightweight linux distro on. The closest thing like it I can think of is the Samsung Series 3, but I've heard it's a bit fragile.

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