US consumers are bankrupt by definition anyway... even US companies have to offer them payment plans to make a sale. Just look at the cellphone market!
Macbook Air... Notebook Air... I can definitely see that consumers might find the similarity confusing given that they're in the same category of goods and services.
Apple v. Samsung was over chromed rounded corners on phones; a series of cases in multiple countries, and this war between the two still isn't over.
So yeah, they've convinced multiple courts in multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries that yes, consumers are, paraphrased from their words, "pretty stupid and get confused easily."
If Burger King introduced a new burger called the "Large Mac", how prominent the "golden arches" logo is for McDonald's doesn't factor at all into whether or not this is trademark infringement. Same goes for this: is there the possibility of confusion between "Macbook Air" and "Netbook Air"? Let's say Joe Consumer heard a radio/podcast advertisement for the new "Netbook Air" (obviously there is zero chance of seeing a logo for such audio media) -- is there the possibility Joe would associate that product with Apple? That's the kind of thing a jury would need to decide.
If the RAM is user-upgradable, this will make for an excellent dev machine. Given it's a chinese laptop, it will surely not be locked, so Ubuntu will run well as well.
I think he's talking about the UEFI non-sense that often happens with western manufacturers to lock it to windows (preventing the switching of the signing keys).
I'm not sure how true his thought is in relation to china,but neither here nor there.
I just wanted to point out that the absence of UEFI thing doesn't automatically make a laptop "work well" with Ubuntu, as someone could read from this comment. Ahh, it is edited already.
This is my gripe, unless you spend hours customizing each laptop ubuntu makes a 10 hour battery life shrink to around 2 hours with only the default 'power saving' features turned on.
pretty naive. especially since it has a dual graphics with nvidia. which is really akward to "correctly" install on linux.
and then there are drivers. pretty sure that there won't be many stuff that directly works on linux.
That there even worse alternatives isn't helping. Avoid third party binary modules. Sure, they might work right now but you'll have no guarantees it'll work in the future. You also risk interactions with other subsystems (sleep etc.). It would be like Windows, where your printer might prevent you from upgrading your operating system.
If you intend to run Linux on the thing, buy things that Linux supports out of the box. That probably means sticking to the working Intel stuff for now. You'll thank me later (or not, because you won't miss the problems you don't have).
While your theoretical point of view is solid, reality kind of disagrees with it.
The binary blob provided by Nvidia have been quite reliable across the years (and I think they've been available for more than 10 years) while the open source ATI/AMD drivers have frequently failed to deliver.
My current (and only) working solution is to disable the Nvidia GPU on a host and use it PCIe passthrough to assign it to another Linux or Windows VM. That's the only stable solution that doesn't break the world when enabling/disabling the discrete GPU.
We shouldn't have to revert to such extreme measures...
At the moment my only two issues with Optimus are that they crash X on wakeup if loaded, and that DPMS doesn't seem to disable properly after the screensaver ends. For the earlier you can add an a suspend hook to unload the nvidia modules, and for the latter you just need to switch to a tty and back to get the screen working again.
Both are somewhat annoying, but far less than only being able to use it in a VM. That said, I'm curious about how you manage the VM output, considering that PCIe passthrough requires a dedicated screen.
I normally run the GPU headless for machine learning. In the rare case I need to access the desktop shell of the VM, I just connect via Chrome Remote Desktop.
In the even rarer case that I wish to play a game, I have an HDMI connection between the GPU and my projector, which I can enable with a remote control.
Learning how to use qemu is a bit of a pain (hint: use qemu directly, virus is a huge waste of time) but after the initial learning curve the setup is seamless for my use case - and I feel safer without the GPU drivers having access to my normal desktop. I much prefer this setup to dual-booting Windows for gaming. The VM spins up in a few seconds and shuts down when not in use (turning off the GPU in the process).
Nvidia drivers do fail quite regularly, especially on laptops. Brightness control randomly stops working, suspend/resume is extremely unreliable, there are login issues on systems with both Intel and Nvidia graphics (supposedly solved with Mesa 12, which can only be found on Arch and Gentoo right now.) It's certainly not a panacea.
In my experience, the open-source radeon drivers are significantly more stable. Fglrx was a stinking pile of crap that has officially been abandoned - the whole driver team has switched to the open-source drivers, now.
Binary blobs provided by Nvidia are extremely unreliable. I've had to ssh to a machine because the graphics don't work at all after some kernel upgrades.
Linking to Theano-CUDA is always a nightmare.
Forget about optimus. That has never worked correctly on Linux.
The only reason I can see someone wanting nvidia on linux is for CUDA. And in that case, you can't just use the ubuntu pre-built version of the drivers.
If you are not doing neural nets locally on Linux, you shouldn't get a discrete graphics card. And if you do get a discrete one, make sure it's not Nvidia since their open source drivers are much inferior to AMD's.
This is an honest question, and I appreciate your answer in advance.
I have a desktop with an HD 6850 and the radeon driver has always worked well, I used to play DOTA2 on it.
But this is a very old GPU now, and all newer models (HD7xxx and up) were having performance issues with the radeon driver last time I was reading the forums.
R9 270X in my case. The Rx 3xx and newer (and they're slowly porting it to older devices) use the newer AMDGPU driver stack, which is supposed to be even better, but I haven't tried that myself yet.
I was running OSX in VMWare every day for a couple of years, did iOS development. With 8 GB RAM and fast Intel SSD in my Windows laptop, the VM was faster then hardware MacBooks I saw. Modern hardware-assisted virtualization is very efficient, BTW that's exactly what allowed those cloud computing.
VmWare’s virtualized 3D accelerated GPU is IMO very good.
Not sure about compatibility with the recent OSX, though. I used lion and mountain lion, and those worked well. AFAIR I’ve used vmware tools from Fusion.
In the host machine, you need reasonably fast Intel CPU, hardware-assisted virtualization enabled in BIOS/UEFI, enough RAM, also unofficial VMWare patch to unlock OSX guests on PC hosts.
In the guest OS, you need VMWare tools for OSX, they exist because VMWare supports OSX guests when running on OSX hosts.
Or just wait for Windows 10 Redstone on Aug 2 and run the Bash on Linux Subsystem for Windows. No overhead and you get full speed with unmodified debs.
Windows may have been released 7 years ago, but it gets updates pretty frequently. Windows 7 has had the ability to install drivers from Windows updates for a few years now.
The linux comparison isn't recent either. That was the exact same procedure I had to do on an nVidia-stricken laptop (thankfully not mine) four years ago.
If they use a good Wifi card or it can be opened easily (which should be a given if RAM can be upgraded). I bought the XPS13 2015 and had a lot of struggle with it until I exchanged the Broadcom card for one from Intel.
The $540 version uses Core M3, which basically has 15% lower performance than the latest iPad, so I doubt it's going to be too great of a dev machine (just because the iPad seems fast with 1 app per screen, doesn't mean the same performance will be enough for 20 tabs and 5 other programs running at the same time):
What kind of development would we be talking about? I still use my 2009 MBP for day to day development. It's ~10% slower than a Core M3, I usually do webdev on it, but it's also fine for AOT things like Rust, Haskell and even some C here and there (I recently compiled RethinkDB, no biggy).
Things that really hurt are short battery life which is ~1.45hrs, and that it misses the modern CPU extensions which will obsolete it soon. Both of this issues obviously won't be present in a Core M3, so I see no reason why you wouldn't dev on an M3 unless you compile big native projects with great frequency.
I'm surprised you find Rust and Haskell bearable. Because for both languages slow compilation is a pretty well known problem[1][2]. On my old laptop (2011 MBP) compiling and interpreting (ghci/ghcid) took so long that it was distracting. This isn't even a big project; just a medium-sized one with a little over a hundred Haskell modules.
Well to be fair I only do hobby projects in both languages. My Haskell project is a C compiler, and my Rust project is a game engine, both compile in seconds. Both have just a few modules. Most complexity is in the dependencies, which have some compile time consequences but not terrible so far.
People shit on Xiaomi here but even imitation requires some level of artistry and finesse. This looks like a good clone of Air, and I haven't seen Acer/Lenovo/Dell manage to do that yet.
Not particularly. There are still lots of "bits" to it - colours, materials, vents, contours, etc. So few companies actually get rid of them, but it looks so much better when they do.
There's no venting or contours, and just two materials: meta and carbon fibre. Personally, I find the carbon fibre much more pleasant to rest my wrists on than metal and it looks quite nice in person. The thing that looks like venting on the left edge is actually a battery indicator. I'd get rid of it, personally, but that's my only real complaint about its looks.
I dont like the shape of it :) That triangular body (or trapezoid in this case?) is not pleasing to my eyes. It could also be that its just something to get used to, but still.
Not at all, but the submission's title is literally "Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival" and this discussion started with the question what's wrong about the Dell XPS13 that makes it worse than the Macbook Air, so I think it's fair that to point out that the design characteristic in question is found in both devices.
In any case, what does being a fan have to do with appreciating good design? I'm no fan of Apple either, but I appreciate their product design nonetheless. I'm not sure why your reaction was that sharp.
There are a few things here I could nitpick about. I'm never really a fan of the textured look of the material surrounding the keyboard - I don't know why so many people who design laptops opt for this. Would much prefer just a solid matte black, no texture. Also I don't understand why the bottom of the laptop and lid are one color and the inside is another - why? I think a single color across the entire laptop would look way better.
Sure, it's a lot sleeker than most laptops (not made by Apple), but its design leaves me asking a ton of "why did they choose that?" kind of questions.
I can second that. I am using XPS 15 and dual booted Ubuntu along side Windows 10. On Windows, some apps icons and texts are pixelated because of the 4k display (it reminds me of the time when the very first Retina Macbook Pro came out). Aside from that, pretty solid and fast laptop, given the size and the spec (can go up to 32 GB RAM + i7 CPU).
I have both air and xps 13 and to me they are not even comparable. Yes, thin bezel looks cool at the first glance but that's about it. Instead of metal under your hand you have this weird something, keyboard works much worse, they did not even make reasonable handle to open the laptop like there is in macbook air. Also the power supply is chunky and you cannot fold it nicely.
Don't get me wrong, it's a really good laptop and I've chosen it over so many others on the market. I would probably still choose it for my linux laptop (lenovo x1 is neat but I'm done with lenovo with all the stuff they've done lately). It just looks poorly to me in a direct comparison.
I cannot trust Lenovo being competent at what they do after superfish, I wonder how can any of the readers of hacker news still think of buying from them... (this doesn't mean that competitors are competent or anything, but being caught like they were undermines my basic trust threshold)
Unfortunately, nothing comes close to ThinkPads. I dislike Lenovo a lot and would ditch them at first chance. No vendor wants to be that chance though. (Proper keyboard, 3-physical-button pad/point, not too hot, etc.)
I'm not too concerned about Superfish - that was only the consumer junk, right? The BIOS-Windows-auto-install stuff was more concerning. But hey, little choices. Lenovo is certainly incompetent - look at the X240/T440 with the terrible pad design they backtracked on (obvious). Or the Carbon keyboards they ended up ditching.
What thinkpad would u get today? I looked into the T460 but (a) they seem to have many variants within the same model and (b) I saw too many negative reviews online.
The T460p is a very good deal if you want something light, powerful and extensible for a very good price. You can get a version with a quad-core i7, dedicated Nvidia graphics card and 3k display for about 1400 USD. Combined with a three-year guarantee it's a very good deal I'd say, and much better than what most other manufacturers (including Dell and Apple) offer for this price. I also own an X1 Carbon, which is a great laptop but a little underpowered for my needs (and hard/impossible to upgrade).
The T440p was bulky, hot - total shit. The graphics were super weak, and the screen was utter junk. Dunno if the newer ones are considerably better; they probably fixed a lot.
The X250 is pretty good, though you get a keyboard at random and will need to replace the part (always get next business day warranty) if you get one of the junk ones. Otherwise it's a nice laptop - I've not seen anything I like more (though it could be better, of course; a 3:2 screen for starters).
I've used a T450s, and the keyboard feels fantastic on it. At 3K res it'd probably real nice. Unless you need a specific CPU/GPU, stick with the X260/T460s (s for slim). Perhaps compare reviews to the X250/T450s to see if it got worse?
Assuming you don't need high-end power (like quad core), it's more of a preference if you want a small 12" or a larger screen. I dock my X250 and it seems fine, even driving a higher-pixel external monitor. I'd go for the X260, but if software support was better for hiDPI I might consider the T450s. (If they had centred keyboards without numpad, maybe even a 15" model.)
Edit: FWIW when using it in laptop mode, I run CPU throttled to 50% or less to keep it cool. I have the cheaper i5-5200U option and it's fine for emacs/VS/browsing. At full power it can play Dolphin emulator Smash Brothers Brawl and Melee at full speed, but just barely.
> Proper keyboard, 3-physical-button pad/point, not too hot
HP's ZBooks? You can even replace almost any component inside. I got the first generation model (15") and it's very good. Sure, it's not light and slim.
I assume this was implemented to improve usability for people with short fingers. As someone with tiny fingers, I would rather have a huge Ctrl key and a tiny fn key
I'm in the same boat. Additionally there is a huge immunity of people running Linux on the thinkpads which make it easier to pick the right components when buying, and sovle and find work around when you do hit a problem.
That's easy: Who cares what Lenovo installs on their hardware? Whatever is on there is coming off as soon as I get it. And their hardware is excellent for the price.
I think the thing with Lenovo is, their hardware is sometimes excellent for the price. It's like they are Intel with a tick-tock cadence except the ticks are all complete duds. Just make sure to wait for a new model to accumulate at least 6 months of solid reviews before pulling the trigger.
I've been getting ThinkPads on corporate refresh cycles for 15 years and after they sold to Lenovo, I never know if a new machine will turn out to be a flaky piece of junk or totally solid and well built. Seems like it's always one or the other.
You can't necessarily remove it. For example, there's a mechanism called the Windows Binary Platform Table that automatically copies an EXE from the UEFI image and executes it with kernel-level privileges on each boot. It's intended to be used to deliver drivers or anti-theft software after a clean install, but Lenovo was using it to deliver malware, and there's nothing you can do about it unless you have a signed image without the malware included.
> I cannot trust Lenovo being competent at what they do after superfish, I wonder how can any of the readers of hacker news still think of buying from them.
It was certainly a giant blunder, but like all of these issues they are Windows only, and usually only if you use the factory OS image.
Like most(?) of the HN crowd not using Apple products, I run Linux, so that kind of stuff doesn't affect me at all. I assume the remaining ones reinstall using their own installation-media too?
It doesn't excuse Lenovo's behaviour and certainly can make you question their judgement, but all in all, I'm one of those who are putting less weight on this issue than others may do.
What matters most to me, are the practical aspects: what can this product do for me? And Carbon X1 Thinkpads are among the best lightweight laptops out there.
> It was certainly a giant blunder, but like all of these issues they are Windows only, and usually only if you use the factory OS image.
Don't forget that your hardware vendor is also responsible for firmware. Not saying that Lenovo is special in any way here, but delivering terrible software on the factory OS image might have implications for software quality in general.
No, it's not only if you use the factory OS image: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nast... - it is, indeed, only if you use Windows for now. But there was a time where pressing the "restore" key on the IdeaPad (yes, there was one, that starts a windows restore) would bork a Linux install.
The Carbon X1 is probably positioned as a competitor to some non-existent Macbook Air/Pro hybrid, and it does have a pricing thereafter. It will certainly have to be more expensive than a plain Air, with its weak CPU and otherwise lackluster specs.
That said, I still find complaints about the X1's price from an Apple-user funny. Whenever people in the past people was critical towards the pricing of Apple products, the response was always "Real quality costs money" and "It's worth it".
Is that no longer so? And is a quality higher than that provided by Apple unimaginable?
I have bought/used a lot of high end ($2000+) windows notebooks: acer, asus, MSI. The trackpads all suck. Seriously, it is insane - macs had a working mouse in 1984!
You bought all the junk. Thinkpads and expensive Dells and HPs are good. So is the surface book. The brands you listed are good at making low quality laptops. Their high end sucks. Lenovo's high end is top-notch and their low end is not as good as Acer's for example.
the comment you replied to said that the specific brands mentioned have bad high-end offerings, so if they want to buy high-end and get their money worth they should look elsewhere.
In a life long ago, I was responsible for an office full of Thinkpads, not long after Lenovo spun off from IBM. These were machines that "just worked", and if there was a problem, their on-site service was legendary. I never had to worry about them.
I now own a 3rd-gen X1 Carbon for personal use. After my experience with it, I'll never buy or recommend Lenovo again. Months of waiting on backordered parts (for their flagship laptop), repeat visits from their service center, and the end result is finally a laptop that mostly works, but is starting a slow death very early because of cheap plastic construction and tight tolerances that aren't so tight after a few months of use. I've had it a year and a half (I bought it the week it came out); I'll be lucky if it makes it to two years without another significant problem.
Terrible experience all the way around. It looks pretty on the website, but it's not built to last like their older products were, and their service is a shadow of its former self.
Taiwan isn't China. Completely different legal structure.
And Lenovo is a Chinese company, but I guess they've made the cost-benefit analysis that they have more to lose getting sued by Apple in the US for copying their products than they have to gain by selling a cheap Macbook knockoff in an already very competitive Chinese market.
The difference is that Lenovo and Acer sell to US market whereas Xiaomi does not. This means that they have something to loose. Xiaomi will be in big trouble if they ever try to break into a market outside of China (and other places with weak IP laws).
Lenovo inherited its entire design style from the IBM sale. A modern thinkpad isn't that different from one from 2003. Lenovo doesn't need to copy anyone. Its designs are already considered classic and unique to their brand.
Xiaomi is the new kid on the block and just copies Apple designs. Some examples:
Also they have no legitimate sales channel in the US/EU, so there's a jurisdiction issue with a lawsuit. Apple knows it can't just march into China and win a lawsuit. Acer and Lenovo sell in the US/EU, so they have to play ball with our IP laws.
If you do business together in a country, you have to follow the laws of that country. Xiaomi does no "official" business here and there is nothing for apple to sue.
Well, if we're talking copies, then Airs are just a scaled-up version of the eeepc - same 'sharp wedge' shape (that is apparently why Lenovo X1s are being called clones of Airs).
The eeepc was the thing that proved there was enough interest for a low-power-but-mobile computer, which ended up turning into the tablet market. Crappy build quality, but people went berserk for them.
And how!!! My ex-boss read the press announcement on a flight (sometime in 2011?) and went gung ho. On coming back, he got me to inquire with our regular/local hardware vendors. Turned out nobody (in our small city) had even heard of it, so the inquiry was escalated to the largest city of our state. Still nothing. Finally, he actually got a staffer to fly to Mumbai and get him a piece.
Within the next few weeks, he bought not less than 7 more, to gift them away to family and friends!! Yes, berserk is right. :-)
I don't typically buy ultra-think notebooks (or really many notebooks in general) but I've had good experiences with Asus if you want that "85% of a MacBook quality for 50% of the price" thing.
Last laptop I bought was due to needing something for occasional DJ and projection graphics projects. Since it needed to be mobile, even a small form factor desktop build was not really feasible so I went looking for the best thing I could grab at Microcenter for under a grand.
Now this was a few years ago so the specs aren't top notch anymore but for just under $1000 I got an Asus that's not quite all metal (bottom half of the shell is plastic but the rest is aluminum), 1920x1080 screen (but worse viewing angles than a premium display), an i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and the mobile variant of the then-current class of nVidia GPUs (because I needed something that could handle all of the OpenGL stuff I was messing with). The only other sucky part was it came with a HDD instead of a SSD but at some point I'll upgrade the SSD in my desktop and hand that one down to the laptop.
The nearest competing Apple notebook at the time (at least 1920x1080, i7, 16GB RAM, and discrete graphics) would've run me about $2500. Build would've been better, display would've been a bit better, and if it had a SSD or one of those hybrid drives, that obviously beats spinning platters.
But none of those things (or all of them together) was worth spending more than double. If it was going to be my only machine for everything I'd have probably paid the premium for an Apple or another higher-end notebook with nicer display and SSD but for a secondary computer at around $950-ish it is still running perfectly when I need to take something on the road.
On some of the models you're describing the motherboard is soldered to the chassis, that makes changing the HDD a bit perileous.
Apart from that point I echo the sentiment. These are (were?) great little laptops for the price point/form factor
Afaict, it only teaches you a good lesson about voiding warranties and looking before prying the whole thing apart. (Almost destroyed mine opening it up to clean up the airways)
Asus is particularly adept not only at providing a good value but actually innovating in the Windows ecosystem. The Vivo AiO, for example, is a fantastic hybrid—part iMac, part Wacom tablet and with a wireless phone charging ability to boot. It doesn't seem like that should work, but the screen is actually rock solid and without wobble while drawing on it with the pen.
It has wireless charging and NFC build into the base, wow! That's really well thought out. I'm not too sold on the iMac-style monitor computers, but I admit they seems to have done a lot right when making the Vivo AiO.
At the very least, Lenovo and Dell are innovating and making attractive, eye popping products that don't copy Apple at all. Copying is a poor strategy that in the end run gets you nowhere, you end up not being able to differentiate yourself other than being a copycat that's one step behind.
For a cheap, lightweight development laptop I use a Toshiba Chromebook 2 (2015) with a 240GB SSD fitted. Build quality is not up to Apple standards but is still decent.
Screen is much, much better than Macbook Air screen though. Battery life is very good. I use Arch Linux and With a bit of tweaking, everything works (bluetooth, wifi, keyboard backlight, suspend/resume etc).
I can also dual boot into ChromeOS which is quite nice in it's own right. Lovely machine for the money ...
You can buy http://amzn.to/2a4isAQ [0] and swap it in. This model is compatible with the Chromebook you mentioned. It's about $50 for the 128GB SSD expansion.
[0] Yes this is an affiliate link through my Amazon account.
I have the MiBand, and it drops hundreds of times. I had eventually lost it. Sure, it's only $10, but it doesn't make sense to buy anything just because it's cheap.
And I have the earbuds too. Sure another $10, but the sound is very mediocre compare to the stock headphones I got.
I also have one of their TVBox, bought it mainly for my Chinese parents. None of the channels work anymore oversea.
Sure, $10 who cares. But I would rather spend bit more on something that last longer than a manufacturer producing more electronic junk to this already-polluted planet.
They say nothing of Linux support, so they probably didn't care much for it. The bigger model has Nvidia graphics, and the smaller model has only 4GB RAM. For a Linux notebook, I think you'd be better off with one of the Dell or Lenovo with good support.
I ran linux as my primary os for 10 years. This was never true for me. Something was always broken, or wonky. 10 years of platitudes about how "it will get better", but it didn't. There is always new hardware to support to various degrees.
I got a mac, because I wanted to be able to listen to music and print at the same time. Also, I was tired of all my photos coming out pink.
What was stopping you from listening to music and printing at the same time? Never seen that one (USB mono laser printer/bog standard mp3 tracks to play).
It had something to do with device drivers not loading. It was stupidity. It was also 2003.
The printer is a classic linux desktop experience. CUPS wouldn't recognize the printer, not even as generic postscript or something, or maybe it did, but wouldn't take advantage of its high resolution because binary blobs being evil or some other high horse. Either way, binary blobs figure into this. So I had to actually buy a driver and color profiles from some company in Germany that had paid a license to make a closed source driver. While I could now print at high resolution, all the photos had a pink cast, that no amount of correction could take away. Boot into Windows, thing prints fine. Ironically, the company touted its color profiles as being better Windows.
In 10 years, I never had a machine that had all of it's hardware working correctly. But hey, maybe 2016 is finally the Year of Linux Desktop!
I have a Linux DAW and two Linux Dev workstations that don't need much "sysadmin'ing" beyond the normal update maintenance schedule, so I dunno .. I think the beauty of Linux is that it allows for your end of the extreme, and mine, and doesn't just force everyone into a pissed-in sandbox, like OSX.
Installed Ubuntu once, I can't help to notice that it tries too much to be macosx. I would rather keep using macbook, or use plain debian instead if installing wifi driver weren't a pain in the ass.
Plasma is as brittle as always. Years in and still is half finished. Like the developer rushed to implement the mockup so it looks good in screenshots, but then polished absolutely nothing about it.
They’ve been through two technology changes, rebuilding basically from scratch every time. This (Plasma 5 and KDE Frameworks 5) feels like the final evolution stage.
It’s gaining polish with every point release. Desktop search is finally quick. The UI stack (QML) is nimble and powerful. Breeze is the best looking flat design, both beautiful and clean. Even the default desktop wallpapers are gorgeous.
The only thing remaining is the Akonadi legacy, which is being replaced. The rest is details. KDE is the best desktop Linux has to offer now, and it’s the best platform to build upon in the future.
If two technology changes is an excuse for unimplemented features, that sounds like some pretty unusable software to me. "The rest is details" was exactly the problem the parent was referring to. "Desktop search is finally quick"--I think most users would want it to be quick first, and then the devs can do whatever "technology changes" they want.
I tried to like KDE, but every time I tried it, one of the first apps I tried would immediately crash. Plus it's default looked like a bad copy of Windows XP, which was a bad copy of the Mac, so it looked really bad. (That was a long time ago.) Unfortunately, GNOME looked nice, but had no features, so I just gave up and went to a bare window manager and realized I have no need for anything a DE offers. Then the problem became that sawfish became unsupported, and nothing else had the same customizability.
Actually it was always quick, just the indexing sometimes would be a little resource intensive.
I’m not going to claim KDE didn’t deserve that reputation in the past. The architectural changes are to blame, but they weren’t frivolous. You can’t build on shaky foundation.
I also think it’s not fair to criticize it based on some snapshot from the past. You’ve seen the beta. It’s really good now!
I see comments like this every time someone complains about Linux usability. You really think just because something worked for you with no problems means anything other than you getting lucky?
I've used Linux for over ten years, on dozens of machines. I'm not a newbie. And yes, it's horribly difficult and broken compared to OS X, unless you get lucky.
> any other combination of hardware and software is
The ThinkPad X250 I'm using right now with Linux would disagree. The Sony Vaio I had in 2010 and put Linux on would disagree. The Dell Inspiron I had last year would fit the description of "broken" but not "badly broken".
Are there poor pairings of hardware and software outside the Apple garden? Sure. Does that mean everything outside Apple's garden is poor?
I concur. No true Linux user gets stumped by these things.
For my part, I've had perfect, smoothly-running Linux workstations for decades now, and for me its a no-brainer to select hardware for the purpose of running Linux. Like I said, if this has decent Linux support, I'll switch from Apple in a moments' notice. Linux can do just as well, if not better, than OSX for many, many things ..
I do see the Nvidia dual-graphics chip causing problems on Linux.
They should have dropped the Nvidia chip all the way, it is a shitty compromise. Nobody is going to play games on this machine and the Intel IGP handles all other workloads just fine. Also, the 12.5 version coming with 4GB is a bit disappointing.
If you mean the kind of Optimus thing, it's actually handled okay out of the box with recent Nvidia drivers. I had problems with it about two years ago, but recently reinstalled with LM17.3 and the Nvidia drivers it automatically installed handle the dual graphics thing just fine.
Hey man, could you elaborate on that a bit or point to a tutorial? I am running Kubuntu 16 on a Skylake+950M laptop, and I can either use Intel or Nvidia but not both at the same time. There is Bumblebee, but my machine freezes on startup....
Hey, I'm not sure what to tell you. My Optimus functionality has been working since installing the "newest" version of the official Nvidia drivers (nvidia-352) on LM17.3. I turned it on in the BIOS and have been able to select from the "NVIDIA X Server Settings" utility ever since. I remember trying out Bumblebee on LM17 and having similar issues as you mention, and was unable to boot with Optimus enabled in the BIOS.
I see, so I guess Mint has some combination of drivers (kernel + nvidia) which just work for your system. Good for you! Thanks for answering. Maybe I will take a look into LM!
As a full-time Apple user for the last 7 years or so (not counting my //e days as a kid), I completely agree with this sentiment.
When you have a captive audience and no competition, it is easy to become complacent.
If Linux had a compelling desktop UI alternative and a compelling seamless device integration, I'd be very happy to switch.
I realize there is a lot of subjectivity to what is pretty, but Apple has opened the door for competitors to come out with a more self-consistent UX and address the shortcomings that Apple has introduced in their UX. Such as reduced discoverability, the loss of at-a-glance comprehension.
Off topic, but have you tried Gnome 3? I personally can't stand it, but a lot of my friends who use macOS love it, to the point of saying it's on par with the macOS desktop environment.
I'll give it a whirl. Last desktop I used was whatever Ubuntu has... Unity I think or something like that.
A lot of glitz, but also very glitchy. I'd be happy with plain, consistent, discoverable, comprehisble. The animation eye candy is nice, but it's low on my priority list.
I am very tempted to try to acquire one. Seems like it would be a great portable development machine.
For robotics work I always end up wanting a small but decent computer to run my ROS visualizations/algorithms and to make small code edits. This has a decent c/gpu, good battery, small form factor, ssd slot, and isn't ungodly expensive. I usually end up running a VM on my primary development laptop but that is very annoying, a dedicated and less valuable machine would be better.
The best thing about Xiaomi is that they support their products very well. Almost all of their phones get security updates each month. That is a rare thing in Android nowadays especially with Motorola announcing that they will stop updating their phones with the new security updates. [1]
They do security updates for Redmi 1S regularly though afaik. They also update their phones with the new version of MIUI. MIUI 8 is coming for Redmi 1S next month. [1]
That's because you probably bought the phone from a re-seller who re-flashed a "custom global ROM" (compiled by who knows who) which does not receive OTA updates because it's not compatible with the official releases. This is what happened to me. After noticing that I don't get the updates for a while I started to investigate and I re-flashed one of the official ROMs from http://en.miui.com/download.html.
yes. my Xiaomi Mi4C gets an update every week. sometimes some minor regressions, but they're always fixed the next week.
i certainly prefer that to the typical android software update cycle from most manufacturers/carriers
i got my Mi4C in April 2016 and it has received several OTA android version update and monthly android security patches. there are certainly many insignificant UI changes, but there have been android updates occasionally in the last four months.
similar to what others have mentioned, the place where i purchased it added google apps in a way that prevented regular updates. once i re-flashed and reinstalled google apps, i've gotten updates every week
I've been using Redmi 2. It's only around 75$, It has good support and roms and the MIUI os itself is beautiful too. They are doing the right thing, I can't care much about privacy stuff till I am getting my things done.
How did you go from However, because of the amount of testing and approvals that are necessary to deploy them, it's difficult to do this on a monthly basis for all our devices. It is often most efficient for us to bundle security updates in a scheduled Maintenance Release (MR) or OS upgrade., which is a quote from Motorola, to Motorola announcing that they will stop updating their phones with the new security updates.?
Keeping up with the monthly updates would likely be preferable, but batching them is still a long way off from how you've characterized it.
Because anyone who has watched Motorola after their acquisition from Lenovo knows they will stop updating phones very quickly. In under a year in some cases.
Yes, please feel free to take them to task over that.
But while you are doing so, please avoid misrepresentations as egregious as Motorola announcing that they will stop updating their phones with the new security updates. (and less egregious ones too).
Well that phrasing is misleading I admit. But what would the reaction be if Microsoft started to have security updates every three months or so for Windows.
Everyone I know with a Xiaomi is on an ancient version of Android and their phones are largely considered disposable. They might do the monthly security updates (all Android OEMs should be doing this) but that's very different than keeping up proper OS updates.
Considering how cheap the Nexus line is, I'm not sure why people even both with the super-budget phones. You get a lackluster experience, few if any OS updates, worse everything, etc just to save $75 or so. A Nexus can last you years compared re-buying a new budget junker annually.
I really wish the mobile market and buyers could mature to the point where we start talking about environmental responsibility here. We shouldn't have to buy phones this frequently and filling up landfills with this stuff. My Nexus is getting old and is still fine. My laptop is at least 6 years old and after an SSD transplant, runs like a a top.
No idea. There's an app that's supposed to test for doze and it says "hw sensors: ok" (or similar) but "config: off". Like it's configurable somewhere but wasn't enabled by Xiaomi.
My guess is that Xiaomi already has a similar feature (perhaps less sophisticated) called "Autostart". Most app aren't allowed by default to wake up in the background and kill your battery. Only some (e.g., whatsapp) are whitelisted and, of course, you may whitelist additional apps yourself.
Overall, I'm happy with the battery usage of my Mi3. I prefer the Xiaomi Apple-like UI over Google's standard -- but that may be just a habit...
The worst thing about Xiaomi is their invasive software. In order to use a Mi Fit band you have to create an account with them and grant their app every permission under the sun.
I love their hardware, it's a frugal premium grade that's hard to come by. I just wish it were more open and their software wasn't so questionable.
Xiaomi isn't explicitly mentioned in that article and I have no doubt they put backdoors in their products for the Chinese Government. I guess my question is, would you feel differently if they were a US company and it were the the US Government holding the keys to backdoor?
There's a reason China has been investing in developing it's own CPUs and telecommunications hardware and it isn't so that it can more easily spy on others. It's because they themselves no longer wish to be spied on... and maybe so they can spy on everyone else a little too.
I'm not saying it's right. I don't know what I'm saying actually. I'm just going to grab some tin foil...
That's interesting, because when I've got my Xiaomi Mi3 I've compared it with my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Mi3 was rooted, had almost no crapware and allowed me to pick what permissions app gets. On the other hand Tab required Samsung Account and rooting it voided guarantee.
Mi Band vibrates on incoming connection, sms and apps so maybe that's why it requires permissions to phone, sms and notifications.
The official app has more features admittedly, but nothing that justifies the level of permissions it asks for. At most it should need access to the camera/photos to allow you to set a profile photo, and full network access to create/sync your account data to the "cloud".
Nothing that the official app does justifies the following permissions it asks for:
Device & app history
retrieve running apps
read sensitive log data
Identity
find accounts on the device
Location
approximate location (network-based)
precise location (GPS and network-based)
SMS
receive text messages (SMS)
Phone
directly call phone numbers
Photos/Media/Files
access USB storage filesystem
Wi-Fi connection information
view Wi-Fi connections
Other
view network connections
connect and disconnect from Wi-Fi
read Google service configuration
draw over other apps
control flashlight
reorder running apps
modify system settings
I don't trust their battery run-times. I was looking for a laptop and finally settled down for a Lenovo Thinkpad 13.
Thinkpad's battery is 42 Wh with a wifi surfing run-time of almost 7 hours [0], although it being sold as a 11 hours run-time. It hasn't a dedicated graphics chip.
Xiaomi's battery is 40 Wh and it sports dedicated graphics. Macbook Air's battery is 58 Wh and it has integrated graphics, lasting around 10 hours [1].
Assuming a similar consumption, Xiaomi's would last less than 7 hours for surfing. But it has dedicated graphics (NVidia 940M) with a consumption (30W) that doubles integrated options (Intel HD in Lenovo and Apple laptops). So, probably it will last 5 or 6 hours of just wifi surfing, even less.
Laptops with discrete GPUs tend to have an integrated GPU as well, and keep the discrete GPU powered off most of the time. The 30W you quoted is the maximum power consumption for the discrete GPU, when it is active and running at full tilt.
The battery claim may be for the smaller model, which uses a Core M (similar to the new Macbook). That wouldn't be comparable to the Thinkpad or Macbook Air at all.
There are laptops which are thinner, faster or has better graphics than MacBooks. But as much as I have checked, every one of them falls flat on battery run time comparison.
If there was anything that comes close to Macbook's 12 hours run time, I would have seriously considered switching.
This laptop takes a lot of inspiration from Dell XPS' small bezels plus a lot of (what seems like) other similar ID inspirations... I love my XPS, but this is more affordable. Would love to give this a test run. Is this laptop running Windows?
Windows power management is no where near as good as OSX, but that's always going to be an issue with horizontally integrated systems. However Windows PM is light years ahead of Linux.
In large part because the Linux devs have to keep patching around Windows-isms (useless ACPI tables for example), and outright bugs that the OEMs paper over with their drivers for Windows.
Frankly PC hardware is going through a drawn out second system period. First there was ACPI replacing APM, and now we have UEFI replacing the BIOS. In both case we have simple and straight forward systems that can hardly be implemented wrong being replaced with complex and convoluted systems where each implementation have its own quirks and gotchas.
On top of this we have the issue of most OEMs barely testing for Windows, and Microsoft is anything but good at getting their implementations right (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish anyone?).
So Linux PM sucks because OEMs implemented unnecessary and inferior replacements for perfectly functional standards because Microsoft?
Your argument ignores a number of truths.
Much of the original BIOS was being replaced with proprietary extensions by vendors to overcome it's limitations and it was in dire need a replacement. At one point Western Digital was shipping what was basically a boot sector virus to overcome the Hard Drive size limitations imposed by the BIOS.
ACPI doesn't just replace APM, but also PnP and MPS. None of which support newer buses or interfaces and would have to be patched or extended to do so.
Microsoft has no love for ACPI and even went so far as to disable ACPI by default and only enable it for a small whitelist of machines with earlier OSes. Vista was the first OS from Microsoft to actually require ACPI, that means it took them over a decade to come to terms with it.
UEFI was meant to replace both ACPI and the BIOS but hasn't replaced either. Unfortunately vendors have been using UEFI to just load BIOS and ACPI implementations. This isn't at all how it was intended.
You can't blame Microsoft for these standards because PnP and APM are the only ones they had a hand in implementing. It also sounds like they're the ones you actually prefer which is funny. If there's anyone you should be blaming then it's Intel because they championed all of them.
The whole setup is a house of cards and no one seems to like it. Why you choose to blame Microsoft for it is beyond me.
I get the feeling you're speaking from your own experience. In the same vein: my experience has been the opposite. But then again, I'm speaking from experience on a ThinkPad X250 with Arch Linux and tlp vs. ThinkPad X250 with Windows 10 (upgraded from Windows 7).
If my experience had been with poorer hardware that don't stick to standards, I'd probably have a similar (though far less extreme) view as yours.
Aren't those arrow keys a bit weird? Left and right keys are implemented as standard size keys, while up and down keys are so small and tiny. How do you work like that?
I hate that arrow key design, and is the reason I haven't bought HP laptops in a long time even when their specs and/or prices were better than the alternatives.
Exactly, this moment reminds me of the same time they did that with the first "Miphone" as they branded it. If I remember correctly, Didn't Apple try to sue them for that?
I do think that Xiaomi's new laptop will meet its first explosion after on sale for a week, like any other Chinese products. I also think that Xiaomi is just a counterfeit of Apple for only Chinese to enjoy.
Frankly, I myself, is a Chinese. Yes I do live in Hong Kong. But I dislike Xiaomi because they are just thieves without creativity and inventive. Xiaomi used to be only a theme mod for Android, also known as MIUI. Gaining popularity and monetary only in China, they delivered their first phone that looked exactly like iPhones' with potentials for Chinese government installing backdoors. See Lenovo for examples.
There is also reports Mi Red had suspicious internet activity that goes into servers centralized in Beijing with high amount of sensitive user data being sent.
They also had produced drones that exploded in midair during a promotion stream. Fortunately no one is hit by that burning beast.
They had bands that almost did nothing besides making your hand or wrist heated.
And now, they want to make a forgery of Macbook. I cannot expect something well to happen.
Besides 'shame', I cannot further describe Xiaomi, maybe also the entire IT ecosystem of China filled with pirated and fragile products.
Sarcastically their CEO, when introducing their new, pioneer products, also goes the "Job's way".
'One last thing'.
The black t-shirt and trousers.
Every single bit they can rip from the Apple are exhausted. Due to the internet blockage of China, the Wall, Chinese never understand that their acts are harming the world, the intellectual properties. They only wait for their opponent to move, analyze it, make a replica for it, denying others to take action of it. This is the reason Chinese always go behind the world. This is the reason Japan can easily beat China. No it's not being passive, but someone who shamelessly ripping off the benefits others had diligently built.
This is not the China I ever dreamed of. But we had to accept it, China are weak. And so she became a shut-in.
First real update(android update) it got was in July 2016 .
also, you cannot delete your i.mi.com account
you cannot delete the data once uploaded on i.mi.com ( so called MI cloud).
You can keep writing them emails and they will refuse to answer.
their service center is pathetic. ( not few, not in exception cases, but in all cases).
forget about security updates, you do not even have encryption option in MI phones.
phone->settings->security->encryption -- this option is absent from MI phones.
No MI phone can encrypt.
The worst part is their online fanboys on MIUI forum , and their forum rules, they actively delete the posts which show the cheating they do .
There are some bloggers who ALWAYS, ALWAYS, WIN the flash sales they do on their website, The SAME bloggers always get to "experience" their new phones first.
Now, the same bloggers post youtube reviews and fool the people.
So, A person FIRST knowledge of MI products comes from viewing online reviews, and those online reviews are written by bloggers who are moderators in their forum.
By the time the normal people realize it, they have sold a million phones already.
Their marshmallow phones ( only 3 ) do not have
-- doze
-- back up to google servers
By MI devices at your own risk.
and see how pathetic and insecure is the website i.mi.com (mi cloud ) and BEWARE OF ONLINE TROLLS OF MI, they are everywhere.
if you spend sometime on miui forums, you might understand the language they use and the kind of treatment they give to posts which exposes the cheating they are doing in their service centers.
But a Kia is a great car these days. Dollar for dollar, I'd rather buy a Kia with my money than a Bugatti, just like I'm not willing to shell out for a MacBook, but might buy this laptop.
If we're going to be using the car analogy, Vertu is the Bugatti of consumer electronics and Apple is more like BMW although they desperately want to be Mercedes.
Regardless, KIA's reliability and repair-ability ratings trump all three of them. So I'll let your original comparison stand.
Will there be heating issues?
Such a small form factor with an i5 and dedicated graphics card ought to have thermal throttling issues and with a metal body, become uncomfortable to hold.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadSo yeah, they've convinced multiple courts in multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries that yes, consumers are, paraphrased from their words, "pretty stupid and get confused easily."
to be fair, that is what Apple sued Samsung for, and it won :(
Also, visual similarities do not always translate into legally-pursuable patent violations, or similar.
I'm not sure how true his thought is in relation to china,but neither here nor there.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-other-hidden-cost-of-runnin...
If you intend to run Linux on the thing, buy things that Linux supports out of the box. That probably means sticking to the working Intel stuff for now. You'll thank me later (or not, because you won't miss the problems you don't have).
The binary blob provided by Nvidia have been quite reliable across the years (and I think they've been available for more than 10 years) while the open source ATI/AMD drivers have frequently failed to deliver.
My current (and only) working solution is to disable the Nvidia GPU on a host and use it PCIe passthrough to assign it to another Linux or Windows VM. That's the only stable solution that doesn't break the world when enabling/disabling the discrete GPU.
We shouldn't have to revert to such extreme measures...
Both are somewhat annoying, but far less than only being able to use it in a VM. That said, I'm curious about how you manage the VM output, considering that PCIe passthrough requires a dedicated screen.
In the even rarer case that I wish to play a game, I have an HDMI connection between the GPU and my projector, which I can enable with a remote control.
Learning how to use qemu is a bit of a pain (hint: use qemu directly, virus is a huge waste of time) but after the initial learning curve the setup is seamless for my use case - and I feel safer without the GPU drivers having access to my normal desktop. I much prefer this setup to dual-booting Windows for gaming. The VM spins up in a few seconds and shuts down when not in use (turning off the GPU in the process).
In my experience, the open-source radeon drivers are significantly more stable. Fglrx was a stinking pile of crap that has officially been abandoned - the whole driver team has switched to the open-source drivers, now.
Linking to Theano-CUDA is always a nightmare.
Forget about optimus. That has never worked correctly on Linux.
The only reason I can see someone wanting nvidia on linux is for CUDA. And in that case, you can't just use the ubuntu pre-built version of the drivers.
If you are not doing neural nets locally on Linux, you shouldn't get a discrete graphics card. And if you do get a discrete one, make sure it's not Nvidia since their open source drivers are much inferior to AMD's.
This is an honest question, and I appreciate your answer in advance.
I have a desktop with an HD 6850 and the radeon driver has always worked well, I used to play DOTA2 on it.
But this is a very old GPU now, and all newer models (HD7xxx and up) were having performance issues with the radeon driver last time I was reading the forums.
Not sure about compatibility with the recent OSX, though. I used lion and mountain lion, and those worked well. AFAIR I’ve used vmware tools from Fusion.
Legally no. VM or not, the real hardware needs to be made by Apple.
In the host machine, you need reasonably fast Intel CPU, hardware-assisted virtualization enabled in BIOS/UEFI, enough RAM, also unofficial VMWare patch to unlock OSX guests on PC hosts.
In the guest OS, you need VMWare tools for OSX, they exist because VMWare supports OSX guests when running on OSX hosts.
If you do web development it is also a much better development experience than using Windows.
Bluetooth devices work much better in Linux than Windows (at least the ones I have).
USB devices are also much better handled in Linux. I never see an 'Installing device driver for this USB stick' message.
I plug my kindle in Ubuntu, it opens Calibre. I plug my kindle in Windows, it shows a folder.
I lose all these niceties if I run Linux inside a VM.
* WTF, why isn't my NIC registering? I thought we had a standard for this stuff by now.
* Download NIC drivers from secondary computer
* Put NIC drivers on a USB stick
* Install NIC drivers
* Nothing happened, turns out you found the drivers for the wrong revision of the chipset, go back to square one
* Download Nvidia drivers
* Try to install, nope, you need to find the Intel drivers first
* Download and install Intel drivers
* Install the Nvidia drivers again
* It's 2AM already, go to sleep
* You forgot to turn off Windows Update, and now you're stuck with Windows 10
* Reformat again, and start over
As opposed to:
$ sudo pacman -S nvidia bumblebee && sudo usermod -aG bumblebee $(whoami) && reboot
The linux comparison isn't recent either. That was the exact same procedure I had to do on an nVidia-stricken laptop (thankfully not mine) four years ago.
http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/221881-apples-a9x-goes-hea...
Things that really hurt are short battery life which is ~1.45hrs, and that it misses the modern CPU extensions which will obsolete it soon. Both of this issues obviously won't be present in a Core M3, so I see no reason why you wouldn't dev on an M3 unless you compile big native projects with great frequency.
[1]: https://m.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/45q90s/is_anything_b... [2]: https://m.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2uxt46/rust_vs_c_inc_co...
And yeah this laptop looks nice anyway.
In any case, what does being a fan have to do with appreciating good design? I'm no fan of Apple either, but I appreciate their product design nonetheless. I'm not sure why your reaction was that sharp.
Sure, it's a lot sleeker than most laptops (not made by Apple), but its design leaves me asking a ton of "why did they choose that?" kind of questions.
The question is how it looks after six months of use.
https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=samsung+serie...
Don't get me wrong, it's a really good laptop and I've chosen it over so many others on the market. I would probably still choose it for my linux laptop (lenovo x1 is neat but I'm done with lenovo with all the stuff they've done lately). It just looks poorly to me in a direct comparison.
Though to be honest there is a small issue with coil whine in very quiet settings. I hear Dell has addressed this in newer models.
Clearly it's not a cheap product, but the Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 is razor thin, high powered, well built, and very good looking.
Maybe I'm missing something?
And Carbon Fibre is certainly more lightweight than aluminium, and may be stronger as well. As such, the Carbon X1 certainly qualifies.
I'm not too concerned about Superfish - that was only the consumer junk, right? The BIOS-Windows-auto-install stuff was more concerning. But hey, little choices. Lenovo is certainly incompetent - look at the X240/T440 with the terrible pad design they backtracked on (obvious). Or the Carbon keyboards they ended up ditching.
The X1 Carbon is much cooler but also less powerful ;)
The X250 is pretty good, though you get a keyboard at random and will need to replace the part (always get next business day warranty) if you get one of the junk ones. Otherwise it's a nice laptop - I've not seen anything I like more (though it could be better, of course; a 3:2 screen for starters).
I've used a T450s, and the keyboard feels fantastic on it. At 3K res it'd probably real nice. Unless you need a specific CPU/GPU, stick with the X260/T460s (s for slim). Perhaps compare reviews to the X250/T450s to see if it got worse?
Assuming you don't need high-end power (like quad core), it's more of a preference if you want a small 12" or a larger screen. I dock my X250 and it seems fine, even driving a higher-pixel external monitor. I'd go for the X260, but if software support was better for hiDPI I might consider the T450s. (If they had centred keyboards without numpad, maybe even a 15" model.)
Edit: FWIW when using it in laptop mode, I run CPU throttled to 50% or less to keep it cool. I have the cheaper i5-5200U option and it's fine for emacs/VS/browsing. At full power it can play Dolphin emulator Smash Brothers Brawl and Melee at full speed, but just barely.
HP's ZBooks? You can even replace almost any component inside. I got the first generation model (15") and it's very good. Sure, it's not light and slim.
On some Lenovo models they are the same size (and can be swapped), but not on the Carbon X1.
I've been getting ThinkPads on corporate refresh cycles for 15 years and after they sold to Lenovo, I never know if a new machine will turn out to be a flaky piece of junk or totally solid and well built. Seems like it's always one or the other.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/08/12/lenovo-used-a-hidde...
At least this issue should be solved.
It was certainly a giant blunder, but like all of these issues they are Windows only, and usually only if you use the factory OS image.
Like most(?) of the HN crowd not using Apple products, I run Linux, so that kind of stuff doesn't affect me at all. I assume the remaining ones reinstall using their own installation-media too?
It doesn't excuse Lenovo's behaviour and certainly can make you question their judgement, but all in all, I'm one of those who are putting less weight on this issue than others may do.
What matters most to me, are the practical aspects: what can this product do for me? And Carbon X1 Thinkpads are among the best lightweight laptops out there.
Don't forget that your hardware vendor is also responsible for firmware. Not saying that Lenovo is special in any way here, but delivering terrible software on the factory OS image might have implications for software quality in general.
ThinkPad hardware is OK, but it's very hard to trust Lenovo with anything these days. A good summary I found while looking for the above link is http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/now-three-pre-installed-malware...
That was not on the business line. I.e. it did not impact thinkpads, which is what people usually buy on HN anyway.
[1] http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...
That said, I still find complaints about the X1's price from an Apple-user funny. Whenever people in the past people was critical towards the pricing of Apple products, the response was always "Real quality costs money" and "It's worth it".
Is that no longer so? And is a quality higher than that provided by Apple unimaginable?
I now own a 3rd-gen X1 Carbon for personal use. After my experience with it, I'll never buy or recommend Lenovo again. Months of waiting on backordered parts (for their flagship laptop), repeat visits from their service center, and the end result is finally a laptop that mostly works, but is starting a slow death very early because of cheap plastic construction and tight tolerances that aren't so tight after a few months of use. I've had it a year and a half (I bought it the week it came out); I'll be lucky if it makes it to two years without another significant problem.
Terrible experience all the way around. It looks pretty on the website, but it's not built to last like their older products were, and their service is a shadow of its former self.
Xiaomi is a Chinese company they don't care since if they ever do get sued the Chinese court will always side with the Chinese company.
The again if the clone works just as well as the original I don't really care but this would have been a really good chance to copy and improve.
And Acer is Taiwanese.
And Lenovo is a Chinese company, but I guess they've made the cost-benefit analysis that they have more to lose getting sued by Apple in the US for copying their products than they have to gain by selling a cheap Macbook knockoff in an already very competitive Chinese market.
Taiwan has robust rule of law, unlike china.
Xiaomi is the new kid on the block and just copies Apple designs. Some examples:
http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/07/xiaomi-copying-apple.html
Also they have no legitimate sales channel in the US/EU, so there's a jurisdiction issue with a lawsuit. Apple knows it can't just march into China and win a lawsuit. Acer and Lenovo sell in the US/EU, so they have to play ball with our IP laws.
The eeepc was the thing that proved there was enough interest for a low-power-but-mobile computer, which ended up turning into the tablet market. Crappy build quality, but people went berserk for them.
Really? Here's one [0] from approximately when the Air came out and looks not even remotely similar to me in shape.
[0] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ASUS_Eee_PC_PIC_09...
And how!!! My ex-boss read the press announcement on a flight (sometime in 2011?) and went gung ho. On coming back, he got me to inquire with our regular/local hardware vendors. Turned out nobody (in our small city) had even heard of it, so the inquiry was escalated to the largest city of our state. Still nothing. Finally, he actually got a staffer to fly to Mumbai and get him a piece.
Within the next few weeks, he bought not less than 7 more, to gift them away to family and friends!! Yes, berserk is right. :-)
Last laptop I bought was due to needing something for occasional DJ and projection graphics projects. Since it needed to be mobile, even a small form factor desktop build was not really feasible so I went looking for the best thing I could grab at Microcenter for under a grand.
Now this was a few years ago so the specs aren't top notch anymore but for just under $1000 I got an Asus that's not quite all metal (bottom half of the shell is plastic but the rest is aluminum), 1920x1080 screen (but worse viewing angles than a premium display), an i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and the mobile variant of the then-current class of nVidia GPUs (because I needed something that could handle all of the OpenGL stuff I was messing with). The only other sucky part was it came with a HDD instead of a SSD but at some point I'll upgrade the SSD in my desktop and hand that one down to the laptop.
The nearest competing Apple notebook at the time (at least 1920x1080, i7, 16GB RAM, and discrete graphics) would've run me about $2500. Build would've been better, display would've been a bit better, and if it had a SSD or one of those hybrid drives, that obviously beats spinning platters.
But none of those things (or all of them together) was worth spending more than double. If it was going to be my only machine for everything I'd have probably paid the premium for an Apple or another higher-end notebook with nicer display and SSD but for a secondary computer at around $950-ish it is still running perfectly when I need to take something on the road.
Ew. What purpose does that serve?
Not much otherwise.
https://www.asus.com/AllinOne-PCs/Vivo-AiO-V230IC/
If I want a Linux dev box, there are other options too.
Screen is much, much better than Macbook Air screen though. Battery life is very good. I use Arch Linux and With a bit of tweaking, everything works (bluetooth, wifi, keyboard backlight, suspend/resume etc).
I can also dual boot into ChromeOS which is quite nice in it's own right. Lovely machine for the money ...
[0] Yes this is an affiliate link through my Amazon account.
I'm very happy with my Xiaomi piston earbuds, good sound quality, survived 1 year of use so far and only ~£10.
I've had one of their phones a few years ago and found it to work well. Just annoying that they'd skinned Android rather than providing stock.
And I have the earbuds too. Sure another $10, but the sound is very mediocre compare to the stock headphones I got.
I also have one of their TVBox, bought it mainly for my Chinese parents. None of the channels work anymore oversea.
Sure, $10 who cares. But I would rather spend bit more on something that last longer than a manufacturer producing more electronic junk to this already-polluted planet.
I ran linux as my primary os for 10 years. This was never true for me. Something was always broken, or wonky. 10 years of platitudes about how "it will get better", but it didn't. There is always new hardware to support to various degrees.
I got a mac, because I wanted to be able to listen to music and print at the same time. Also, I was tired of all my photos coming out pink.
The printer is a classic linux desktop experience. CUPS wouldn't recognize the printer, not even as generic postscript or something, or maybe it did, but wouldn't take advantage of its high resolution because binary blobs being evil or some other high horse. Either way, binary blobs figure into this. So I had to actually buy a driver and color profiles from some company in Germany that had paid a license to make a closed source driver. While I could now print at high resolution, all the photos had a pink cast, that no amount of correction could take away. Boot into Windows, thing prints fine. Ironically, the company touted its color profiles as being better Windows.
In 10 years, I never had a machine that had all of it's hardware working correctly. But hey, maybe 2016 is finally the Year of Linux Desktop!
Sysdamining is not my favorite thing.
https://neon.kde.org/
It’s gaining polish with every point release. Desktop search is finally quick. The UI stack (QML) is nimble and powerful. Breeze is the best looking flat design, both beautiful and clean. Even the default desktop wallpapers are gorgeous.
The only thing remaining is the Akonadi legacy, which is being replaced. The rest is details. KDE is the best desktop Linux has to offer now, and it’s the best platform to build upon in the future.
I tried to like KDE, but every time I tried it, one of the first apps I tried would immediately crash. Plus it's default looked like a bad copy of Windows XP, which was a bad copy of the Mac, so it looked really bad. (That was a long time ago.) Unfortunately, GNOME looked nice, but had no features, so I just gave up and went to a bare window manager and realized I have no need for anything a DE offers. Then the problem became that sawfish became unsupported, and nothing else had the same customizability.
I’m not going to claim KDE didn’t deserve that reputation in the past. The architectural changes are to blame, but they weren’t frivolous. You can’t build on shaky foundation.
I also think it’s not fair to criticize it based on some snapshot from the past. You’ve seen the beta. It’s really good now!
I've used Linux for over ten years, on dozens of machines. I'm not a newbie. And yes, it's horribly difficult and broken compared to OS X, unless you get lucky.
The ThinkPad X250 I'm using right now with Linux would disagree. The Sony Vaio I had in 2010 and put Linux on would disagree. The Dell Inspiron I had last year would fit the description of "broken" but not "badly broken".
Are there poor pairings of hardware and software outside the Apple garden? Sure. Does that mean everything outside Apple's garden is poor?
For my part, I've had perfect, smoothly-running Linux workstations for decades now, and for me its a no-brainer to select hardware for the purpose of running Linux. Like I said, if this has decent Linux support, I'll switch from Apple in a moments' notice. Linux can do just as well, if not better, than OSX for many, many things ..
They should have dropped the Nvidia chip all the way, it is a shitty compromise. Nobody is going to play games on this machine and the Intel IGP handles all other workloads just fine. Also, the 12.5 version coming with 4GB is a bit disappointing.
When you have a captive audience and no competition, it is easy to become complacent.
If Linux had a compelling desktop UI alternative and a compelling seamless device integration, I'd be very happy to switch.
I realize there is a lot of subjectivity to what is pretty, but Apple has opened the door for competitors to come out with a more self-consistent UX and address the shortcomings that Apple has introduced in their UX. Such as reduced discoverability, the loss of at-a-glance comprehension.
A lot of glitz, but also very glitchy. I'd be happy with plain, consistent, discoverable, comprehisble. The animation eye candy is nice, but it's low on my priority list.
http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/27486/security/xiaomi-ha...
https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/hack-Xiaomi-phone.html
For robotics work I always end up wanting a small but decent computer to run my ROS visualizations/algorithms and to make small code edits. This has a decent c/gpu, good battery, small form factor, ssd slot, and isn't ungodly expensive. I usually end up running a VM on my primary development laptop but that is very annoying, a dedicated and less valuable machine would be better.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/07/motorola-confirms-tha...
[1] http://en.miui.com/thread-301820-1-1.html
or a new wall paper in the stock
or a new option on swipe right
They have sold millions of phones , ask them, on how many phones have they given
--- android version update.
similar to what others have mentioned, the place where i purchased it added google apps in a way that prevented regular updates. once i re-flashed and reinstalled google apps, i've gotten updates every week
Keeping up with the monthly updates would likely be preferable, but batching them is still a long way off from how you've characterized it.
But while you are doing so, please avoid misrepresentations as egregious as Motorola announcing that they will stop updating their phones with the new security updates. (and less egregious ones too).
For instance, you can mischaracterize something by not understanding it or by not being informed at all about it or by intentionally lying.
Considering how cheap the Nexus line is, I'm not sure why people even both with the super-budget phones. You get a lackluster experience, few if any OS updates, worse everything, etc just to save $75 or so. A Nexus can last you years compared re-buying a new budget junker annually.
I really wish the mobile market and buyers could mature to the point where we start talking about environmental responsibility here. We shouldn't have to buy phones this frequently and filling up landfills with this stuff. My Nexus is getting old and is still fine. My laptop is at least 6 years old and after an SSD transplant, runs like a a top.
(No doze support and it revoked my root access but still nice!).
My guess is that Xiaomi already has a similar feature (perhaps less sophisticated) called "Autostart". Most app aren't allowed by default to wake up in the background and kill your battery. Only some (e.g., whatsapp) are whitelisted and, of course, you may whitelist additional apps yourself.
Overall, I'm happy with the battery usage of my Mi3. I prefer the Xiaomi Apple-like UI over Google's standard -- but that may be just a habit...
Might only be true in the US. At least in my country, it is neither accessible to buy nor cheap.
I love their hardware, it's a frugal premium grade that's hard to come by. I just wish it were more open and their software wasn't so questionable.
There's a reason China has been investing in developing it's own CPUs and telecommunications hardware and it isn't so that it can more easily spy on others. It's because they themselves no longer wish to be spied on... and maybe so they can spy on everyone else a little too.
I'm not saying it's right. I don't know what I'm saying actually. I'm just going to grab some tin foil...
Mi Band vibrates on incoming connection, sms and apps so maybe that's why it requires permissions to phone, sms and notifications.
The official app has more features admittedly, but nothing that justifies the level of permissions it asks for. At most it should need access to the camera/photos to allow you to set a profile photo, and full network access to create/sync your account data to the "cloud".
Nothing that the official app does justifies the following permissions it asks for:
It's not as slick as the official app, but requires much less in the way of permissions and is more flexible.
Thinkpad's battery is 42 Wh with a wifi surfing run-time of almost 7 hours [0], although it being sold as a 11 hours run-time. It hasn't a dedicated graphics chip.
Xiaomi's battery is 40 Wh and it sports dedicated graphics. Macbook Air's battery is 58 Wh and it has integrated graphics, lasting around 10 hours [1].
Assuming a similar consumption, Xiaomi's would last less than 7 hours for surfing. But it has dedicated graphics (NVidia 940M) with a consumption (30W) that doubles integrated options (Intel HD in Lenovo and Apple laptops). So, probably it will last 5 or 6 hours of just wifi surfing, even less.
[0] http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-13-Ultrabook-Re...
[1] http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-2015-Noteb...
If there was anything that comes close to Macbook's 12 hours run time, I would have seriously considered switching.
https://world.taobao.com/item/528554912918.htm#detail
Frankly PC hardware is going through a drawn out second system period. First there was ACPI replacing APM, and now we have UEFI replacing the BIOS. In both case we have simple and straight forward systems that can hardly be implemented wrong being replaced with complex and convoluted systems where each implementation have its own quirks and gotchas.
On top of this we have the issue of most OEMs barely testing for Windows, and Microsoft is anything but good at getting their implementations right (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish anyone?).
Your argument ignores a number of truths.
Much of the original BIOS was being replaced with proprietary extensions by vendors to overcome it's limitations and it was in dire need a replacement. At one point Western Digital was shipping what was basically a boot sector virus to overcome the Hard Drive size limitations imposed by the BIOS.
ACPI doesn't just replace APM, but also PnP and MPS. None of which support newer buses or interfaces and would have to be patched or extended to do so.
Microsoft has no love for ACPI and even went so far as to disable ACPI by default and only enable it for a small whitelist of machines with earlier OSes. Vista was the first OS from Microsoft to actually require ACPI, that means it took them over a decade to come to terms with it.
UEFI was meant to replace both ACPI and the BIOS but hasn't replaced either. Unfortunately vendors have been using UEFI to just load BIOS and ACPI implementations. This isn't at all how it was intended.
You can't blame Microsoft for these standards because PnP and APM are the only ones they had a hand in implementing. It also sounds like they're the ones you actually prefer which is funny. If there's anyone you should be blaming then it's Intel because they championed all of them.
The whole setup is a house of cards and no one seems to like it. Why you choose to blame Microsoft for it is beyond me.
I get the feeling you're speaking from your own experience. In the same vein: my experience has been the opposite. But then again, I'm speaking from experience on a ThinkPad X250 with Arch Linux and tlp vs. ThinkPad X250 with Windows 10 (upgraded from Windows 7).
If my experience had been with poorer hardware that don't stick to standards, I'd probably have a similar (though far less extreme) view as yours.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_Probo...
That being said I have no experience with such a keyboard, so I can't say
Friend of mine has one, he is happy with it, never particularly mentioned the arrow keys as a negative
First real update(android update) it got was in July 2016 .
also, you cannot delete your i.mi.com account
you cannot delete the data once uploaded on i.mi.com ( so called MI cloud).
You can keep writing them emails and they will refuse to answer.
their service center is pathetic. ( not few, not in exception cases, but in all cases).
forget about security updates, you do not even have encryption option in MI phones.
phone->settings->security->encryption -- this option is absent from MI phones.
No MI phone can encrypt.
The worst part is their online fanboys on MIUI forum , and their forum rules, they actively delete the posts which show the cheating they do .
There are some bloggers who ALWAYS, ALWAYS, WIN the flash sales they do on their website, The SAME bloggers always get to "experience" their new phones first.
Now, the same bloggers post youtube reviews and fool the people.
So, A person FIRST knowledge of MI products comes from viewing online reviews, and those online reviews are written by bloggers who are moderators in their forum.
By the time the normal people realize it, they have sold a million phones already.
Their marshmallow phones ( only 3 ) do not have
-- doze -- back up to google servers
By MI devices at your own risk.
and see how pathetic and insecure is the website i.mi.com (mi cloud ) and BEWARE OF ONLINE TROLLS OF MI, they are everywhere.
Tbh a posting from a new account named "mi_sucks" raises some flags for me as well…
Forget about security, HOW MANY PHONES OF MI can do ENCRYPTION,
HOW MANY PHONES EVER DID ENCRYPTION.
settings->security->encrypt == this option is absent from all phones.
MI phones is not even run true android
Settings -> Additional Settings -> Privacy -> Encrypt Phone
My About Phone:
- Model: REDMI NOTE 3
- Android: 5.1.1 LMY47V
- Android Security Patch Level: 2016-07-01
- MIUI version: MIUI Global 7.5 | Stable 7.5.3.0(LHOMIDE)
http://en.miui.com/thread-29306-1-1.html
a google search on MI3 encryption
will help you out
and their customer care sucks when you ask them
I have been using MI phoneS for more than 2 years Now
But why?
Read up on nonviolent communication, man!
if you spend sometime on miui forums, you might understand the language they use and the kind of treatment they give to posts which exposes the cheating they are doing in their service centers.
If you can run Hackintosh on it, I don't see why I wouldn't go with it instead of paying $2500 on Apple computer with similar specs.
You cant compare a KIA to Bugatti and say cheap as $xxx.
The point is create a product people speak about and has a value
Regardless, KIA's reliability and repair-ability ratings trump all three of them. So I'll let your original comparison stand.