Ask HN: What laptop should I buy in 2021?
I know this is a common question so I apologize beforehand. I’ve been a Mac user ever since I bought my Powerbook G4. I’ve owned pretty much every Mac model except for a MBP and a Mini and only had one lemon which was my Mac Pro trashcan. After that experience, where Apple refused to replace the model and denied the problems I was having, I’m somewhat embittered.
I’ve seen some inspiring stuff on r/unixporn but I feel if switch to linux I’ll miss all my favorite apps. But on the other hand I’ve heard some surprise stories with the M1 which may or may not be resolved, like Docker not working.
Overall, I’m ambivalent and ignorant about what to buy as a developer and could use some advice; my price range is around $1200. Feel free to recommend a laptop that exceeded your expectations or to just to offer some guidance. Thanks!
52 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threada 2560 x 1600 pixels screen with less than 1.5 kilos in weight.
another one that looks very interesting is the kfocus.org laptop.. preinstalled with linux and plenty powerful.
What makes things easier for me is using it in conjunction with remote VSCode (into either local WSL2 or aforementioned cloud boxes).
Of course, if you're wedded to specific Mac software, then I'd imagine that an M1-based machine will be your only realistic option.
https://www.lg.com/us/laptops
If you can’t wait, this is sound advice. However, if you can, it’s likely worth it, on this rare occasion.
[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-c-ser...
My wife and I both bought one: me a 9360 and later her a 9370.
Around a year into using my laptop, the power button started to occasionally get stuck behind the case and turn off the computer. After 3 years, it's gotten so bad that this happens any time I close, open, or adjust the angle of the laptop screen. The screws that hold the bottom of the case together tend to get loose, but the root cause of this problem is a crack in a metal part of the internals of the laptop that's probably been there since day 1. Currently, I'm using KDE Neon since Plasma gives a good warning when the power button is pressed.
Additionally, I had to replace the battery since after 2-3 years just outside of warranty, it went down from 10 hours to 45 minutes.
Dell Support refused to fix either of the issues.
You might think this is just a case of getting a lemon, but my wife's 9370 had problems too.
The computer came with several keyboard keys not working. Dell Support took over a month to ship a new one, and I spent forever on the phone with them figuring out why the repair was still "processing".
Now after 2 years, the battery has started to swell and has cracked the outside of the case a little. No luck from Dell Support getting this issue fixed.
Unless you buy a good support plan like many large companies do that have large amount of Dell Laptops for employees, I'd stay away from the brand.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dell/comments/ibk4je
I don't doubt that some people have issues with it, but I wonder what percentage of people have issues with it, and how that percentage compares to other laptops.
The only issue I had was with the power adapter, it made a very high pitched noise (the laptop does not make a noise and does not have "coil whine"). Customer service replaced the power adapter without hassle and the new one is fine.
Mine came with a year of Pro Support which was free, I don't know if that made any difference on the ease of replacement.
Another very annoying thing is the fan, which is quite loud, and also on most of the time. I cannot even have a single tab open in a web browser, or watch a movie, without spinning up the fan.
Battery life is also nothing special, it's definitely worse than on comparable MBPs.
- I'm through 2 swollen batteries (at least the touch pad coming up gives you a warning...). One the sent me for free after warranty though.
- blew a speaker in week 2
- bluetooth and wifi didn't work together (I now swapped the chip)
- fan blades are very brittle (broke one accidentally when de-dusting and then took out an opposite one so it's correctly weighted)
- these case screws... Super short and mounted at an angle. Easy to screw in in the wrong angle and without lock tight you might loose the before you notice one is coming out.
- gforce card played dead for a few weeks.
- do not use USB-C for power in. Even with a dell branded dock I get system freezes. It's only fine to charge over night or while watching a bit of youtube.
Other than that that it's my daily driver since a few years though and quite alright...
Had another 13" xps at work and the matte version had auto backlight dimming when the screen showed dark content. Super frustrating for dark themes. Had to patch in a leaked fix to remove it (risking a brick) because support wouldn't hand out one.
Running NixOS on it.
I didn't mind much but people next to me would notice in meetings.
OpenBSD developers mostly use Thinkpads, so everything works - suspend, hibernation, wifi, camera, etc. Packages for firefox, chrome, and all the usual other open source software are just a pkg_add command away. Two commands and a reboot to upgrade the system and all installed apps a couple times a year.
It might not be the right OS if you are a gamer, or you gotta have the latest phone-app-thingy, but if you're a unix person and want a rock solid well organized and documented system that you can trust it's bliss.
I've stuck with pre-compiled packages, and that's as easy as can be. I've only needed the pkg_info, pkg_add, and pkg_delete commands. There's a syspatch command to pull down OS security updates and upgrade to new releases. After new releases the fw_update command updates any firmware packages, and pkg-add -ui updates all packages. The faq pages have more info on this, and a lot of other system setup stuff [0].
(Extra info: Packages are pre-compiled binaries from the openbsd ports collection [1]. This ports collection can be installed and used to build stuff from source, and more closely track updates. Each app has a sub-dir under the ports directory with a makefile to download source code and compile/install everything to the right place, handle dependencies, etc. Packages are so easy, and I've never needed to get involved with ports. I've used ports on freebsd and can appreciate the value of them, if someone were to need them.)
I don't have much first hand experience with openbsd containers. The system makes use of chroot [2] for daemons like httpd, running executables as a separate user restricted to a specified userland root directory, and I've played with this. There's also vmm [3], which can run openbsd and linux virtual machines. Apparently vmm allows for docker to run on openbsd [4].
[0] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html [1] https://openports.se/ [2] https://man.openbsd.org/chroot [3] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html [4] https://medium.com/@dave_voutila/docker-on-openbsd-6-1-curre...
I ask because I had the impression that openbsd was doing ok in this regard. I use it for development and running apps with a lot of concurrent processes and hadn't noticed any problems. These benchmarks [0] have it doing better than almost all linux distributions when it comes to compilation times (but I know benchmarks are not always as objective as they could be). My youtubes and media players run great :-)
It's been a while since I did any heavy networking, but I never had problems/surprises there as long as I spec'd out appropriate hardware, in particular the pf firewall and the hw accelerated ipsec and qos configs which I got pretty far into were outstanding, better than cisco hardware costing a lot more at the time.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=bsds-pho...
Edit: tbqh I haven't used openBSD in a couple years, so things might have (probably?) changed since then.
I got Thinkpad, I love a lot about it, it’s keyboard is supreme. Touchpad didn’t work well for me and I turned it off and use the nib.
Still for daily driver I use desktop and macbook air (m1).
The machine is super well built, ridiculously fast, silent (not “whisper silent”, actually “silent silent”) under any load, battery life is incredible.
It’s as big of a leap in laptop hardware as I’ve ever seen.
My job provides me with a not-awful HP EliteBook, and it’s less than a creaky and noisy toy in comparison.
The main thing I dislike about them is too many of their laptops come with 10-keys on the keyboard, with no option to not have it.
If you're not sure if you want a linux machine or not, I can't really comment since you know better than me how much this matters.
I’m pleased with just about every aspect of running Ubuntu on a dell XPS except that one.
Merely by omission, I'm guessing that these are not serious points of contention and any MacBook will do, either an M1 if you don't mind a few bumps or get it next upgrade cycle. If I were in that boat, an M1 Mac Mini would likely be it.
The only reason I'm not jumping on the M1 train is I'm die hard linux. I also prefer desktops and never work outside of a home/work office. So I can get the same/better performance with AMD Ryzen and not need to care so much about power/battery.
it's basically an dell xps13 but with all the ports you might need, and ram and disk that you can upgrade.
that machine really made me change my opinion about dell as a laptop vendor: you mostly have to look at the latitude line and you'll find sturdy and boring laptops that you can count on (without the flashy fancy things that are basically impossible to fix/replace if/when they break).
If only the latitude 7390 had the trackpoint... I'd throw my old thinkpad in the trashcan and I'd buy an identical unit for myself.
Coming from a thinkpad x1 extreme (which I still use on occasion), this machine blows it out of the water in every conceivable metric at a fraction of the price.