I prefer it since 1080p takes less resources to drive, therefore gets better battery life. On a 14" display, I think 1080p looks more than fine. If I want a hidpi display, I'll just dock to an external display.
My eyesight is not great. The higher resolution screen is wasted on me, and wastes computing / energy resources to drive it.
I enjoy gaming on my laptop, and prefer native resolution gaming.
I require a high refresh rate due to post-concussion syndrome. So sure, if that can be the case with a higher resolution that's fine, but that isn't the norm yet. (2021 seems to be the year for QHD 165Hz though!)
I'm in no way saying QHD or 4K isn't ideal for anyone. It's just silly to say that "this option I don't want is a non-starter" as if it applies to everyone.
Sometimes I wish there was the possibility to see the exact number of upvotes or downvotes a response got here in HN in order to settle the numbers of such opinions (pro and contra).
Not such a big deal because highdpi is finnicky in Linux in 2021 (as long as it is a high-quality panel). Lenovo has shipped some atrocious 1080 panels in the past.
Works great, if you happen to have resolution that is usable with integer scaling.
If you need fractional scaling, only native Wayland applications work well. X11 applications are going to be upscaled and look blurry. Today, Chrome, all Electron apps, Jetbrains tools still do not support Wayland, though at least for Chrome/Electron the support is on the way.
For me and my tired eyes, no laptop screen comes close to the real deal which is a large ultrawide monitor. So it might as well come with 1080p which has better battery life and no application scaling issues on Linux.
Most offices don't allow people to put pictures or personal effects on their hotel desks anymore so perhaps one could have a little LCD panel there displaying pictures of one's loved ones, or the cat not eating salad.
I'm left-handed and I'll take a built-in numpad any day. I punch in enough long numbers day-to-day to really enjoy having it, even if it's on the "wrong" side of the keyboard (and so it is with virtually every other keyboard out there with a built-in numpad).
I also already normally type with my keyboard slightly off-center on my desktop, so an asymmetrical laptop keyboard ain't really all that big of a deal. Even if I didn't, and insisted on a perfectly-centered typing experience, having an off-center screen is something that I've yet to actually really notice.
You put nothing, why do you assume if there is space it needs to be more keys in there? I bet they can even improve the structural rigidity by not having the numpad.
I question whether 4K on the average laptop screen size is worth the added load on the GPU (and so, lowered everyday performance and battery longevity). On big screens, sure, but at 13 inches? At that point you're stretching the limits of perceptibility, and given the other compromises you're already making to have a laptop instead of a desktop, it seems like a doubly silly one to add.
Well, my current laptop, a Dell XPS 13 has a resolution of 3840x2400 and its great! Yes, my normal use, I have things scaled/zoomed but for watching videos, its fantastic.
For normal use, 1440p is fine, but 1080p is too low for me. 4K is probably not necessary if its only used to watch videos. I probably should have flipped it and said: "give me 1440p, or even 4K"
Although one area where I find higher resolution is beneficial code editors, if I have enough pixels that I can have 3 vertical splits and have the text still look crisp, that really helps my development workflow.
On a 15" and above though, I wouldn't go lower than 4K personally.
Yes! If someone from system76 is listening to this thread, please, make a version without the numpad! That would be the case for me to buy one of these, but with a numpad it is a no.
How does it compare to Lenovo Thinkpad L15? As I understand there is no problem with running latest Linux on it, and currently I'm thinking about buying it (mostly Rails development + docker). Do you recommend any other machine?
I feel like battery life could be a challenge too, at 49 Wh. The M1 Macbooks have a 58 Wh battery, but they also benefit from being not-x86 and having better power management at the OS level. Dell XPS laptops with discrete graphics ship 97 Wh.
Why aren't there any bold laptop manufacturers? This is a 2021 laptop that uses USB-A primarily, a meh panel, and no particular standout design features. Why do I have to get a mac if I want actually good design?
System76 should take a risk and truly make an interesting laptop. leaving the standard, boring design to the big name companies.
I've grown to love my Dell XPS (with Linux). It definitely has some rough edges. Dell shipped what I consider a faulty machine. The trackpad is wobbly/bouncy. I had a tech come out to replace it, but he ended up having to send it to "the depot" due to a screw being sheared. I hadn't touched the screw. The depot returned it to me with a missing/broken case LED, unplugged speakers and one WiFi antenna that won't seat. Even still, the machine is beautiful. Even the fingerprint reader works in Linux. I use the heck out of it and battery life is quite good. Also, I upgraded my RAM to 32G and my SSD to 512G. This thing also has another M.2 slot just in case I want to put another SSD into it.
My xiaomi notebook looks a bit like a mac clone and as 2x USB-C ports and 2x USB-A ports. It is not without its problems, but if you want a reasonably priced laptop that looks like a mac I would say it is a pretty good choice.
I'd have to disagree. I bought the Mibook Pro a few years ago after it seemed to get quite good reviews, but it is an absolutely miserable machine to use
The iGPU has a hard-locked 64MB of RAM allocated to it, which means the Nvidia graphics chip is ALWAYS on, causing it to get maybe 2~ hours of battery life at best
The build quality is miserable, I ended up replacing all of the screws in the machine to make it more properly sturdy (which also fixed the case flex causing the fans to grind to a halt if you nudged the machine too harshly)
Linux support still isn't 100%. The Nvidia blob doesn't support GPU switching for what ever reason and Nouveau just causes kernel oopses
After suffering with it for so many years I finally bought an "MSI Modern 14" Ryzen laptop, which I'm moderately content with. I'll probably send the Mibook off to some people I know that work at Red Hat so they can at least improve its Linux support for those who still have it though
Not a "fan" of Macs but a fanless laptop without having to get 5 year old performance in return and the touch bar is still very rare outside Apple devices.
Agreed, although on that front it completely baffles me that they didn't release a Magic Keyboard Pro with TouchID and Touch Bar at most one release cycle after throwing the Touch Bar into laptops.
I find them completely useless and am ready for them to be gone, but it's like they didn't even try.
It’s fairly expensive to develop and pay for tooling on an entirely new notebook. It’s relatively inexpensive to start with a whitelabel design from Clevo or Tongfang instead and leverage the existing tooling and validation work.
Apple can design custom everything and has the economy of scale to justify it. The PC space is also more competitive, Apple managed to associate their brand with luxury and charge a huge premium for their hardware, a laptop with equivalent specs would struggle massively to sell at the same price when you could purchase similarly powerful laptops for half the cost that would run the same software.
At this point Apple can design any gimmicky piece of hardware, stick their logo on it, sell it for three times the price of equivalent third party products and still run out of stock on launch. You can't beat that.
It's been the case for a while though, and I know for a fact that Dell offers form factors very similar to MacBooks. But even then, the market is a lot more fragmented when Apple offers a full ecosystem of devices.
Which is a huge problem for the competition. I know that I can get just get a cheap Mac and it will still be fast, it will still have a great screen and the build quality will be higher than the majority of PC laptops.
I happen to like macOS, so it's not a huge issue, but if I want to get a laptop for Linux, then I need to go to a store to see the models. Otherwise I can't be sure if I'll like the screen, keyboard or overall look an feel. The minor price difference for an Apple product is acceptable, given that I know what I'll getting a usable laptop regardless of which model I pick.
Yet $1000 is cheaper than some phones from the same manufacturer. Which is, of course, an apples and oranges (pardon the pun) comparison. But boggles my mind, nevertheless.
Just before M1 it was hugely uncompetitive. Higher ended macs throttled thermally so bad that using more than browser with 10 tabs and Jetbrains IDE caused them to grind to a halt.
It depends on the products, for some of them I'm fairly sure it's well beyond that (their new headphones come to mind). For their macbooks you're almost certainly right though.
Yeah. I've said it before, if you do a like-for-like comparison (of notebooks, I've found this to be less true on their desktops) then their prices are often in line with other manufacturers. Every time I've bought a MBP (2007, 2009, 2012, 2017) I've done a comparison with non-Apple laptops and found that a spec-for-spec equivalent from most manufacturers is going to be roughly equivalent in price to Apple's (usually a range of about $300-400 on the prices, Apple being near the top but not always the top).
Now, if you spec out their Mac Pro, especially as it gets updated so infrequently, those get very out of line with competitor hardware quickly.
For SSD upgrade prices, it is actually more than a 100% markup compared to retail prices for the most premium Samsung PCIe SSDs on the market. Apple's markup is multiple hundreds of percent compared to mid-range PCIe SSDs on the market.
Retail prices already include higher profit margins than bulk order prices would include, which makes this markup even more egregious.
I calculated it the other day, and Apple is charging $0.52/GB for SSDs on their M1 MacBook Air.
Samsung's 980 Pro is under $0.20/GB for the 1TB model on Amazon right now. That is arguably one of the best SSDs on the market right now, and I'm fairly sure Samsung' 980 Pro is actually significantly better than the internal SSD that Apple is using on the M1 MacBook Air.
That means Apple is charging a 160% markup above retail price, minimum.
The Western Digital SN550 1TB PCIe SSD is priced at about $0.10/GB at retail on Amazon, which means Apple is charging over a 400% markup relative to the retail prices of that perfectly good SSD. Most users would not be able to tell the difference between the SN550 and the internal SSDs Apple is currently using.
I recognize that other OEMs can sometimes charge steep upgrade markups too... but Apple's prices for storage are personally annoying to me because the M1 MacBook Air seems reasonably priced until you get into the upgrades. I wanted to get more storage, but I'm not going to pay $0.52/GB for additional storage these days... I just don't find it reasonable.
Certainly. Computers are made of parts. Apple charges egregious prices for upgrades, some companies don’t. System76 is the focus of this whole discussion, and they charge extremely reasonable prices for SSD upgrades... not hundreds of percent markups.
Since we’re on the topic of System76, a fully upgraded Oryx Pro (except leaving the GPU at the base option) costs about half of what a fully upgraded 16” MBP costs (also leaving the GPU at the base option), while offering similar specs — $3158 vs $6000. The System76 chooses to go for a 144Hz panel instead of a HiDPI panel, but different people value different things. The System76 obviously has a better port selection (for most people), while obviously not being as sleek — but it’s not huge either, it’s reasonably thin and light. It’s more durable while not as shiny. It’s easy for people to pull out the “no true Scotsman” defense at this point, but it all depends on what the customer is looking for. It’s Apple’s fault if they don’t offer enough variety to meet the needs of their customers.
I’m sure I could dig into comparative analysis of other OEMs vs Apple and come up with other examples, but this one is easy enough.
Spec for spec, Apple charges much more than twice as much for many important upgrades... so a sufficiently upgraded Apple laptop can be more than twice as much, even if it’s often “only” a 70% markup or something. That doesn’t excuse charging egregious prices for storage. Customers want storage, and Apple withholds it unless customers want to pay a large ransom. They solder the SSDs so that customers cannot upgrade their own computers.
I own an M1 MacBook Air. I’m not some “Apple hater”, but their upgrade pricing is truly appalling, and for all their talk of environmental friendliness, their attempts to thwart aftermarket repair and upgrades significantly hinders the total potential lifetime of their products, which increases their environmental impact relative to what could be.
I bought the 256GB/16GB model, and that 256GB SSD is borderline too small for me to deal with, and I’m not even like an average user that would be attempting to store music and pictures on it. I’m almost exclusively using it for software dev and web browsing. I would swap out the SSD, but... that’s obviously not possible.
If I can’t make the 256GB of storage work long term, I think I would rather sell this thing and buy something else than give Apple $0.52/GB. The M1 is good... but it’s not priceless. My opinions are subject to change, of course.
>Since we’re on the topic of System76, a fully upgraded Oryx Pro (except leaving the GPU at the base option) costs about half of what a fully upgraded 16” MBP costs (also leaving the GPU at the base option), while offering similar specs — $3158 vs $6000.
Not sure where you're getting these numbers. Comparing like for like and maxing out the Oryx, and the Mac's processor, they both have 64GB RAM and a 4TB SSD. The price I'm getting for that Mac config is $4800 vs the $3168 that you mention. $6000 doubles the Mac's storage to an 8TB SSD, which the Oryx does not offer. 6K is indeed a lot, but how many PC laptops even offer an 8TB SSD at any price? I haven't seen many.
But I digress. That's roughly a 50% markup, which is indeed a lot. For the extra $1500 you get a much higher resolution display (2880 x 1800) with good color reproduction, much better build quality, macOS and the Mac software ecosystem, Thunderbolt ports, Mac trackpad and keyboard, etc. Maybe these things are not valuable to you! But it's not like you're not getting anything for that money. The products are not equivalent, even if their specs were the same on paper.
I own System76 products and Apple products, and have owned countless PC laptops in the past. I do the math regularly and know what I'm paying for with Apple stuff, and it's almost never a 70% markup. And Apple stuff has specs you just can't find in other products, like the high-res displays and high number of Thunderbolt ports. Which isn't to say it's perfect! I don't like the Touch Bar and would like an SD card reader and HDMI out. But in general, statements about the price inflation are overblown. It exists but it's not as bad as many people think.
I agree that I made a mistake on the storage capacity comparison, I was walking and looking things up on my phone and got briefly confused.
The rest of your points I’ve already addressed. More thunderbolt ports is actually bad for most users if it comes at the expense of ports they can actually use without a dongle. The build quality is not really any better... I’ve owned both as well, and I’ve also had a work MacBook Pro 15 with the butterfly keyboard. Until recently, Mac keyboards were the worst in the industry, including reliability. Now they’re decent, but nothing to write home about. Definitely not an advantage. Trackpads are what you make of them... Apple certainly makes good ones, but it’s not 2010 anymore. Every mid-to-high end laptop I’ve used in the last 5 years has had a good trackpad, but I still reach for a mouse even on my Macs.
I already addressed the display as well. It’s a trade off. Apple doesn’t offer high refresh rate displays on their laptops, which matter to some people. If they didn’t matter, Apple wouldn’t put them on their iPad Pro.
System76 used to offer 4K displays (optionally matte) on the Oryx Pro, and mine was exceptionally good! And that’s higher resolution than Apple uses, in addition to the wonderful matte effect cutting down on glare. I’m just guessing the massive ongoing part shortage has affected which displays they can actually acquire for the moment.
So yes, I agree you get different things with a Mac, but those things are unlikely to be worth 50% more to most people, with the exception of macOS itself... and that’s only valuable to people who like macOS or are literally required to use macOS.
> in general, statements about the price inflation are overblown. It exists but it's not as bad as many people think.
I started this conversation by pointing out the price inflation I care about the most: storage, and it’s on the order of a 400% markup. It’s extremely awful.
If Apple would be environmentally friendly and allow people to repair and upgrade their computers, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, because I’d have a 1TB SSD in my MacBook Air, and it would have cost me $100. If Apple would charge a healthy 100% profit margin, I would probably have paid them for the SSD... I’m just not willing to go to 400% markup.
Apple has basically always charged egregious upgrade prices, it didn’t start when they started soldering things down, so the small number of people like myself who would actually upgrade components should not be considered a threat to their profit margins... but even if most people did it, Apple should allow it because it’s the right thing to do long term, even if it impacts short term profits. Instead, they seem to be optimizing their products to eek out every last percentage point of profit. Which is understandable... it is a company, but it would be nice if they didn’t. They already have hundreds of billions of dollars of cash.
>If Apple would be environmentally friendly and allow people to repair and upgrade their computers, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, because I’d have a 1TB SSD in my MacBook Air, and it would have cost me $100.
I mean, yeah. This is the one thing that's basically inarguable. Their computers increasingly do not contain serviceable parts, except for the Mac Pro, which is absurdly expensive. I suspect they just prefer compactness and longer battery life to repairable devices. I have to admit this isn't something I care about very much because I don't upgrade my machines and I use them until they break, which is often around a decade with Macs. Because you have different preferences I can see how you'd find these changes upsetting.
The fact that paying those inflated prices after the initial purchase isn't an option is already enough to turn me away from buying any of them (or even the laptop itself).
I think it's more (and it's not just Apple playing this game) that the entry model/price is horrifically under-powered. It's there to hook you in on the price, and that's it. The rest of the pricing is then designed to pull you along the upgrade ratchet.
i.e. You've paid the absolutely necessary $249 to get the 512Gb... then it's only $200 to get an extra 512Gb. Once you've overcome that first hurdle, the 2nd looks almost good value.
Microsoft experimented with bold ideas with their surface series. They have fantastic displays (3:2, 4K, multi touch), keyboards, and touchpads. But they have the same issues as Apple’s devices, you cannot open the machine and change components, and the I/O are a bit limited (USB 3, SD, USB-C, propriety port for charging).
System76 is probably one of the least bold laptop manufacturers because they can't afford to be. As other comments have noted, much of their hardware are largely rebadged devices from other manufacturers such as Clevo, because the main selling point of System76 appears to be the software experience and hardware integration.
If you want great design that matches a Mac (overall, better in some areas, worse in others), look at the flagship ThinkPad models, Microsoft Surface devices, etc. There are many laptops that have "standout design features" such as convertible designs, novel display and input options including pen-and-touch, etc. If anything, I think Macs lag behind in these innovations, although they have other benefits.
hmm - aren't there Eluktronics laptops (https://www.eluktronics.com/laptops/) which also uses some rebraded chasis for newest Ryzen laptops? Even if you are forced to use rebranded chasis - i think there are better options out there. The pangolin model looks pretty meh tbh.
I bought an innovative new convertible tablet from HP in 2008. I now appreciate Apple's hesitancy to implement innovative designs before they're ready for prime-time. Sometimes, quality of execution is more innovative than the concept.
I still have a vintage 2010 HP TouchSmart tm2 sitting around. It was certainly an early execution of the convertible idea, and I appreciate it for that. Doesn't stop me from also appreciating my modern Surface Book 2 and Dell XPS 13, though.
Anyway, that's basically the creation myth of the iPhone, no? That it supposedly was basically iterated on for quite a few years before the technology got to the point where a high-quality execution was allowed. I also had Windows Mobile smartphones and remember the iPhone releasing. I didn't recognize or appreciate that difference then.
I also had WM phones at the time of the iPhone release. Most WM users at the time, myself included, were power-users who criticized the iPhone for a lack of features and never actually bought one. I couldn't install my network scanning app, connect to exchange, or even copy/paste with the iPhone, so what was the point?
Turns out I was entirely wrong: Apple wasn't positioning this phone for IT/business professionals for corporate use. They were building a consumer product. The feature set they were prioritizing was entirely counter-intuitive from my perspective. The features that I thought were gimmicks at the time ended up being the features that made it successful: natural multi-touch input, a (then) gigantic screen, and a bare-bones UI/UX. It had nothing that I wanted or needed, but it had everything that they needed to open up the market to millions of people who weren't using HTC bricks on their Verizon corporate plan that their IT admin configured for them.
Just search "windows mobile" on YouTube and look back at the awful (but feature filled!) experiences we used to think was awesome. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXDgsZvSTP8
Reminds me of this medium post [1]. Apple might make it look easy but all those little things they do are really difficult and require massive scale to get at a reasonable cost.
* in general, users are pretty low-discretion, which makes it hard to meaningfully differentiate your product
* deeply entrenched competition (what % of laptops are sold at best buy/etc?)
* the users who are high-discretion are going to be extremely demanding users. They're going to nitpick over small details in both hardware and software. And they're probably going to be installing their own OS (or at least reinstalling the existing one) and will generally be more demanding of both product design and support. Also, they probably have the tech skills to correctly point the finger at you when it's your fault. Whereas less discerning users might just go "Ugh bill gates!"
Doesn't help that the "linux laptop" niche was probably a big part of this "niche laptop" market segment and Dell and Lenovo are both kinda warming back up to that niche. e.g. the newest XPS's all work great on (latest kernel) linux.
The XPS 13 competes directly with the mac in terms of (familiar but) industrial design, standout display and inner design (with the white carbon fiber) and USB-C ports for a lifetime. Stating it first, because its the most obvious competitor.
The Razer, Asus, HP and Surface flagships have clear standout designs and similar features.
The only 2 laptops that are purposely boring are the Thinkpad and System76, because they seem to cater to people who need them as work machines, first and foremost. (LG Gram is not a flagship)
I'm on my 2nd XPS 13. I switched to it and linux after being severely impacted by the butterfly keyboard (i.e. having to fly to a different country to get it repaired, only to have it break again a few months later).
I don't _hate_ the XPS 13, but I wouldn't recommend it and I probably won't be getting a 3rd one (unless they change).
The build quality just isn't there. First of all, the flexible chassis is annoying. If I pick it up on the side with one hand, it's likely to flex enough to trigger a trackpad click. Secondly, while it's pretty quiet, it does get rather hot. Third, the trackpad and mouse aren't Macbook-quality (butterfly keyboard aside). In my first one, the trackpad and battery had to be replaced. The keyboard on my current one (9300) has very mild issues (I think they reduced the travel distance and it, like butterfly, is somewhat susceptible to dust/dirt)
Not sure what I'll replace it with. Will see how the reviews for the Framework laptop are.
Thinkpad X and T series laptops are excellent machines. They’re all in the process of getting at least a 2k display, 11th gen intel chips (or amd in the case of T and X13), etc etc
My Huawei Matebook Pro is most of what I wanted in that space. 3000x2000 screen, USB-A on one side and C on the other, all day battery, nvme instead of soldered in SSD.
They have to take whatever designs are coming out of China and can only make minor adjustments to the specs.
Apple has huge volume, big margins a very tight supply chain and a mountain of cash in tax havens. They have a lot more options.
If a seller like System 76 adds too much margin on their models people will buy a Clevo rebadged by some other seller which is a shame because System76 are adding value with their firmware and OS tweaks.
I am looking forward to the day when a company like System76 can release their own designs but without being in Apples position of fleecing customers for music, video, apps, cloud, mobile, tablets etc in a closed ecosystem it might be a long time coming.
I have owned multiple S76 machines - the machine was built by Clio? The guts were good, but the case was chintsy.
I had four of these laptops - and on ALL 4 they would have screws come loose and fall out inside the case. You could hear it rattling around when you turned the machine. Two of them had one type of connector for the screen and the other two had a different connector - One got fried and on the other I broke the screen on - so I couldn't harvest parts from one to the other.
S76 wanted $90 for a new charger after one of mine failed.
I have an HP Omen laptop as my primary machine now - here is what is cool:
I had an HP Omen and it failed to power on one day - so I contacted support and they had me send them the machine - instead of fixing it, they sent me a brand new Omen which was way better than the failed unit. The design is super elegant, and it has dual NVME slots, so I have dual drives in it.
The screen is matte so no glossy reflections like my macbooks have...
Yeah - I think I'll stick with Omens for the foreseeable future. HP's support was FANTASTIC.
When my macbook pro caught fire in my sleep and nearly killed me (it was laying on my bed and I fell asleep watching a movie and the machine caught fire - something that that model was recalled for) I took it to Apple's main store in San Francisco - and they kept it for two months "analyzing it" then came back and told me that even though it was a safety issue and the machine was under recall for CATCHING FIRE, they found that one of my moisture sensors had been triggered and therefore, they were not going to replace, fix or help me.
(I had spilled a small bit of water on the keyboard many month prior to the machine catching fire)
Then they tried to sell me a new machine, or have them "replace the machine for $1,500"
A total joke. Ill never buy another apple machine nor a s76 machine again.
HP support is AMAZING.
Also - When HP bought Compaq - we had a bunch of Compaq/HP servers back in 1998 - and the support back then on those servers was top notch - and the HW design was as well. I used to rebuild those servers in minutes in the literal dark.
All the Sun servers we had, like the 650s would bitch if their case was even slightly off center and would refuse to boot.
I had good experiences with System76 support. I've bought 2 laptops off of eBay and had no problem getting support even though I wasn't the original owner since the original owner bought the 2 year support package. If I had a loose screw I would have removed the case and found it. They're reasonably able to diy and your warrant isn't voided just because you replaced the RAM. Apple support has gotten horrible based upon anecdotal experiences friends and family have had. The build quality isn't the greatest but having everything work well under Linux and be supported is a good thing. I gifted my Oryx Pro to my step-kid who uses it to play games etc. Linux battery/power management has never been great as this isn't the focus of most kernel developers and there is a lot of microcode optimizations that might be possible.
I opened them up. I spoke to S76 support and they charged me $9 for a new screw kit...
I am quite familiar with breaking down/working on all types of machines...
they had lock-tight paint on the screws, which didnt work.
and the sad thing was that the connector type between the two broken machines had changed, even though they were the same model "Gazelle" - they are also a super pain in the ass to work on. The screen connector requires you to basically dismantle the entire machine...
Obviously this machine was a white-label Clio machine, and S76 has more recently started designing their own machines (supposedly - so I dont know how much of that design is in-house vs them spec'ing things out to other design services...
Can anyone else back this up? Has HP changed? I've sworn off HP products (both enterprise and consumer) because of their terrible customer service and documentation. Dell/Lenovo always offer something very similar in price and performance, and their enterprise support is fine to great.
I might have just hit the HP Support Jackpot. But it was hands down the best experience I have had between machine manufacturers - HP/Sun/S76/Dell/Apple etc...
I was completely dumbfounded when HP just said "we are going to send you a new machine, at no cost, please pick from this list...
And I picked this dope Omen machine and when I opened it up to look at the guts and put in a second SSD, I was taken aback by the elegant symmetry of the design. The only downside is that even though the sound is "bang & olufsen" - its a bit too quiet.
However, the support guy on my case was dope, and I love this machine
Yes it is amazing, EVEN for the lower end E series.
I bought one, and didn't like the keyboard. Send to a relative overseas. Months later the Mobo died a few weeks under warranty. Called HP and told i was overseas. They provided a local support number. ship by local post. upgraded new mobo. no charge.
This was a non-business $300ish laptop.
sadly, their shopping experience is abysmal like every other PC manufacturer :(
I'm typing this on a 7 or 8 year old s76 Gazelle. It was my primary work and personal machine for 3 or 4 years and has been my primary personal machine since. I did replace the original drive with an SSD, and I think I may need to replace the fans---they're getting loud. Hardware- and build-quality-wise, I've never had any problems. (Well, ok, I killed one of the USB ports. Probably broke some of the connections.)
The one problem I have had is with the NVidia graphics, which have never worked properly. (I've got graphics acceleration disabled now.) Either it wouldn't go to sleep, or the graphics wouldn't wake up. The last straw was when I got those problems beaten into a standstill, and Chrome started somehow overriding my window manager and keeping the (accelerated) Chrome window front and center, minus WM decorations.
Sure, it's a generic Clio or something, but I've been very impressed. Never had much love for HP, though.
A Legion 5 will have an Nvidia dGPU, so you have to decide if you want to run PRIME or something else and see how the external monitor outputs are muxed if that's important to you.
Would like to see more specifics than just "AMD Radeon Graphics".
That could mean literally anything from Intel integrated level performance, to a proper dedicated GPU, though for the price here I'm guessing on the former ...
You are unlikely to see dedicated graphics paired with a U-series processor in most cases. (There are exceptions, but you'll see the dedicated graphics card specified in those cases.)
I don't want to advertise, so I'll just say - you can go to a big computer/hardware seller website and search for laptops with nvidia graphics cards. You can get a laptop with a GTX 1650 for $700, which has 3x the performance.
The one thing that stops me from getting a Librem 14 is the utterly hateful decision to have a tiny right-shift key to the right of the up arrow. Like seriously wtf Purism?
Oddly enough, I almost never hit the right shift key. I touch type pretty fast, but the left pinky does a lot of work. I suppose it comes from CAD stuff and (let's be honest) WASD gaming where my left hand is on the keyboard and right hand is on the mouse.
But I totally agree: Input and output to the user (keyboard, trackpoint/mouse buttons/touchpad/screen) are of critical importance. I can be really effective on a decade-old Thinkpad (with the IPS display mod!) and woefully out-of-date processor, but if it takes too long to adjust to the keyboard I'll be frustrated every time I have to use it.
I was/am thinkpad user also.
I have migrated to desktops.
They are cheap enough to have one at the office and one at home.
Sure the above wont work for everybody, but if you are like me, you unpacked the laptop at home and at work each day at exactly the same space, where all the cables and extra monitors were.
I used to use laptop in coffee shops and outdoors, but nowadays between phone, and tablets (wel phone and kindle in my case) I almost never feel the need.
Buy silent box, mobo for overclocking and underclock it for extra silence, and throw the box under the table.
Still have my laptop, but its mostly just "backup" and in case I travel somewhere, but honestly I don't care about it as much
The downside with this is extra effort to keep them in sync. Depending on what you do, syncing can be easy (or even trivial if you do everything remote anyway) or more annoying.
My main reason to go for a laptop was that I wanted to continue coding where I left off and not have to worry about differing settings and system configuration.
3 machines Syncthing setup between desktop, laptop and a cloud instance in case laptop wasn't on to sync and the desktop is off for some reason.
It takes about 15s from connecting the laptop to the internet to having the files synced to it. Just need to remember to save files in emacs.
Setting up Syncthing in the cloud was a challenge, had to tunnel the web-ui with ssh port forwarding.
I do all my development in VSCode, and symlink my settings to a git repo. VSCode really let's you customize a lot of stuff, and if you lean into it as your development environment, you get awesome cross platform support.
That same git repo has scripts that apply some of my system configurations, and a readme to walk me through the GUI stuff I have to do.
My first few setups were hard. I had to debug some weird issues on my Linux install. (Not sleeping properly, remapping some keyboard keys).
But now I've got it cased. I setup 3 machines (2 Linux, 1 windows) over the past couple days and all are essentially equal development experience now. Was super fast to setup l. If your going the Linux route, make a repo where you record all the tweaks your making so you can redo them if you need to on a new machine.
It's shitty the first time, but now I know I can buy any new machine and have it ready to rip in mere minutes. With my custom keyboard layout (home, end, pageup, pagedown, alt, cntrl, alt+tab), my custom VSCode hotkeys, my ssh key identity management, my terminal font and themes, my system hotkeys (moving windows around and switching workspaces). Now that I've got all this setup, it feels great. Feels very fluid on all 3 machines.
I too went desktop route. Built what I want - including lots of ECC memory. I too have a laptop for backup and travel (and a Chromebook used as RDP client).
Sync isn't an issue. All work is on VMs, and they get backed up every day to my Synology.
My backup laptop is a 6 year old Thinkpad, which hasn't been out of it's bag in over a year.
With the quality of networks these days it may pay off to just have a single beefy desktop at work or home and a very simple desktop in the other location that you just use to remote in to the first. Keeps the environment consistent over time and even allows leaving long running computations running and picking them up later. Two remote stations and a headless server in a rack somewhere may even be better. No worries about noise and cooling.
>>>*laptop at home and at work each day at exactly __the same space__, where all the cables and extra monitors were.*
Nope. Actually, just like with my phone chargers, I like to have a laptop charger in all the spaces I like to compute.. I like to have a charger in my bedroom, my living room and in the garage.
I used to have this for all my machines - though I now have a new HP Omen (bad ass machine) - but I only have one charger for it currently.
I havent touched my ipad in a really long time.
But here is a tip - this super light and super cheep USB screen is AMAZING to have with a laptop:
(This thing was $69 when I bought it - but its now $99 but still - a USB only monitor is fantastic.
What I do, is I make it the top monitor - and I have this TV Tray stand that is at the perfect level for me to have my laptop on my lap, a tray or a TV tray, and then I have the AOC monitor on this stand and I just move up to click on that mon...
And this is dope because during this pandemic, I am trying to take every free training I can get my digital hands around.
So I have the training vid on the top screen and then I can use whatever program(s) I need on the laptop...
Blender courses are a good example of how this works great. The point is to have the two screens stacked vertically so that you only move your eyes up and down and dont have to turn your neck...
i just keep my personal dot files in git, not system config.
Systems are slightly different, at work i have two 27 inch monitors and at home i have one 30 inch, and I do play some paradox games on home computer on ocasion
Thanks for sharing this, it looks outright incredible. I love my x201, but it's starting to feel a little long in the tooth these days... I may end up getting one of these. What's the battery life like?
I can typically get 4-6 hours with an OEM x201 battery? I really don't try to max out the battery though. It really depends on your usecase as well, as I don't do anything too harsh with it.
I have an x200 as well, so if I was really worried I could just carry a spare battery.
I'm on the same boat as you: my ideal laptop would be an x220/x230 on the outside with a 1440p display and a modern CPU on the inside.
I can't understand why Thinkpads are moving away from this absolutely perfect design in the name of... slickness?
Why are laptops with a minimal (or non-existing) touchpad so difficult to find? Once you start using the trackpoint your wrists feel incredibly relaxed at all times.
Why do so few vendors offer RJ45 ports? When in the lab, I find my self needing one almost daily.
Why this trend of including keyboards with shorter and shorter travel distance?
There was a campaign to bring attention to all these details a few years ago which (surprisingly!) resulted in Lenovo releasing the "Thinkpad 25 anniversary edition" [1] which ticked most (but not all) of my boxes and which is unfortunately no longer available.
Do people really prefer the new design trends? Am I out of touch with reality?
The X1 nano is the same width and height as a X220 but half the thickness and significantly lighter. The X13 is very close to that too on the lower end. What would you change in those?
Having been a user of the old X lines throughout the years the current X/T and X1 lines seem like a definite improvement to me. And I also use the trackpoint exclusively.
Have been using an X1 Nano for a few weeks now and so far it's been quite nice. Light as a feather, decent keyboard/trackpoint/trackpad, reasonably battery life, and the 16:10 screen ratio works so much better on this size than 16:9.
Feels quite well built despite the low weight, too. It doesn't sacrifice on solidness to achieve its weight.
The X1 Nano seems like a great buy. I think I will hold out for 9th gen X1 Carbons to drop in price, however, because I want to bump up the RAM to 32gb and keep the laptop for a long time, lessen the chance of my workloads outgrowing the machine. Or I will wait for the T series to get the 11th gen Intel chips and 16:10 screen
Plus the extra battery life in the Carbon. But the X1 Nano beats my 2020 intel macbook air in battery life from the benchmarks I've seen, which could be longer I have not found lacking
Yeah I made the same consideration. Carbon G9 has some distinct advantages but I needed the laptop sooner than later (who knows how long it'll take the G9 to come down to reasonable prices in the current environment) so I went ahead and bought the Nano.
I own both the x230 and the x395 (which is, externally, almost the same as the x13) and I can definitely feel a difference when typing on the much more comfortable x230.
It's mainly due to two factors: 1) thanks to having a very small touchpad, the keyboard is closer to the edge and I feel much less strain on the lower part of the arm, near my wrists, which becomes more apparent after long coding sessions; and 2) the key travel is much longer and typing feels "better" (I make far less mistakes).
Also, because the x395 is almost half the thickness, they could not fit a bigger battery (which is definitely my main complaint on these newer machines).
Don't get me wrong, the "X" series is great and I will probably get the latest version when I need a replacement *but* I'm sad they make these sacrifices in the name of "design".
I'm guessing that because laptops are portable machines, almost nobody ever uses the network port and if you need one, you can use an adapter with the USB port.
They come close in number of ports and battery life *but* they still have an excessively big touchpad, don't have a 13 inch version and start at 1.7 kilos (which makes them less than ideal for carrying around).
But I agree they are the very nice machines and we keep a bunch of them in the lab.
I think there is definitely space to at least offer some SKUs with all that, albeit at a high markup (kinda like the Mac Pro).
However I think that yes, most people (including me) prefer the new to the old. Eg.: I dislike full keyboards because it shifts my hands to a side and moves the mouse further away. I tried track points but I find touchpads superior. I don’t need an RJ45 because even if I wanted to use it, I’d much rather have it on a USB-C dongle with pass through power, so I only have one cable to disconnect when moving around. And call me crazy, even though I use a mechanical external keyboard most of the time, I actually like typing on the butterfly keyboard more than on other laptop keyboards I have and had.
The X220 is nowhere near an "absolutely perfect" design, it's way too wide. I still use one as my daily driver, but come on. The screen bezels are huge, the keyboard stretched to fill its wide footprint, and the power plug juts out the back where it gets stressed against the floor in any cross-legged, or other tilted back usage setting.
The X61s was far closer to an absolutely perfect design, it just needed less plastic in the chassis. Things started going downhill with the X201s in the transition to wide aspect ratio displays, and X220/X230 arrived at full retard on that trajectory.
You are completely right. The X61s is a better design (I happen to own one too!), I completely forgot about it as, due to its much slower CPU, I must have put it away somewhere in the attic many years ago :)
I honestly love overhearing you discuss your perfect computers, because it doesn't seem impossible that you might get your wish! One really interesting possibility is to recycle the X61s chassis and use modern PCBs, chips, and peripherals to get you what you want. Another possibility is the creation of a PC ecosystem similar to the "Red Camera System" where yes, your m2 module costs $5k instead of $500, but it it comes in a machined aluminum module that fits perfectly with the rest of your tricked out customized laptop.
Likelihood of people actually using products they buy is overestimated, I think.
Lots of games on Steam has achievements for extremely simple tasks, such as launching the game for the first time or playing it for five minutes, and popularity of those is typically around 82.5% and 75% respectively among audiences for most popular titles.
IOW, 17.5% of PC game enthusiasts pay for a game and immediately put it on a shelf and don’t even double click on the icon. 25% reaches past the loading screen. Of all purchasers, maybe 10% reaches the final boss or end of the storyline. Potentially less.
A person who has issues with a mainstream laptop for its lack of an Ethernet port few years into ownership, who knows how many of those exist in the whole world?
I had the same problem. As lenovo seems set on making thinkpads more like macbooks I just embraced it and got the m1 macbook air instead of another thinkpad. It’s amazing, as long as I don’t need to repair it.
I've been looking around for a good linux laptop dev machine and am starting to resolve around the idea of having multiple desktops. It's cheaper with better support for replacing parts as well as linux.
The laptop market churns way too much for my liking and I feel like the second I move away from my macbook pro (work) I'm going to be disappointed with the quality.
When it comes to development, my goal is to be able to ssh into my linux box and use that for most development (tmux + vim). That plus ZeroTier and I now have access to my dev machine from wherever.
Even on large codebases written in Typescript, vim + plugins are "good enough."
macbook pro + live inside an ssh terminal seems to be working well enough for me.
The closest I came was my XPS 15 9560. The build quality and hardware was excellent. i5 + GTX 1050 + 8GB RAM + 256 GB NVME + Thunderbolt. Linux support was phenomenal, especially on a rolling release. After about 18 months of owning it, I upgraded the memory to 16GB and storage to 1 TB without any problems. Unfortunately, I ran into a few issues trying to use it as a work and home machine.
1) Mixed DPI is insanely bad on Linux, and that issue is amplified if you have Nvidia hardware. At least as of last month, Wayland and XWayland are basically unusable with Nvidia. Since the laptop screen is 4k, but I was using a Thunderbolt dock plugged into 2x1080p monitors, I'd have to turn off display scaling on the laptop, and, because I was stuck on X11 because Nvidia, I'd have to restart the laptop for the scaling change to take effect.
2) There was no Thunderbolt dock support for unlocking full disk encryption, so if you wanted FDE, you either had to unplug the laptop from the dock, open it, type the password and plug it back in every time you turn the laptop on, or just not used a Thunderbolt dock. This wouldn't be a big deal except I was restarting the laptop frequently when changing pretty much any display parameter.
3) There was no clear best practice for managing switchable graphics. There are options like Bumblebee that I never really figured out if they were working properly - especially for games. Then, Nvidia supposedly added a "primus-run" feature to the driver, but again, it seemed to just not work. Eventually I settled on "prime-select" but that involves rebooting every time you switch.
4) Selecting the Nvidia graphics disabled on-board audio. I had to either use USB or Bluetooth. I never figured this out despite countless hours of messing around with alsamixer. My best guess is that it was trying to direct everything over the HDMI out even though that wasn't plugged in. The Intel drivers were loaded, just every time I selected the Nvidia chip, the audio devices would disappear.
In the end, I settled on picking up an Acer Aspire refurbished from eBay. It has an i5 10400, 12GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD. I put a 1050 Ti in it without any problems. The total system ran me $500. It's much nicer. So the moral of the story is for me, if you do go Linux laptop, avoid Nvidia like the plague.
Unfortunately, I need CUDA for work. However, with a desktop and static resolution (not changing from laptop 4k to dock 1080p all the time) I can comfortably use X11, and without power management issues (no battery on desktop) I don't have to switch between Nvidia and integrated graphics.
>4) Selecting the Nvidia graphics disabled on-board audio. I had to either use USB or Bluetooth. I never figured this out despite countless hours of messing around with alsamixer. My best guess is that it was trying to direct everything over the HDMI out even though that wasn't plugged in. The Intel drivers were loaded, just every time I selected the Nvidia chip, the audio devices would disappear.
Try sudo alsactl restore
I have a Dell G5 with Nvidia RTX and my headphones do not work when I start it
Took me a few months of investigation, but that alsactl command fixes it in 90% of situations
I would cry tears of joy to get a laptop with mouse buttons. Trackpad gestures are a gimmick and so much harder to user than buttons. Apple did it to be "bold" and everyone copied them.
Apple has only ever shipped single-button mice with their computers, so turning the whole trackpad into that button on their laptops was a pretty simple evolution. Gestures came much later.
I moved from Macbook to a ThinkPad (trackpoint+trackpad+mouse buttons+trackpad buttons).
I never used gestures. But I seriously miss inertia scrolling. You never realize how much a pain in the ass it is scrolling web pages until you don't have it. Firefox has it, but you have to turn on an environment variable to get it and it feels a bit weird to me. Chrome does not have it all on Linux. And the way they are implementing it means that every app has to reimplement inertia scrolling on its own. Sigh. At least you can hold down the middle mouse and use the trackpoint to swiftly scroll.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but this is just when you scroll, release your fingers, and it slows to a stop instead of stopping instantly, right? I have that out of the box here on Linux. Firefox + X + touchpad with the synaptics driver.
I had thought this was what "Use smooth scrolling" did it in the Firefox preferences.
Edit: I also just checked and I have this in my terminal (Konsole), text editor (KWrite), and PDF viewer (Okular) so this is at the very least not a Firefox only thing. It feels exactly the same in each application. I bet it's a feature of the touchpad driver.
This is one of the reasons I still enjoy using my old XPS. The buttons are great: nice deep solid clicks. Even doing stuff like dragging windows around is so much better than on a touchpad-only design. (I've used Macbooks with the old "hinge" style touchpad, and they're even worse than using a double-tap-and-drag gesture, just because of the force needed to keep the button pressed.)
Given the number of people these days who don't even own a desktop, I don't understand why mouse buttons aren't the standard. With the XPS I can even play casual games while sitting on the couch. No need to move to a desk and dig a corded mouse of the drawer!
It's worse than you think: They are somewhat hamstrung in their hardware decisions by the current offerings from those Apple/Ultrabook chasing OEMs, but in this case they jumped the shark entirely and removed the 2.5" drive caddy.
The nearly identical Clevo NL51RU/NL50RU [1] has a 2.5" drive caddy but a 36 Wh battery. Take a look at the internal photo of the System76 unit at [2]. It's the same laptop. Heck, they didn't even bother removing the boss and brass insert for the 2.5" drive retaining screw by the left speaker.
System76 is not an OEM, they whitelabel and have tweaks made to Clevo/Sager laptops. I think they do a great service to the Linux community with PopOS and driver development/compatibility to make those into machines where Linux "just works" out of the box, don't get me wrong.
This obsession with thin-and-light goes completely counter to the whole point of "Our laptops’ guts are fully accessible!". They say they've got a tactile keyboard, to fit in 20mm thin right on top of the heat sink for the high-power Ryzen processor and discrete graphics I think I'm pretty safe in assuming it's a pathetic <1mm key-travel scissor unit.
1" thick or more is not too much. You could fit in all the ports, as well as an 80 Wh battery, and cooling to run at boost frequencies for more than 20ms. You don't have to match the dimensions of a Macbook Air and be able to slice tomatoes with the wrist rest.
I agree with your general sentiment. (He says typing on his Dell XPS 13...) But it also seems to me that ditching a drive bay to get a bigger battery is the definition of a design decision and not in any way jumping the shark.
I think it depends a lot on an individual's needs. Like in my case, a recent laptop purchasing decision revolved around qualities that make a laptop particularly good at being a laptop — that is, high portability, low/no noise, little/no heat. Power and ports were a cherry on top because I already have another machine that fills those needs.
In that situation, 1" isn't necessarily too thick, but it is negatively impacting its functionality as a laptop, if only because added thickness implies added weight (especially for sizes larger than 13").
With that said, ultraportables shouldn't exist at the cost of models more oriented toward power and flexibility… they should be an option alongside more traditional laptops.
And is there anything as enduring and resistant as the thinkpads?
I accidentally spilled a glass of water on my old thinkpad w, and all I had to do was to replace the keyboard (happened twice). It also helped that I could find spare part easily online. Would it be possible with lesser-know brands? It also fell several time on the ground but never broke anything.
I'm honestly very interested to know if there are laptops as durable as thinkpads.
I don't understand the appeal for System76. It seems grossly overpriced. Is it simply because they install Linux for you? You can find the same processor with much better specs for cheaper on Amazon or Costco.
With system 76 you get not just the processor, but also the other parts. You know System 76 didn't change network interfaces to something new with no linux drivers mid stream. Or Wifi, USB chipset, some BIOS, or one of the many other non-processor parts that manufacture change all the time. If there are drivers the substitution doesn't matter to anyone, but often there are no linux drivers for 3-6 months (best case - meaning that it isn't hard to write the driver, in the worst case linux will never get a driver).
Note that for the above substitutions there often is no part number change so you have no way of knowing if the amazon/costco model will work even if it works for someone else.
Costco list the model and the manufacturer provides all the information about the chips on their website. If you're running a distro with a 2 year old kernel then you may have issues, but I run Arch so it works flawless. I just got a Ryzen 4600 on Costco for $429 and everything works great.
Not everyone runs Arch or a distro with anywhere near the newest kernel. Not everyone feels like digging for posts online that show what wifi/ethernet/etc chipset a laptop is using so they know beforehand whether or not its going to be a pain in a more LTS minded distro.
Pro-tip from an ex-university sysadmin: beware getting consumer-grade machines, and never, ever, get them if you are buying in bulk. The specs will probably all be similar, but the individual parts will be whatever was in the bin when the chassis came down the line, which means whatever was cheapest that day. Even if you get lucky and have drivers for everything, supporting 10 machines with 10 different configurations is 10 times harder than supporting hundreds of machines with one configuration.
It is all set up and chosen to work out of the box. I have a limited number of hours in my life, and figuring out the right combination of hardware to run a Linux box correctly is not something I'm going to bother spending them on.
I certainly paid a bit extra for my Thelio, but it's incredibly cute on my desk (in a NeXTcube kind of way) and I didn't have to worry about finding the right permutation of parts to get everything up and running.
I'm sure I likely could have purchased and assembled the components myself and found a more spartan case and all that, but it felt a bit like Christmas using it for the first while.
Laptops with offset keyboards are difficult for me to deal with. The keyboards qwerty (or whatever layout) section should really be centered under the screen
HDMI is less hassle. Everything comes with a HDMI port these days, but a DP port is still more of a proper full Computer Monitor(tm) feature. My work just installed a whole bunch of projectors that have HDMI and VGA as input options. I have no idea where they found them.
Of course sometimes the HDMI fails due to DRM nonsense, so that's also an issue.
I think HDMI only exists because HDMI cartel keeps pushing it for patents profits. There is no real need for it because DP is much better. But since they make HDMI only equipment, we are still stuck with it.
And personally, I had a lot of problems with HDMI in the past. Unlike with DP.
Theoretically some DRM content should refuse to play at full resolution on DP connected displays due to the lack of DRM on the cable. I've never tested this myself, but you often see requirements for things like Blu-Ray players that you have to be running a late model Intel chip, on a supported motherboard, on Windows 10, over HDMI to a supported monitor. Get anything wrong and you've got a 720p picture or a black box.
It doesn't look like there is a Thunderbolt port ( a 40 GBPS port ). I recall reading that it has something to do with it working on Intel only hardware.
But whatever the case is, lack of Thunderbolt is unfortunately a deal breaker. I've moved on to unifying all my docks and power chords to only be Thunderbolt. It's unfortunate because the Ryzen chipsets are clearly getting to be superior from a price/performance point of view.
EDIT: I am writing this as someone who supports System76, and has only ran Linux professionally and at home for the last 10 years.
USB Type-C is a connector shape, used by both USB and Thunderbolt. So people saying they want thunderbolt and you saying they should want USB Type-C doesn't make much sense.
Imagine someone in 2001 saying they are disappointed with new computers being released without USB 2.0 (i.e. still using USB 1.1), and you replying that things should be based on Type-A. Both USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 used Type-A connectors. The shape is unrelated to the protocol/speed/etc.
The lack of Thunderbold has nothing to do with Intel.
Apparently AMD has not supplied hardware partners with any reference designs implementing it. If you do it then it would be up to you to come up with your own design implementation.
There is one desktop Ryzen board that supports Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt aka USB 4 (I think?) can be added to AMD systems but so far I've only seen one AMD desktop motherboard introduce this option. So far it doesn't look good for 2021... maybe next year?!
It's complicated. Thunderbolt 1/2/3 were all open-ish, but required intel's chip. Which was alright at the time - AMD didn't have anything competitive in mid to high-end market anyway. Thunderbolt 3 later became royalty-free, but with mandatory certification by intel.
Around January 2020 vendors are able to make their own controllers and submit them for certification. AMD doesn't have any. Intel's controllers don't have an embedded version for sale.
Thunderbold is generally not available on AMD systems.
Several reasons.
a) Intel wants licensing cash for allowing you to use it
b) It does not actually add that much to USB. You want to attach monitors? Non-Thunderbolt USB can do that. You want to attach storage? Non-Thunderbolt USB can do that. Networking? Charge your device? USB can do all that.
The remaining selling point of Thunderbolt is that you can attach an external graphics card over it. There are external USB graphics solutions, too, but they can't really compete if you plan to do high perf 3d graphics over it.
However this selling point is also the Achilles heel of Thunderbold. It exposes PCIe to devices outside the device, allowing direct memory access over it. This can be partially mitigated if the OS and all drivers cooperate and are really well written (for example not expose a memory page that contains other stuff as well).
But bottom line? I actually view this as an AMD advantage.
It's a bit like Firewire was. a) it cost licensing money and b) it introduced a similar security issue while c) not actually delivering that much of an advantage over USB unless you are part of a certain niche.
In my opinion, though I don't actually have this option, the killer use case for Thunderbolt (or USB 4) is sufficient bandwidth and a large aftermarket for...
Docks.
Now, I had a thin 'n' light with just 2 USB-C ports, and I could get a dock/adapter that had power delivery, HDMI, Ethernet and a couple USB-A/USB-C ports. But for high-refresh rate monitors, a proper dock will want a lot of bandwidth. Without that bandwidth, you'll have to pick your compromise on the dock.
Thunderbolt may not matter so much for desktop, but it definitely does for laptops.
Like the other comment mentioned, docks.
Yes you can theoretically accomplish everything with other ports, but I don't want to feel like I'm disconnecting my laptop from life support every time I move around. 1 Wire for Power + 10+ peripherals is awesome, and I can't go back.
I believe, based on my own experiences, that you're mistaken here.
MacOS has a nice feature that shows you in the device tree what the thunderbolt connection speed is, for my eGPU it shows as '2x' which is 20GBps, and that's running an eGPU with 2x 4k displays.
For work, I run a 4k panel from Lenovo[0] that has a USB-C in and while that's a 60Hz screen, it does not show any signs of input lag or artifacting.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadI enjoy gaming on my laptop, and prefer native resolution gaming.
I require a high refresh rate due to post-concussion syndrome. So sure, if that can be the case with a higher resolution that's fine, but that isn't the norm yet. (2021 seems to be the year for QHD 165Hz though!)
I'm in no way saying QHD or 4K isn't ideal for anyone. It's just silly to say that "this option I don't want is a non-starter" as if it applies to everyone.
If you need fractional scaling, only native Wayland applications work well. X11 applications are going to be upscaled and look blurry. Today, Chrome, all Electron apps, Jetbrains tools still do not support Wayland, though at least for Chrome/Electron the support is on the way.
I have a 4k monitor on my laptop but I regret that choice.
3/2 is the best ratio ever when writing code (after 4/3, but that’s definitely dead).
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NBBq9vHufU9a6d59irhR...
Being left handed makes the numpad even dumber. It's placed on the wrong side of the keyboard.
I also already normally type with my keyboard slightly off-center on my desktop, so an asymmetrical laptop keyboard ain't really all that big of a deal. Even if I didn't, and insisted on a perfectly-centered typing experience, having an off-center screen is something that I've yet to actually really notice.
Was going to say the same.
Also, I will not buy a 1080p laptop. We're in 2021, give me 4K or at least 1440p or I'm not interested.
I also personally prefer 13" laptops for travel convenience. (Not that its a concern right now, but I assume one day it will be again!)
For normal use, 1440p is fine, but 1080p is too low for me. 4K is probably not necessary if its only used to watch videos. I probably should have flipped it and said: "give me 1440p, or even 4K"
Although one area where I find higher resolution is beneficial code editors, if I have enough pixels that I can have 3 vertical splits and have the text still look crisp, that really helps my development workflow.
On a 15" and above though, I wouldn't go lower than 4K personally.
Can someone comment on the pros and cons of the Ryzen CPU? Wondering how to compare the new machine to the Intel-based System76 laptops.
After just putting in an order for a Darter Pro, of course this immediately becomes available!
System76 should take a risk and truly make an interesting laptop. leaving the standard, boring design to the big name companies.
OEM are very risk averse. They only produce cookie cutter designs because most of their buyers themselves look for most casual buyers.
The iGPU has a hard-locked 64MB of RAM allocated to it, which means the Nvidia graphics chip is ALWAYS on, causing it to get maybe 2~ hours of battery life at best
The build quality is miserable, I ended up replacing all of the screws in the machine to make it more properly sturdy (which also fixed the case flex causing the fans to grind to a halt if you nudged the machine too harshly)
Linux support still isn't 100%. The Nvidia blob doesn't support GPU switching for what ever reason and Nouveau just causes kernel oopses
After suffering with it for so many years I finally bought an "MSI Modern 14" Ryzen laptop, which I'm moderately content with. I'll probably send the Mibook off to some people I know that work at Red Hat so they can at least improve its Linux support for those who still have it though
I find them completely useless and am ready for them to be gone, but it's like they didn't even try.
At this point Apple can design any gimmicky piece of hardware, stick their logo on it, sell it for three times the price of equivalent third party products and still run out of stock on launch. You can't beat that.
$1000 for the M1 air is not a huge premium. It's actually very cheap.
Which is a huge problem for the competition. I know that I can get just get a cheap Mac and it will still be fast, it will still have a great screen and the build quality will be higher than the majority of PC laptops.
I happen to like macOS, so it's not a huge issue, but if I want to get a laptop for Linux, then I need to go to a store to see the models. Otherwise I can't be sure if I'll like the screen, keyboard or overall look an feel. The minor price difference for an Apple product is acceptable, given that I know what I'll getting a usable laptop regardless of which model I pick.
Now, if you spec out their Mac Pro, especially as it gets updated so infrequently, those get very out of line with competitor hardware quickly.
Retail prices already include higher profit margins than bulk order prices would include, which makes this markup even more egregious.
I calculated it the other day, and Apple is charging $0.52/GB for SSDs on their M1 MacBook Air.
Samsung's 980 Pro is under $0.20/GB for the 1TB model on Amazon right now. That is arguably one of the best SSDs on the market right now, and I'm fairly sure Samsung' 980 Pro is actually significantly better than the internal SSD that Apple is using on the M1 MacBook Air.
That means Apple is charging a 160% markup above retail price, minimum.
The Western Digital SN550 1TB PCIe SSD is priced at about $0.10/GB at retail on Amazon, which means Apple is charging over a 400% markup relative to the retail prices of that perfectly good SSD. Most users would not be able to tell the difference between the SN550 and the internal SSDs Apple is currently using.
I recognize that other OEMs can sometimes charge steep upgrade markups too... but Apple's prices for storage are personally annoying to me because the M1 MacBook Air seems reasonably priced until you get into the upgrades. I wanted to get more storage, but I'm not going to pay $0.52/GB for additional storage these days... I just don't find it reasonable.
Since we’re on the topic of System76, a fully upgraded Oryx Pro (except leaving the GPU at the base option) costs about half of what a fully upgraded 16” MBP costs (also leaving the GPU at the base option), while offering similar specs — $3158 vs $6000. The System76 chooses to go for a 144Hz panel instead of a HiDPI panel, but different people value different things. The System76 obviously has a better port selection (for most people), while obviously not being as sleek — but it’s not huge either, it’s reasonably thin and light. It’s more durable while not as shiny. It’s easy for people to pull out the “no true Scotsman” defense at this point, but it all depends on what the customer is looking for. It’s Apple’s fault if they don’t offer enough variety to meet the needs of their customers.
I’m sure I could dig into comparative analysis of other OEMs vs Apple and come up with other examples, but this one is easy enough.
Spec for spec, Apple charges much more than twice as much for many important upgrades... so a sufficiently upgraded Apple laptop can be more than twice as much, even if it’s often “only” a 70% markup or something. That doesn’t excuse charging egregious prices for storage. Customers want storage, and Apple withholds it unless customers want to pay a large ransom. They solder the SSDs so that customers cannot upgrade their own computers.
I own an M1 MacBook Air. I’m not some “Apple hater”, but their upgrade pricing is truly appalling, and for all their talk of environmental friendliness, their attempts to thwart aftermarket repair and upgrades significantly hinders the total potential lifetime of their products, which increases their environmental impact relative to what could be.
I bought the 256GB/16GB model, and that 256GB SSD is borderline too small for me to deal with, and I’m not even like an average user that would be attempting to store music and pictures on it. I’m almost exclusively using it for software dev and web browsing. I would swap out the SSD, but... that’s obviously not possible.
If I can’t make the 256GB of storage work long term, I think I would rather sell this thing and buy something else than give Apple $0.52/GB. The M1 is good... but it’s not priceless. My opinions are subject to change, of course.
Not sure where you're getting these numbers. Comparing like for like and maxing out the Oryx, and the Mac's processor, they both have 64GB RAM and a 4TB SSD. The price I'm getting for that Mac config is $4800 vs the $3168 that you mention. $6000 doubles the Mac's storage to an 8TB SSD, which the Oryx does not offer. 6K is indeed a lot, but how many PC laptops even offer an 8TB SSD at any price? I haven't seen many.
But I digress. That's roughly a 50% markup, which is indeed a lot. For the extra $1500 you get a much higher resolution display (2880 x 1800) with good color reproduction, much better build quality, macOS and the Mac software ecosystem, Thunderbolt ports, Mac trackpad and keyboard, etc. Maybe these things are not valuable to you! But it's not like you're not getting anything for that money. The products are not equivalent, even if their specs were the same on paper.
I own System76 products and Apple products, and have owned countless PC laptops in the past. I do the math regularly and know what I'm paying for with Apple stuff, and it's almost never a 70% markup. And Apple stuff has specs you just can't find in other products, like the high-res displays and high number of Thunderbolt ports. Which isn't to say it's perfect! I don't like the Touch Bar and would like an SD card reader and HDMI out. But in general, statements about the price inflation are overblown. It exists but it's not as bad as many people think.
The rest of your points I’ve already addressed. More thunderbolt ports is actually bad for most users if it comes at the expense of ports they can actually use without a dongle. The build quality is not really any better... I’ve owned both as well, and I’ve also had a work MacBook Pro 15 with the butterfly keyboard. Until recently, Mac keyboards were the worst in the industry, including reliability. Now they’re decent, but nothing to write home about. Definitely not an advantage. Trackpads are what you make of them... Apple certainly makes good ones, but it’s not 2010 anymore. Every mid-to-high end laptop I’ve used in the last 5 years has had a good trackpad, but I still reach for a mouse even on my Macs.
I already addressed the display as well. It’s a trade off. Apple doesn’t offer high refresh rate displays on their laptops, which matter to some people. If they didn’t matter, Apple wouldn’t put them on their iPad Pro.
System76 used to offer 4K displays (optionally matte) on the Oryx Pro, and mine was exceptionally good! And that’s higher resolution than Apple uses, in addition to the wonderful matte effect cutting down on glare. I’m just guessing the massive ongoing part shortage has affected which displays they can actually acquire for the moment.
So yes, I agree you get different things with a Mac, but those things are unlikely to be worth 50% more to most people, with the exception of macOS itself... and that’s only valuable to people who like macOS or are literally required to use macOS.
> in general, statements about the price inflation are overblown. It exists but it's not as bad as many people think.
I started this conversation by pointing out the price inflation I care about the most: storage, and it’s on the order of a 400% markup. It’s extremely awful.
If Apple would be environmentally friendly and allow people to repair and upgrade their computers, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, because I’d have a 1TB SSD in my MacBook Air, and it would have cost me $100. If Apple would charge a healthy 100% profit margin, I would probably have paid them for the SSD... I’m just not willing to go to 400% markup.
Apple has basically always charged egregious upgrade prices, it didn’t start when they started soldering things down, so the small number of people like myself who would actually upgrade components should not be considered a threat to their profit margins... but even if most people did it, Apple should allow it because it’s the right thing to do long term, even if it impacts short term profits. Instead, they seem to be optimizing their products to eek out every last percentage point of profit. Which is understandable... it is a company, but it would be nice if they didn’t. They already have hundreds of billions of dollars of cash.
I mean, yeah. This is the one thing that's basically inarguable. Their computers increasingly do not contain serviceable parts, except for the Mac Pro, which is absurdly expensive. I suspect they just prefer compactness and longer battery life to repairable devices. I have to admit this isn't something I care about very much because I don't upgrade my machines and I use them until they break, which is often around a decade with Macs. Because you have different preferences I can see how you'd find these changes upsetting.
$999 Starting Price. tempting
+$249 +265Gb SSD (and a 8th GPU core)
+$200 +8Gb RAM (to a reasonable 16Gb)
+$200 +512Gb (to a nice 1Tb)
So that's $649 for a 768Gigs of SSD, 8 Gigs of RAM (and a GPU core). Cost of 1Tb gen-4 and a stick of RAM is about $200
i.e. You've paid the absolutely necessary $249 to get the 512Gb... then it's only $200 to get an extra 512Gb. Once you've overcome that first hurdle, the 2nd looks almost good value.
If you want great design that matches a Mac (overall, better in some areas, worse in others), look at the flagship ThinkPad models, Microsoft Surface devices, etc. There are many laptops that have "standout design features" such as convertible designs, novel display and input options including pen-and-touch, etc. If anything, I think Macs lag behind in these innovations, although they have other benefits.
Anyway, that's basically the creation myth of the iPhone, no? That it supposedly was basically iterated on for quite a few years before the technology got to the point where a high-quality execution was allowed. I also had Windows Mobile smartphones and remember the iPhone releasing. I didn't recognize or appreciate that difference then.
Turns out I was entirely wrong: Apple wasn't positioning this phone for IT/business professionals for corporate use. They were building a consumer product. The feature set they were prioritizing was entirely counter-intuitive from my perspective. The features that I thought were gimmicks at the time ended up being the features that made it successful: natural multi-touch input, a (then) gigantic screen, and a bare-bones UI/UX. It had nothing that I wanted or needed, but it had everything that they needed to open up the market to millions of people who weren't using HTC bricks on their Verizon corporate plan that their IT admin configured for them.
Just search "windows mobile" on YouTube and look back at the awful (but feature filled!) experiences we used to think was awesome. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXDgsZvSTP8
[1] https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-...
* extremely, extremely thin margins
* in general, users are pretty low-discretion, which makes it hard to meaningfully differentiate your product
* deeply entrenched competition (what % of laptops are sold at best buy/etc?)
* the users who are high-discretion are going to be extremely demanding users. They're going to nitpick over small details in both hardware and software. And they're probably going to be installing their own OS (or at least reinstalling the existing one) and will generally be more demanding of both product design and support. Also, they probably have the tech skills to correctly point the finger at you when it's your fault. Whereas less discerning users might just go "Ugh bill gates!"
Doesn't help that the "linux laptop" niche was probably a big part of this "niche laptop" market segment and Dell and Lenovo are both kinda warming back up to that niche. e.g. the newest XPS's all work great on (latest kernel) linux.
The XPS 13 competes directly with the mac in terms of (familiar but) industrial design, standout display and inner design (with the white carbon fiber) and USB-C ports for a lifetime. Stating it first, because its the most obvious competitor.
The Razer, Asus, HP and Surface flagships have clear standout designs and similar features.
The only 2 laptops that are purposely boring are the Thinkpad and System76, because they seem to cater to people who need them as work machines, first and foremost. (LG Gram is not a flagship)
I don't _hate_ the XPS 13, but I wouldn't recommend it and I probably won't be getting a 3rd one (unless they change).
The build quality just isn't there. First of all, the flexible chassis is annoying. If I pick it up on the side with one hand, it's likely to flex enough to trigger a trackpad click. Secondly, while it's pretty quiet, it does get rather hot. Third, the trackpad and mouse aren't Macbook-quality (butterfly keyboard aside). In my first one, the trackpad and battery had to be replaced. The keyboard on my current one (9300) has very mild issues (I think they reduced the travel distance and it, like butterfly, is somewhat susceptible to dust/dirt)
Not sure what I'll replace it with. Will see how the reviews for the Framework laptop are.
Seems like the reasonable choice, given that host-side USB-C is still dead in the water.
Still has soldered in RAM, unfortunately.
Apple has huge volume, big margins a very tight supply chain and a mountain of cash in tax havens. They have a lot more options.
If a seller like System 76 adds too much margin on their models people will buy a Clevo rebadged by some other seller which is a shame because System76 are adding value with their firmware and OS tweaks.
I am looking forward to the day when a company like System76 can release their own designs but without being in Apples position of fleecing customers for music, video, apps, cloud, mobile, tablets etc in a closed ecosystem it might be a long time coming.
I had four of these laptops - and on ALL 4 they would have screws come loose and fall out inside the case. You could hear it rattling around when you turned the machine. Two of them had one type of connector for the screen and the other two had a different connector - One got fried and on the other I broke the screen on - so I couldn't harvest parts from one to the other.
S76 wanted $90 for a new charger after one of mine failed.
I have an HP Omen laptop as my primary machine now - here is what is cool:
I had an HP Omen and it failed to power on one day - so I contacted support and they had me send them the machine - instead of fixing it, they sent me a brand new Omen which was way better than the failed unit. The design is super elegant, and it has dual NVME slots, so I have dual drives in it.
The screen is matte so no glossy reflections like my macbooks have...
Yeah - I think I'll stick with Omens for the foreseeable future. HP's support was FANTASTIC.
When my macbook pro caught fire in my sleep and nearly killed me (it was laying on my bed and I fell asleep watching a movie and the machine caught fire - something that that model was recalled for) I took it to Apple's main store in San Francisco - and they kept it for two months "analyzing it" then came back and told me that even though it was a safety issue and the machine was under recall for CATCHING FIRE, they found that one of my moisture sensors had been triggered and therefore, they were not going to replace, fix or help me.
(I had spilled a small bit of water on the keyboard many month prior to the machine catching fire)
Then they tried to sell me a new machine, or have them "replace the machine for $1,500"
A total joke. Ill never buy another apple machine nor a s76 machine again.
HP support is AMAZING.
Also - When HP bought Compaq - we had a bunch of Compaq/HP servers back in 1998 - and the support back then on those servers was top notch - and the HW design was as well. I used to rebuild those servers in minutes in the literal dark.
All the Sun servers we had, like the 650s would bitch if their case was even slightly off center and would refuse to boot.
I am quite familiar with breaking down/working on all types of machines...
they had lock-tight paint on the screws, which didnt work.
and the sad thing was that the connector type between the two broken machines had changed, even though they were the same model "Gazelle" - they are also a super pain in the ass to work on. The screen connector requires you to basically dismantle the entire machine...
Obviously this machine was a white-label Clio machine, and S76 has more recently started designing their own machines (supposedly - so I dont know how much of that design is in-house vs them spec'ing things out to other design services...
Can anyone else back this up? Has HP changed? I've sworn off HP products (both enterprise and consumer) because of their terrible customer service and documentation. Dell/Lenovo always offer something very similar in price and performance, and their enterprise support is fine to great.
I was completely dumbfounded when HP just said "we are going to send you a new machine, at no cost, please pick from this list...
And I picked this dope Omen machine and when I opened it up to look at the guts and put in a second SSD, I was taken aback by the elegant symmetry of the design. The only downside is that even though the sound is "bang & olufsen" - its a bit too quiet.
However, the support guy on my case was dope, and I love this machine
I bought one, and didn't like the keyboard. Send to a relative overseas. Months later the Mobo died a few weeks under warranty. Called HP and told i was overseas. They provided a local support number. ship by local post. upgraded new mobo. no charge.
This was a non-business $300ish laptop.
sadly, their shopping experience is abysmal like every other PC manufacturer :(
I'm typing this on a 7 or 8 year old s76 Gazelle. It was my primary work and personal machine for 3 or 4 years and has been my primary personal machine since. I did replace the original drive with an SSD, and I think I may need to replace the fans---they're getting loud. Hardware- and build-quality-wise, I've never had any problems. (Well, ok, I killed one of the USB ports. Probably broke some of the connections.)
The one problem I have had is with the NVidia graphics, which have never worked properly. (I've got graphics acceleration disabled now.) Either it wouldn't go to sleep, or the graphics wouldn't wake up. The last straw was when I got those problems beaten into a standstill, and Chrome started somehow overriding my window manager and keeping the (accelerated) Chrome window front and center, minus WM decorations.
Sure, it's a generic Clio or something, but I've been very impressed. Never had much love for HP, though.
A Legion 5 will have an Nvidia dGPU, so you have to decide if you want to run PRIME or something else and see how the external monitor outputs are muxed if that's important to you.
That could mean literally anything from Intel integrated level performance, to a proper dedicated GPU, though for the price here I'm guessing on the former ...
Vega 7 @1600Mhz
You are unlikely to see dedicated graphics paired with a U-series processor in most cases. (There are exceptions, but you'll see the dedicated graphics card specified in those cases.)
I don't want to advertise, so I'll just say - you can go to a big computer/hardware seller website and search for laptops with nvidia graphics cards. You can get a laptop with a GTX 1650 for $700, which has 3x the performance.
AMD's APU graphics offer a good enough solution while removing the headaches many of us are trying to avoid.
* trackpoint + buttons (can be without touchpad, disabled anyway) * full keyboard * strong durable * removable battery * 4k screen * ecc 64-128gb * rj45 * lots of ports * hardware switches to disable: networking, camera, mic,..
Thinkpad's are move farther away each year. I hope some company will fill the gap.
https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/
But I totally agree: Input and output to the user (keyboard, trackpoint/mouse buttons/touchpad/screen) are of critical importance. I can be really effective on a decade-old Thinkpad (with the IPS display mod!) and woefully out-of-date processor, but if it takes too long to adjust to the keyboard I'll be frustrated every time I have to use it.
Sure the above wont work for everybody, but if you are like me, you unpacked the laptop at home and at work each day at exactly the same space, where all the cables and extra monitors were.
I used to use laptop in coffee shops and outdoors, but nowadays between phone, and tablets (wel phone and kindle in my case) I almost never feel the need.
Buy silent box, mobo for overclocking and underclock it for extra silence, and throw the box under the table.
Still have my laptop, but its mostly just "backup" and in case I travel somewhere, but honestly I don't care about it as much
https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
Did you solve those problems? and if so how?
If you don't want to do something like that, with a Microsoft account a lot of settings can be applied to multiple machines.
Setting up Syncthing in the cloud was a challenge, had to tunnel the web-ui with ssh port forwarding.
That same git repo has scripts that apply some of my system configurations, and a readme to walk me through the GUI stuff I have to do.
My first few setups were hard. I had to debug some weird issues on my Linux install. (Not sleeping properly, remapping some keyboard keys).
But now I've got it cased. I setup 3 machines (2 Linux, 1 windows) over the past couple days and all are essentially equal development experience now. Was super fast to setup l. If your going the Linux route, make a repo where you record all the tweaks your making so you can redo them if you need to on a new machine.
It's shitty the first time, but now I know I can buy any new machine and have it ready to rip in mere minutes. With my custom keyboard layout (home, end, pageup, pagedown, alt, cntrl, alt+tab), my custom VSCode hotkeys, my ssh key identity management, my terminal font and themes, my system hotkeys (moving windows around and switching workspaces). Now that I've got all this setup, it feels great. Feels very fluid on all 3 machines.
Sync isn't an issue. All work is on VMs, and they get backed up every day to my Synology.
My backup laptop is a 6 year old Thinkpad, which hasn't been out of it's bag in over a year.
I’m on Linux, and use mosh as a more reliable ssh client.
I use wireguard to access my home network when I'm visiting my parents.
Nope. Actually, just like with my phone chargers, I like to have a laptop charger in all the spaces I like to compute.. I like to have a charger in my bedroom, my living room and in the garage.
I used to have this for all my machines - though I now have a new HP Omen (bad ass machine) - but I only have one charger for it currently.
I havent touched my ipad in a really long time.
But here is a tip - this super light and super cheep USB screen is AMAZING to have with a laptop:
(This thing was $69 when I bought it - but its now $99 but still - a USB only monitor is fantastic.
https://www.amazon.com/AOC-e1659Fwu-1366x768-Brightness-3-0-...
What I do, is I make it the top monitor - and I have this TV Tray stand that is at the perfect level for me to have my laptop on my lap, a tray or a TV tray, and then I have the AOC monitor on this stand and I just move up to click on that mon...
And this is dope because during this pandemic, I am trying to take every free training I can get my digital hands around.
https://digitaldefynd.com/free-udemy-courses/
So I have the training vid on the top screen and then I can use whatever program(s) I need on the laptop...
Blender courses are a good example of how this works great. The point is to have the two screens stacked vertically so that you only move your eyes up and down and dont have to turn your neck...
A laptop (xps 13 9360) for traveling or working in remote places.
Even have a yubikey on each desktop and one for travel. All storing the ssh keys.
I don't use the laptop for months, open it and update the packages and dotfiles before going for a travel and that's it. Ready to go.
This is something other than just having your dot files in git, and system config in git via etc keeper?
Systems are slightly different, at work i have two 27 inch monitors and at home i have one 30 inch, and I do play some paradox games on home computer on ocasion
https://www.xyte.ch/
I have a thinkpad x2100 and it is a great laptop.
I have an x200 as well, so if I was really worried I could just carry a spare battery.
I am glad I am not the only one.
I can't understand why Thinkpads are moving away from this absolutely perfect design in the name of... slickness?
Why are laptops with a minimal (or non-existing) touchpad so difficult to find? Once you start using the trackpoint your wrists feel incredibly relaxed at all times.
Why do so few vendors offer RJ45 ports? When in the lab, I find my self needing one almost daily.
Why this trend of including keyboards with shorter and shorter travel distance?
There was a campaign to bring attention to all these details a few years ago which (surprisingly!) resulted in Lenovo releasing the "Thinkpad 25 anniversary edition" [1] which ticked most (but not all) of my boxes and which is unfortunately no longer available.
Do people really prefer the new design trends? Am I out of touch with reality?
[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/outletus/laptops/thinkpad/think...
Having been a user of the old X lines throughout the years the current X/T and X1 lines seem like a definite improvement to me. And I also use the trackpoint exclusively.
Feels quite well built despite the low weight, too. It doesn't sacrifice on solidness to achieve its weight.
Plus the extra battery life in the Carbon. But the X1 Nano beats my 2020 intel macbook air in battery life from the benchmarks I've seen, which could be longer I have not found lacking
It's mainly due to two factors: 1) thanks to having a very small touchpad, the keyboard is closer to the edge and I feel much less strain on the lower part of the arm, near my wrists, which becomes more apparent after long coding sessions; and 2) the key travel is much longer and typing feels "better" (I make far less mistakes).
Also, because the x395 is almost half the thickness, they could not fit a bigger battery (which is definitely my main complaint on these newer machines).
Don't get me wrong, the "X" series is great and I will probably get the latest version when I need a replacement *but* I'm sad they make these sacrifices in the name of "design".
> Why do so few vendors offer RJ45 ports?
I'm guessing that because laptops are portable machines, almost nobody ever uses the network port and if you need one, you can use an adapter with the USB port.
They come close in number of ports and battery life *but* they still have an excessively big touchpad, don't have a 13 inch version and start at 1.7 kilos (which makes them less than ideal for carrying around).
But I agree they are the very nice machines and we keep a bunch of them in the lab.
However I think that yes, most people (including me) prefer the new to the old. Eg.: I dislike full keyboards because it shifts my hands to a side and moves the mouse further away. I tried track points but I find touchpads superior. I don’t need an RJ45 because even if I wanted to use it, I’d much rather have it on a USB-C dongle with pass through power, so I only have one cable to disconnect when moving around. And call me crazy, even though I use a mechanical external keyboard most of the time, I actually like typing on the butterfly keyboard more than on other laptop keyboards I have and had.
The X61s was far closer to an absolutely perfect design, it just needed less plastic in the chassis. Things started going downhill with the X201s in the transition to wide aspect ratio displays, and X220/X230 arrived at full retard on that trajectory.
Slow by modern standards, being pre-Nehalem, yes. But not 32-bit, the X61s tops out at a 1.8Ghz c2d L7700, which is 64-bit:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/32243/i...
Lots of games on Steam has achievements for extremely simple tasks, such as launching the game for the first time or playing it for five minutes, and popularity of those is typically around 82.5% and 75% respectively among audiences for most popular titles.
IOW, 17.5% of PC game enthusiasts pay for a game and immediately put it on a shelf and don’t even double click on the icon. 25% reaches past the loading screen. Of all purchasers, maybe 10% reaches the final boss or end of the storyline. Potentially less.
A person who has issues with a mainstream laptop for its lack of an Ethernet port few years into ownership, who knows how many of those exist in the whole world?
At least, many people in HN and most people in /r/thinkpad seem to agree! :)
They also have the T25 frankenpad: https://www.xyte.ch/shop/t25-frankenpad-kit/ and https://www.xyte.ch/thinkpads/t25-frankenpad/
The laptop market churns way too much for my liking and I feel like the second I move away from my macbook pro (work) I'm going to be disappointed with the quality.
When it comes to development, my goal is to be able to ssh into my linux box and use that for most development (tmux + vim). That plus ZeroTier and I now have access to my dev machine from wherever.
Even on large codebases written in Typescript, vim + plugins are "good enough."
macbook pro + live inside an ssh terminal seems to be working well enough for me.
1) Mixed DPI is insanely bad on Linux, and that issue is amplified if you have Nvidia hardware. At least as of last month, Wayland and XWayland are basically unusable with Nvidia. Since the laptop screen is 4k, but I was using a Thunderbolt dock plugged into 2x1080p monitors, I'd have to turn off display scaling on the laptop, and, because I was stuck on X11 because Nvidia, I'd have to restart the laptop for the scaling change to take effect.
2) There was no Thunderbolt dock support for unlocking full disk encryption, so if you wanted FDE, you either had to unplug the laptop from the dock, open it, type the password and plug it back in every time you turn the laptop on, or just not used a Thunderbolt dock. This wouldn't be a big deal except I was restarting the laptop frequently when changing pretty much any display parameter.
3) There was no clear best practice for managing switchable graphics. There are options like Bumblebee that I never really figured out if they were working properly - especially for games. Then, Nvidia supposedly added a "primus-run" feature to the driver, but again, it seemed to just not work. Eventually I settled on "prime-select" but that involves rebooting every time you switch.
4) Selecting the Nvidia graphics disabled on-board audio. I had to either use USB or Bluetooth. I never figured this out despite countless hours of messing around with alsamixer. My best guess is that it was trying to direct everything over the HDMI out even though that wasn't plugged in. The Intel drivers were loaded, just every time I selected the Nvidia chip, the audio devices would disappear.
In the end, I settled on picking up an Acer Aspire refurbished from eBay. It has an i5 10400, 12GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD. I put a 1050 Ti in it without any problems. The total system ran me $500. It's much nicer. So the moral of the story is for me, if you do go Linux laptop, avoid Nvidia like the plague.
Possibly a stupid question, but isn't a "1050 Ti" an Nvidia chip? How did this help you with the driver issues?
Try sudo alsactl restore
I have a Dell G5 with Nvidia RTX and my headphones do not work when I start it
Took me a few months of investigation, but that alsactl command fixes it in 90% of situations
They're not a gimmick if well implemented. Useful gestures are very dependant on deep software integration, however.
I never used gestures. But I seriously miss inertia scrolling. You never realize how much a pain in the ass it is scrolling web pages until you don't have it. Firefox has it, but you have to turn on an environment variable to get it and it feels a bit weird to me. Chrome does not have it all on Linux. And the way they are implementing it means that every app has to reimplement inertia scrolling on its own. Sigh. At least you can hold down the middle mouse and use the trackpoint to swiftly scroll.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but this is just when you scroll, release your fingers, and it slows to a stop instead of stopping instantly, right? I have that out of the box here on Linux. Firefox + X + touchpad with the synaptics driver.
I had thought this was what "Use smooth scrolling" did it in the Firefox preferences.
Edit: I also just checked and I have this in my terminal (Konsole), text editor (KWrite), and PDF viewer (Okular) so this is at the very least not a Firefox only thing. It feels exactly the same in each application. I bet it's a feature of the touchpad driver.
Given the number of people these days who don't even own a desktop, I don't understand why mouse buttons aren't the standard. With the XPS I can even play casual games while sitting on the couch. No need to move to a desk and dig a corded mouse of the drawer!
The nearly identical Clevo NL51RU/NL50RU [1] has a 2.5" drive caddy but a 36 Wh battery. Take a look at the internal photo of the System76 unit at [2]. It's the same laptop. Heck, they didn't even bother removing the boss and brass insert for the 2.5" drive retaining screw by the left speaker.
System76 is not an OEM, they whitelabel and have tweaks made to Clevo/Sager laptops. I think they do a great service to the Linux community with PopOS and driver development/compatibility to make those into machines where Linux "just works" out of the box, don't get me wrong.
This obsession with thin-and-light goes completely counter to the whole point of "Our laptops’ guts are fully accessible!". They say they've got a tactile keyboard, to fit in 20mm thin right on top of the heat sink for the high-power Ryzen processor and discrete graphics I think I'm pretty safe in assuming it's a pathetic <1mm key-travel scissor unit.
1" thick or more is not too much. You could fit in all the ports, as well as an 80 Wh battery, and cooling to run at boost frequencies for more than 20ms. You don't have to match the dimensions of a Macbook Air and be able to slice tomatoes with the wrist rest.
[1]: https://laptopwithlinux.com/wp-content/uploads/Clevo-NL51RU-... from https://laptopwithlinux.com/product/clevo-nl51ru/ [2]: https://assets.system76.com/products/pang10/internal.png
I think it depends a lot on an individual's needs. Like in my case, a recent laptop purchasing decision revolved around qualities that make a laptop particularly good at being a laptop — that is, high portability, low/no noise, little/no heat. Power and ports were a cherry on top because I already have another machine that fills those needs.
In that situation, 1" isn't necessarily too thick, but it is negatively impacting its functionality as a laptop, if only because added thickness implies added weight (especially for sizes larger than 13").
With that said, ultraportables shouldn't exist at the cost of models more oriented toward power and flexibility… they should be an option alongside more traditional laptops.
I accidentally spilled a glass of water on my old thinkpad w, and all I had to do was to replace the keyboard (happened twice). It also helped that I could find spare part easily online. Would it be possible with lesser-know brands? It also fell several time on the ground but never broke anything. I'm honestly very interested to know if there are laptops as durable as thinkpads.
Come on.
How do System76 and Purism compare in terms of daily drivers? Anyone tried both and could provide a comparison?
Note that for the above substitutions there often is no part number change so you have no way of knowing if the amazon/costco model will work even if it works for someone else.
System76 is there for those people.
I'm sure I likely could have purchased and assembled the components myself and found a more spartan case and all that, but it felt a bit like Christmas using it for the first while.
and for under 15" it is just a waste for 90% of people.
Would be really nice to use a proper modern DP instead of antiquated HDMI for this.
Is it using Coreboot by the way?
Of course sometimes the HDMI fails due to DRM nonsense, so that's also an issue.
And personally, I had a lot of problems with HDMI in the past. Unlike with DP.
Edit: Behold this list of requirements. https://www.reddit.com/r/htpc/wiki/faq#wiki_what_do_i_need_f...
DP should support HDCP as far as I know, if you need it.
Seriously, HDMI should just disappear already but that corrupt cartel will keep it around for years.
But whatever the case is, lack of Thunderbolt is unfortunately a deal breaker. I've moved on to unifying all my docks and power chords to only be Thunderbolt. It's unfortunate because the Ryzen chipsets are clearly getting to be superior from a price/performance point of view.
EDIT: I am writing this as someone who supports System76, and has only ran Linux professionally and at home for the last 10 years.
USB Type-C is a connector shape, used by both USB and Thunderbolt. So people saying they want thunderbolt and you saying they should want USB Type-C doesn't make much sense.
Imagine someone in 2001 saying they are disappointed with new computers being released without USB 2.0 (i.e. still using USB 1.1), and you replying that things should be based on Type-A. Both USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 used Type-A connectors. The shape is unrelated to the protocol/speed/etc.
Around January 2020 vendors are able to make their own controllers and submit them for certification. AMD doesn't have any. Intel's controllers don't have an embedded version for sale.
Several reasons.
a) Intel wants licensing cash for allowing you to use it
b) It does not actually add that much to USB. You want to attach monitors? Non-Thunderbolt USB can do that. You want to attach storage? Non-Thunderbolt USB can do that. Networking? Charge your device? USB can do all that.
The remaining selling point of Thunderbolt is that you can attach an external graphics card over it. There are external USB graphics solutions, too, but they can't really compete if you plan to do high perf 3d graphics over it.
However this selling point is also the Achilles heel of Thunderbold. It exposes PCIe to devices outside the device, allowing direct memory access over it. This can be partially mitigated if the OS and all drivers cooperate and are really well written (for example not expose a memory page that contains other stuff as well).
But bottom line? I actually view this as an AMD advantage. It's a bit like Firewire was. a) it cost licensing money and b) it introduced a similar security issue while c) not actually delivering that much of an advantage over USB unless you are part of a certain niche.
Docks.
Now, I had a thin 'n' light with just 2 USB-C ports, and I could get a dock/adapter that had power delivery, HDMI, Ethernet and a couple USB-A/USB-C ports. But for high-refresh rate monitors, a proper dock will want a lot of bandwidth. Without that bandwidth, you'll have to pick your compromise on the dock.
Like the other comment mentioned, docks.
Yes you can theoretically accomplish everything with other ports, but I don't want to feel like I'm disconnecting my laptop from life support every time I move around. 1 Wire for Power + 10+ peripherals is awesome, and I can't go back.
This can still be done with non-TB USB-C. Including power and video.
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000141328/displaypo...
MacOS has a nice feature that shows you in the device tree what the thunderbolt connection speed is, for my eGPU it shows as '2x' which is 20GBps, and that's running an eGPU with 2x 4k displays.
For work, I run a 4k panel from Lenovo[0] that has a USB-C in and while that's a 60Hz screen, it does not show any signs of input lag or artifacting.
[0]: https://www.lenovo.com/il/en/monitors/p27u
Excellent machine, faster than anything else I got. But it was only a short time test balloon, I fear. Not available anymore.