If you are never going to take it on a plane you can add a lot of batteries and I was thinking it might be fun to make a computer powered by electric car batteries just as electric cars were powered by laptop batteries for a time.
The blog post starts with replacements for an X301, and I guess, people like that/us are using the notebooks for getting work done and don't care about "consumer" stuff.
Serial and Parallel ports are still important if you are running around a factory floor. That is also why still got a T400 and X201 in working order, because over their card slots I can still can get a good serial port.
The problem is running around the factory floor. I tried to solve that problem when I worked at Cutler-Hammer Automation years ago. Problem was no one was able to even conceive of doing things a different way - that's the way they've always done it. Now they're realizing they're too niche for the market to cater to? SMH
- There are plenty of industrial applications that still make use of legacy comms protocols. Those people need laptops too.
- There are 30 million Raspberry pi's sold worldwide and at least a quarter of a million Arduino boards, even more so if you add the clones and knock offs. There is a world of non-professional 'consumer grade' makers and hobbyist that would love to have a more diverse offering in consumer electronics.
instead CES just feels more and more like the Auto trade shows where cars keep converging to more and more homogenous things and designers risk less and less, at some point you are just changing branding and not much else because all the components come from the same handful of suppliers.
Corporations have stopped taking risks that much is apparent.
I too am excited for OLKB's replacement keyboard for the MNT Reform[0]. I seriously have enough ThinkPads to last me the rest of my life, but that one feature... It would be enough to make me buy another black bulky tank of a laptop.
For those missing sturdy builds, ports, replaceable parts, explore gaming laptops. They have all those and are built to last and be upgradeable. Just ensure to use it in. Integrated graphics mode and the battery backup would be great too. And thanks to the better thermals, parts don't fail so easily.
Maybe you've had better luck, but in my experience, I'd advise avoiding gaming laptops like the plague.
The build quality is alright depending on how you look at it. Better than most other laptops, but most other laptops are half the price. Looking at laptops in the same price range, usuablly they're about the same in my experience. They're fairly upgradable, you can swap the RAM and storage and often the battery, but that's about it.
Where they really fail is on the thermals. They certainly have better airflow than non-gaming laptops, but the amount of heat they produce is orders of magnitude more, and the gain in cooling is not as great as the gain in heat generated.
Most gaming laptops have a battery that will last maybe 3 years at most. Mine (which I'm looking to replace) didn't even last 1 year before it swelled to the point where I could get the backplate back on with the battery still in. Luckily it works for the time being on permenant power.
Meanwhile, my old x240, which I've had for about four years, is still going strong with no issues. I push that laptop hard, far harder comparitive to its specs than I did the gaming laptop.
Edit: For clarity I should say that my particular gaming laptop was a Razer Blade, which I do hear is one of the worse performers in terms of thermals, although its also listed as one of the best for build quality and upgradability, so its a bit of a mixed bag. I had an older gaming laptop which had better thermals but worse everything else, so as usual, YMMV
The secret is in tuning of GPU and CPU TDP to a lower level to ensure the thermals are much better. In a gaming laptop they come configured much higher while in regular laptop its much lower. So to make this work, the laptop will have to be run a lower TDP mode (which will still beat normal laptops on thermals and power) and switch to integrated graphics. Most manufacturers provide software to do just that. The battery life also increases once the thermals become better. On top of that, manufacturers like Asus provide software to extend battery lifespan by capping the max battery charge to 60%. This helps a lot because most of the time battery life goes down when laptops end up being on adapter all time (like gaming laptops tend to be).
Oh believe me, I did. I did just about everything I could think of to cool my laptop (I had an nvme cooling pad in there, a shortcut to temporarily turn my fans up when the temps got a bit high, I even took a dremel to my laptop stand so it could get more air in and out, and of course as you mention the TDP settings). Either these measures were all taken too late (~6 months into owning it, though I had a stand and the nvme cooler from day 1), or they merely extended its life.
It has been a hot summer here, and UK houses are built specifically to trap heat, plus I have another which generates a bit of heat a few metres from it for work, so I am in a fairly hot room, but the thinkpad is in the very same room, without any of the cooling measures taken (I usually use it in bed, the bane of a laptops cooler) and as I say, its still chugging along.
Not saying its impossible to have a well built, well cooled gaming laptop, but in my experience, they're not the go to for reliability
Better luck here, but I shy away from thinner gaming laptops like the ones Razer makes. Thick chunky laptops weight a ton but then so does my old thinkpads. Thin laptops have ruined our ability to cool things reasonably.
They weren't the most powerful, but Dells Inspiron series of gaming laptops have been pretty good the last few years. Especially when it comes to price Dell and Acer keep putting out sub $700 gaming laptops you can often find on sale for $600 or $650. They almost all have an open m.2 slot or 2.5inch bay for extra cheap storage and swappable ram.
Currently I'm on a Maingear Vector Pro (Ryzen 5800H / Nvidia 3070) and a blessing is just how tweakable the fan profiles are as well as power adjustments for each of the saved profiles I have setup. AMD's lastest mobile parts are still extremely performant with a 35W power cap if I want to keep the fan speed down.
All else fails I can just hit the 100% fan button and even under full load the cpu is hovering around 78C and gpu around 68C. It's loud but I don't do rendering often so its a compromise I'm willing to have for the amount of portable power.
I used to have a thicker gaming laptop and yeh thermals were certainly better, but I found its build quality lacking and performance just wasn't really there comparative to its massive size and pretty high price. Credit where credits due to the razer, it performs admirably, and is built well, it just can't keep itself cool.
I've heard good things about the dell laptops, although that was mainly the XPS range which are more thinkpad competitors. I think for the time being though I'm going to avoid high spec laptops as a desktop replacement, I'll either settle for the drop in specs and use one of my many thinkpads as my main computer, or get a desktop.
A glossy screen is not "Appleization" in the sense the author means - pointless aesthetics at the expense of functionality. Glossy screens inherently have superior contrast, especially in sunlight. The reason is simple - they reflect incoming light at its incident angle, while matte screens smear it over all angles. Thus, unless you happen to be in sitting at precisely the wrong angle, matte screens reflect more sunlight into your face. With a glossy screen you can shuffle around until the reflection suits you, but with matte you are stuck with an average.
Well, our experiences are at odds then. Every glossy-screened device I own is usable outside, and none of my matte-screened devices are. It's not a mystery, the physics are straightforward. Gloss improves contrast by lowering black levels. The same effect causes water to darken concrete.
If matte was so much better, wouldn't there be a market for matte overlays for smartphones? Yet smartphones are universally glossy, and universally legible outside.
> If matte was so much better, wouldn't there be a market for matte overlays for smartphones?
If I put the query "antiglare matte protector" on ebay I get an offering of 49000 results of different matte screen covers for phones/tablets/laptops etc. Would that 'after purchase' offer exist if everyone loved the glossy screen experience, like you do?
There is a tradeoff, to be sure. The same property that allows glossy screens to reject sunlight better - preservation of high angular frequency - causes a visible signal (reflections of objects). This signal is more easily disentangled from the image on the screen than a uniform raising of the noise floor, but some no doubt find it more distracting.
Agreed. There is a reason camera lenses are not matte. Polished glass passes light rays more directly and efficiently, meaning a clearer, higher contrast view of the screen underneath the glass.
The big change that enabled Apple to remove the matte option was brighter and more efficient LED backlights. Now their laptop screens have plenty of brightness to overpower ambient light in practical usage. If reflections are interfering with work, one can simply turn up the brightness to overpower them.
This does not work well in extremely bright conditions like direct sunlight. But then again matte screens also suck in direct sunlight. I like to think of this as a subtle hint from the industry that one should not work at the beach. ;-)
> unless you happen to be in sitting at precisely the wrong angle, matte screens reflect more sunlight into your face
Although direct sunlight comes from one angle, many sunlight reflections come from all other angles. E.g. it's hard to find a place at a cafe without seeing reflected glares.
True. However the direct sunlight is so much more powerful than the reflections that it can (supposedly) literally blind you if you stare directly at it. The vast majority of the ambient light energy comes from that single spot in the sky. With a matte screen, the sun is either behind you, and the screen is catching and diffusing all that energy - or the sun is in front of you, and the screen hasn't a hope of competing.
Well, I honestly believe that my eyes enemy is various light sources besides sun (e.g. office lights). And they always come from many different angles, so it's impossible to put glossy screen to avoid them all. Matte would diffuse them good enough.
I mean, I see your point, and agree with it. I just think probability of that happening is less than office/cafe/window lights.
TL;DR: Enabling the external HDMI connector requires the use of a proprietary blob (DRM malware) and the DDR4 memory controller has a small firmware blob that you need.
Bit of a shame about the lack of thunderbolt, but I guess thats proprietary. For me, I'll stick to thinkpads. This certainly has some big advantages over them, but at roughly 5 times the price for similar specs, I'll swallow that pill for now
Thunderbolt is the worst security hole you can imagine. It just gives direct memory access to, well, pretty much everything. So it's trivial to install a backdoor, like it was back in Win95 era.
Mmm, I used a Thunderbolt (T530 I believe) for 2 years without opening it at all, I just had two dock stations at work and at home. So it was pretty much desktop replacement.
But it was as proprietary as Thunderbolt.
This is fantastic. I love seeing things like this and the framework laptop starting to emerge. Even if it's clearly just a niche market thing, it's awesome to see some pushback against disposable everything.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 77.0 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
If you are never going to take it on a plane you can add a lot of batteries and I was thinking it might be fun to make a computer powered by electric car batteries just as electric cars were powered by laptop batteries for a time.
However, you still had to carry the CRT screen (unless you knew that a TV was available where you wanted to use it :)).
No high speed serial ports, and yes I have tried the USB<>RS232 ports, they do not keep up at true high speeds/
No parallel ports, not for printer but to have high speed input and output of digital lines.
No I2C port which has it limits, but i can get a lot of chips that will work with it.
Some of us want I/O that will work with our own hardware.
... starts to quote several ports that haven't been used in consumer electronics for ages (or ... outside consumer electronics in the case of I2C).
Serial and Parallel ports are still important if you are running around a factory floor. That is also why still got a T400 and X201 in working order, because over their card slots I can still can get a good serial port.
- There are 30 million Raspberry pi's sold worldwide and at least a quarter of a million Arduino boards, even more so if you add the clones and knock offs. There is a world of non-professional 'consumer grade' makers and hobbyist that would love to have a more diverse offering in consumer electronics.
instead CES just feels more and more like the Auto trade shows where cars keep converging to more and more homogenous things and designers risk less and less, at some point you are just changing branding and not much else because all the components come from the same handful of suppliers.
Corporations have stopped taking risks that much is apparent.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/olkb/comments/ocf32y/ortholinear_la...
The build quality is alright depending on how you look at it. Better than most other laptops, but most other laptops are half the price. Looking at laptops in the same price range, usuablly they're about the same in my experience. They're fairly upgradable, you can swap the RAM and storage and often the battery, but that's about it.
Where they really fail is on the thermals. They certainly have better airflow than non-gaming laptops, but the amount of heat they produce is orders of magnitude more, and the gain in cooling is not as great as the gain in heat generated.
Most gaming laptops have a battery that will last maybe 3 years at most. Mine (which I'm looking to replace) didn't even last 1 year before it swelled to the point where I could get the backplate back on with the battery still in. Luckily it works for the time being on permenant power.
Meanwhile, my old x240, which I've had for about four years, is still going strong with no issues. I push that laptop hard, far harder comparitive to its specs than I did the gaming laptop.
Edit: For clarity I should say that my particular gaming laptop was a Razer Blade, which I do hear is one of the worse performers in terms of thermals, although its also listed as one of the best for build quality and upgradability, so its a bit of a mixed bag. I had an older gaming laptop which had better thermals but worse everything else, so as usual, YMMV
It has been a hot summer here, and UK houses are built specifically to trap heat, plus I have another which generates a bit of heat a few metres from it for work, so I am in a fairly hot room, but the thinkpad is in the very same room, without any of the cooling measures taken (I usually use it in bed, the bane of a laptops cooler) and as I say, its still chugging along.
Not saying its impossible to have a well built, well cooled gaming laptop, but in my experience, they're not the go to for reliability
They weren't the most powerful, but Dells Inspiron series of gaming laptops have been pretty good the last few years. Especially when it comes to price Dell and Acer keep putting out sub $700 gaming laptops you can often find on sale for $600 or $650. They almost all have an open m.2 slot or 2.5inch bay for extra cheap storage and swappable ram.
Currently I'm on a Maingear Vector Pro (Ryzen 5800H / Nvidia 3070) and a blessing is just how tweakable the fan profiles are as well as power adjustments for each of the saved profiles I have setup. AMD's lastest mobile parts are still extremely performant with a 35W power cap if I want to keep the fan speed down.
All else fails I can just hit the 100% fan button and even under full load the cpu is hovering around 78C and gpu around 68C. It's loud but I don't do rendering often so its a compromise I'm willing to have for the amount of portable power.
I've heard good things about the dell laptops, although that was mainly the XPS range which are more thinkpad competitors. I think for the time being though I'm going to avoid high spec laptops as a desktop replacement, I'll either settle for the drop in specs and use one of my many thinkpads as my main computer, or get a desktop.
If matte was so much better, wouldn't there be a market for matte overlays for smartphones? Yet smartphones are universally glossy, and universally legible outside.
If I put the query "antiglare matte protector" on ebay I get an offering of 49000 results of different matte screen covers for phones/tablets/laptops etc. Would that 'after purchase' offer exist if everyone loved the glossy screen experience, like you do?
There is a tradeoff, to be sure. The same property that allows glossy screens to reject sunlight better - preservation of high angular frequency - causes a visible signal (reflections of objects). This signal is more easily disentangled from the image on the screen than a uniform raising of the noise floor, but some no doubt find it more distracting.
The big change that enabled Apple to remove the matte option was brighter and more efficient LED backlights. Now their laptop screens have plenty of brightness to overpower ambient light in practical usage. If reflections are interfering with work, one can simply turn up the brightness to overpower them.
This does not work well in extremely bright conditions like direct sunlight. But then again matte screens also suck in direct sunlight. I like to think of this as a subtle hint from the industry that one should not work at the beach. ;-)
Although direct sunlight comes from one angle, many sunlight reflections come from all other angles. E.g. it's hard to find a place at a cafe without seeing reflected glares.
I mean, I see your point, and agree with it. I just think probability of that happening is less than office/cafe/window lights.
Yes, because is so easy for everyone to do that...
USB-C would be much better.