Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?
I'd like to understand if I'm missing on any new developments since 2015 or so. Here's what I'd like to have:
*. Goes: preference and alternative, deal-breakers:
1. SIM preferable, WiFi acceptible, but Bluetooth has to be good
2. Spill and dust resistant keyboard that doesn't feel like typing on nothing
3. Trackpoint or trackpad, that works
4. Stylus or touch-screen that doesn't glare
5. Good power management, lasts through the day, done charging in 2.5 hours
6. Runs the hacky-mac or Slax, has a head-set jack
7. Good GPU, fast storage, two fast external storage ports
From my understanding I fit a kind of profile, and am very much not alone. But I'd like to know what the HN crowd take on this is.
731 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 432 ms ] threadOut of interest how bad is the compatibility of the M1 macbooks with other OSs? That might be a dealbreaker as well.
One speck of dust and that thing gets stuck. The keys have no travel, that's no good. And having typed on it a bit, I can attest there is not much difference between those keyboards and typing on straight up glass, feeling-wise.
I love what they are doing with the CPU, GPU, no significant interconnect overhead so that everything is way snappy – like the big 2TB RAM machines I used to maintain back when I coded for a living.
But they aren't thinking of me and people like me when they create those past-2015 products, let me tell you. There is much to hate about the current crop of them.
The most important thing for me is that I can open my laptop and start working in 3 seconds. Without loading, waiting, something randomly freezing etc..
I have a good evidence for this effect being real. My git commit graph skyrocketed since I can open my laptop for 15minutes, do some work and then close it. With windows that was never the case. Either a long programming session or nothing
No thanks.
1) The M1 MacBook Air is better value and has a better keyboard.
2) Properly rugged business PCs are still better hardware (hardware is more than just the CPU).
3) Kubuntu or Linux Mint are a better OS.
Any models you’d point at? After 5 minutes with an HP thing the employer gave me, I’ve never touched it, that thing was an abomination. I’d like a good alternative.
- at least opens 180 degrees: I often find myself having to do the odd bit of work in the car - which is a nightmare generally, but having a laptop that can open flat is essential.
- Fingerprint reader (that works well under Linux): this is one of the saddest things about my current computer. It's a nice to have, but a very nice to have - especially if I end up doing work in a coffee shop with a thousand CCTV cameras.
Thank you for the ideas presented, I appreciate the time taken.
If the rumours are true, the new M1X MacBook Pros being announced this Monday look perfect:
- high performance + battery life
- exceptional build quality
- great screen, sound, and webcam
- decent port selection
They also introduced a crazy bug which when you plug in a USBC charging cable you can twig the temperature sensor on the macbook sending the whole CPU to 100% and it was a software issue not a hardware issue. Still not fixed.
I intend to get the nex M1X for the simple reason that it will be better integrated with the mac's and OS. I don't love Apple, but I consider them to make the best laptop so i'll be excited to see what they release on monday.
It should have a better camera, that much I agree with.
Given the privacy advantages, I'd prefer systems without onbard video or audio capture.
(I'm aware advanced methods can be used to capture some audio signal via, e.g., speakers or device vibrations. I'm looking at risk minimisation / mitigation, not elimination.)
I would argue this is almost impossible with a laptop. Even if the webcam could manage to capture a decent resolution, it would almost always be placed at an awkward position relative to your face compared to an external webcam.
External microphones are so far superior to internal ones that once you start noticing it’s all you hear when people talk via their echoey noise-suppressed-via-magic internal microphones.
I get it; I’m nitpicking. But my point I guess is that even good laptops have a lot worse remote conference setups than most people think.
This is my first Linux notebook after ~4 years and I am really blown away by how easy it was to set up!
Not sure what you mean by keyboard flex, but so far, typing is really good...I am mostly using this for text work (research papers, proposals, presentations), so the keyboard sees a lot of use.
Number one is immediate global availability so I won't have to deal with the customs or pre-order. Sadly the the Framework fails both.
Excellent hardware compatibility (full Linux support) is "number zero". I can only possibly forgive the finerprint scanner for being unusable on Linux (because these are not really necessary and the reality is they mostly are so I accept this).
I fail to follow your logic. Do you mean that Framework has memory/ssd soldered on the mainboard?
The plastic tabs are ridiculous. Why do they use them when there are screws? To save an extra screw and a fraction of a penny off the price?
That I can understand.
But the thing about broken tabs is that only some form of double-sided adhesive or drilling a hole and socket for a screw to replace the tab actually works sufficiently well.
So yeah, not a fan.
Drilling a place for socket for a screw in a laptop means drilling the mainboard - hardly a good idea :-]
I'm not familiar with current ThinkPads.
the whole "it's modular! here's your screwdriver! you can service your laptop by yourself and replace the ram! don't forget your coveralls, you're a hardware technician now!" thing seems a bit.. theatrical? but who knows, i've never owned a laptop with fixed storage and ram so maybe i'm not in the target demographic. also, who knows, maybe their inverted dongle thing will become a standard?
i've always just used thinkpads. they do a pretty good job of picking the right ports in the right quantities and have almost (excluding the ultra-ultralights) always allowed for replacement of ram, disk and sometimes have had a modular bay for cd-rom/dvd/additional disk/etc. quality seems to have dropped a little recently, but overall, still decent.
That'd be true for laptops from 3-4 years ago. That's also what I thought about framework until I saw the recent crap Lenovo etc. are pushing in consumer segment. They have basically tablet motherboards. Everything else is soldered. No ram slots, no sata, no connectivity, only a single M.2. If you're lucky it'll have 1 ram slot. This'll only get worse and spread to all segments.
I think Thinkpads are actually quite fine for user serviceability, although I do find it was much easier to open my old HP Probook than it was to open my Lenovo P1 gen 3. Lenovo had me dig for a whole bunch of screws and tabs to pull off the bottom panel where HP let me access all the important parts with just one screw and a slide-off panel.
Does this even exist? Never met a reliable (even in context of using within a single meter of range) BlueTooth in my life. Only Apple seems to offer reasonably good.
For this very reason (although my experience comes solely from earphones) I hesitate to buy a BlueTooth keyboard which I would normally prefer over occupying a USB port with a separate wireless KB dongle.
What has your experience been with bt? I have the cheapest bt-dongle I could find (4 euros) and it never failed me and is super solid.
Untolerable sound distortions start occuring every now and then. Even under Windows on a new EliteBook with reasonably expensive earphones. Often also with the smartphone when I jog in the woods (tried with different headphones and earphones).
With a cheap full-featured dongle I use on the office PC the sound quality is often untolerable (I mean distortions, not the bitrate, some days it would work Ok whole day, some days it just doesn't).
Built in BlueTooth in my old Dell Latitude only worked with Windows and occasionally with Ubuntu, other distros thought the device was a trackpad (could be fixed with some hacling but was not worth it because still worked unreliably so I used the Creative dongle instead).
Even with Apple (but non-apple headphones of the middle price segment) the connection breaks occasionally although not very often.
Is there a BlueTooth channel scanner by the way? Like the "WiFi analyzer" app but for BlueTooth?
I'd love that, but alas.
Besides, there is 0 things you can configure about BT, and that's intentional. I mean, if you could just upturn the signal x10 you'd get 50 good reception meters out of just that. But you can't.
May I ask why?
It's not like I especially like AMD, but I'd love to support a little more competition in the x86 market. Eventually I'd love to see consumer grade ARM available for non-Apple devices. Their premiums and lockin just don't make it attractive to buy an M1 MBP to install Linux on it.
I guess in this age of soldered CPUs (and other stuff), it's as good as it gets, but I wonder about the price.
- low maintenance so I have more time and energy
- popular so app ecosystem works
- unbreakable
For work I haven't seen a competitor to macbook pro's in a decade.
At least 4 USB ports (2-3 USB-B, 1-2 USB-C).
At least one of them full USB-4 Thunderbolt unless the computer is very cheap.
100% USB-C with no USB-B is a serious annoyance. Lack of a head-set jack is an extreme annoyance I would only excuse if the computer is really great otherwise.
Built-in Ethernet port is very nice to have but not necessary.
Built-in SD card reader is also very nice to have. I actually dream about every computer to have such so people would just use SD cards instead of USB-attached thumb-drives.
My work computer has a 2K screen, BTW. I lower the resolution instead of scaling.
I have a colleague that scaled his monitors up a lot to something that looks hard to use, but he works fine with it.
If your laptop supports that, you can close the lid and it will power ~everything except the RAM down (sometimes a USB port still charges). In 'new' laptops, including almost everything Tiger lake and Intel, S3 is being phased out for Microsoft's "Modern Standby", known as S0ix (or sometimes InstantGo). This is much more like a mobile phone, where it stays on but attempts to use as little battery as possible.
So, peripherals might shut down, but you might still be able to get critical Windows Updates or receive an important notification -- all while your laptop is unplugged, lid closed, in your bag overnight. This is pretty bad for heat, battery, and often not what you might expect. My new laptop uses about 15% battery overnight, just doing nothing.
In the future, perhaps this mode will work as well as S3 used to for battery life, but finding your laptop fans on while it's closed inside your bag and getting really hot is not fun. This applies to lots of laptops currently.
2. A good screen. Brightness that goes high enough to be seen outside (400, or more) - and it'll usually auto turn down the rest of the time to save battery. Hard to go wrong on a Mac, but really variable screen quality across other brands and models. You'll spend a lot of time looking at the screen.
Modern standby was designed for ARM-based Windows 10 Mobile initially, but I do feel that Intel had plead to Microsoft to allow them to implement it too. Regardless, even the best Intel cores (except for their clean-room Atom designs, not all Atom-branded CPUs have these) runs hot that it's a disgrace that Microsoft haven't insisted on requiring S3 sleep.
Isn't Microsoft embarrassed about this? This has been an issue for my last two laptops over the last 5 years. How is it acceptable for this problem to still exist?
My Lenovo supports S3 sleep, but I didn't discover it until probably a year into having bought it, so at that point my battery's ability to hold charge had already been sufficiently degraded, to the point where I'm having to charge this thing every day when I'm mostly only using it for basic web browsing.
I will never buy another Windows laptop, and if Visual Studio ran on Mac I'd probably switch my PC out also. I'm not a mac guy, I find MacOS fairly unintuitive, and really hate the placement of the Ctrl key, but at this point it's clear that Apple's model better lends itself to quality, and I'm sick of all the broken crap that is deemed acceptable in the Windows world.
As I was typing this, a great example of said broken crap, is Lenovo popping up a MessageBox asking me to reboot to update my firmware. Didn't software developers all agree well over a decade ago that windows stealing focus was not a good thing? So why then is a top of the line brand in the PC world writing shit like this?
Not sure if it supports all the features you need, but it exists.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/
Much better off using Rider (also works nicely on Linux).
Microsoft has never been good at naming things. They made that mess of Windows naming at multiple points and they are still making a mess with the Xbox brand.
C:\Programs\SP107705\BIOSConfigUtility64.exe /setvalue:"Battery Health Manager","Maximize my battery health"
C:\Programs\SP107705\BIOSConfigUtility64.exe /setvalue:"Battery Health Manager","Let HP manage my battery charging"
Before, I simply removed my battery when plugged in all day and significantly extended my battery life. If I needed it, it was mostly charged. It would of course dissipate over time so if I had any plans of using my laptop in an actual mobile fashion or wanted to move my laptop from one long term power source to the next, I'd pop it in, make the move and pop it back out. I of course lost the UPS feature having a laptop with a battery pack also served but I could assess when I thought my power source was/wasn't stable and pop the battery in under those conditions (not very often).
Most people I know use laptops as portable workstations. If you frequently operate in situations where you desire battery alone then the OS charge management works quite well. I don't and most people I know don't. In today's world, mos the use cases I operate under those conditions are better served by my smartphone.
Also, true power off guarantees nobody is remotely activating eavesdropping on your device.
Its the same with batteries, you keep them at 100% constantly they will wear out. Its just a limitation of the technology.
Some devices now try and use "machine learning" to determine max charge, for example iphones will maintain a medium charge throughout the night then do a final top up charge to reach 100% just before you wake up.
Yes, of course. That's not the issue, though.
> Some devices now try and use "machine learning" to determine max charge, for example iphones will maintain a medium charge throughout the night then do a final top up charge to reach 100% just before you wake up.
That's different and even opposite from advertising X max charge and only delivering 80% of X as the max charge. What I referred to is a bait and switch, where the manufacturer advertises one thing but provides another. Your example justification, however, is not a bait and switch but aligns the technical MVPs and marketing promises.
The situation is similar to purchasing a fridge that only operates at 80%. All food spoils more quickly, but the fridge lasts longer. If that had been disclosed, instead of the opposite implication from the marketing, then consumers would have almsot certainly made different purchasing decisions. That is why these sorts of things are generally illegal.
In your car example, if a car is advertised with 400 HP but never goes above 320 HP, that's called false advertising. Sure, the engine can get to 400 HP tested on a bench, but that's not why the car was purchased.
Consumers can either accept this and pay for a new battery every few years, or if they want they can limit to 80% and get way longer life battery life if they can live with the reduced runtime.
I'm not aware of any vendors claiming x capacity battery with mandatory limiting charging to 80% of x, rather its an option you have the choice to explicitly enable.
I've had my Lenovo carbon x1 for a few years set to 80% max charge and its battery life is still good.
Battery stats report 480 charging cycles, capacity has dropped only 8 percent from rated.
If you charge to 50% and keep it there, it basically last years.
If you use your notebook primarily on AC, battery is charged and kept on “storage” until you unplug from AC. Over the years, this is equivalent to a battery stored on a box.
So, time stored on a box with 50% is better than 80%, which is also better than 100%.
But. If your notebook is used primarily unplugged from AC, that 100% is better than 80%, because you’ll have fewer deeper discharges.
Deep discharges is what form dentrites. Dentrities is what kill lithium batteries.
I'm not sure what you mean, by default most laptops will charge to 100% and keep trickle charging it to that level consistently while on AC.
Setting a charge max of 40% would be ideal, but there is point where you want to maintain some level of runtime when removed from AC, so 80% is a reasonable compromise.
It is! What do you mean? :)
https://www.keyghost.com/qido/
For all the people downvoting. He is the equivalent of people making "screenshots" with their mobile phone instead of using printscrn. I bet you are complaining about your own users all the time and here you defend someone who can't even be bothered to look at the options he has. smh
If you want to make Windows apps, it just doesn't support that scenario.
My phone (a oneplus 6) can be on standby for nearly a week. That windows laptops attempt at this mode drains the battery by the end of a workday is just pathetic. Instant resume should be available with no practical compromises.
Just as a data point, my 2019 mac sleeps perfectly for multiple days, no problem.
Macs used to be really customiseable, and they haven't got around to ripping all of that out yet.
System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys
You can control how the various keys behave.
Do Microsoft Surface devices have this problem (the heat/fans spinning/high battery drain while sleeping, I mean)? If not, then Microsoft has no need to be embarrassed; it’s the rest of the PC laptop industry that should be embarrassed for not shipping hardware that does the right thing when the OS asks it to.
(Though, I mean, the rest of the PC industry should already be embarrassed, for still shipping new PCs in 2021 that don’t have Thunderbolt/USB4 ports, and desktop PCs that don’t even have a single USB-C port.)
There’s also the fact that Microsoft is (perhaps by accident of fate) “building for the future”; a lot of Windows 11’s assumptions in particular make sense given hardware and CPU steppings in mind that should have shipped a year ago, but which are caught in the COVID logistical conga-line and so won’t be seen for another year. That includes e.g. Intel CPUs with ARM-like big/LITTLE designs.
It's not a 50/50 responsibility split, but it's definitely not 100% on hardware.
While commuting back and forth to work those are definitely asleep in a bag/briefcase.
Don't think that MacOS spares you about that either. Update notifications are equally distracting.
You're right but if I recall correctly notifications do not steal the focus.
"It's OK when we do it"
Yeah, I was astounded when I recently found out about the "modern standby" idiocy. I've almost always used Mac laptops, but I just assumed that at some point in the last 20 years the PC world would figure out reliable sleep. And it seems like they mostly did, and then Microsoft broke it for no good reason?
Visual Studio Code does. Is that the same?
Even has native M1 support.
It is pretty good though. It's enjoying a big surge in popularity lately and seems to deserve it.
Unfortunately, even in S3 sleep, the battery would drain in a day.
I am now back to a MacBook Air (M1) and sleep works perfectly. Life is to short to deal with the terrible state of sleep on Windows/Linux laptops.
I have a Ryzen ThinkPad p14s with Linux. What you do is turn on S3 mode (they call it "Linux") in BIOS as you did. Then in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf you enable AllowSuspendThenHibernate. You can adjust the time. I have mine set to 30 minutes. I also have suspend set when the laptop lid closes. Which means when I close the laptop, it suspends for 30 minutes. If I open before 30 minutes, it resumes right away. If not, it hibernates. The battery will last for practically days if you configure it this way.
You have to configure Linux to hibernate and this will depend on your setup. Just know that it is possible to use LUKS encryption and hibernate to a file (or partition).
Another factor with my Macbook is that it seems to automatically resume from hibernate in the morning. Not sure what it's doing. Maybe it's keeping track of when I typically open my laptop. But you can get this same behavior on Linux with rtcwake. If using LUKS though, you'll probably need to use a keyfile rather than a passphrase for this to work. It would be neat if someone wrote a program that could monitor the time you open the laptop and automatically adjust the rtc wakeup times based on historical data.
Actually, as far as I understand it's a mixture like modern sleep in Windows. Like modern sleep, the system also wakes up to fetch e-mail, calendar events, etc. But in contrast to Windows, it actually works well and is very restrictive (only certain whitelisted apps can update). Apple calls it Power Nap:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-power-nap-m...
Which means when I close the laptop, it suspends for 30 minutes. If I open before 30 minutes, it resumes right away. If not, it hibernates. The battery will last for practically days if you configure it this way
I know, but hibernate on Linux has many issues. First of all, properly restoring hardware state is even more of a hit and miss than S3 sleep (where e.g. the trackpad would often not come up correctly).
Hibernate on Linux also has all kinds of security issues. Hibernate currently does not work with Secure Boot + kernel_lockdown [1]. Hibernate with randomly-keyed encrypted swap requires all kinds of workarounds.
I am not willing to forgo security mechanisms that have been supported for some time on other systems.
[1] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/55845.html
It doesn't have anything to do with the processor does it? Surely neither intel nor amd have removed S3 support?
AFAIK it's integrators (motivated by Microsoft's push of "modern standby"?) which make it unavailable in their bioses: S3 needs bios integration, modern standby is just S0. Or do you mean "hopefully AMD will have a better S0 idle"?
(Also, why does your post show as being made on the 2021-10-14 when this "Ask HN" is from today? Wat)
For mine it's under Config // Power // Sleep State. Windows 10 means useless Modern Standby, Linux means S3. https://i.imgur.com/Y5CchL9.png
In this covid helped me because I learned about this before I cooked my expensive new laptop in its bag :(
Type
powercfg -a
and see:
The following sleep states are available on this system:
Standby (S3)
I'll have to try powercfg next time I boot into Windows.
So you mean Microsoft can force your laptop to restart and lose all your work even when it's "off"? Amazing.
That being said, I hate this, with my old laptop I could close the lid and pop it in the bag and it would lose maybe 5-10% battery per day, with new laptop it happily unsleeps itself in the bag which has zero ventilation.
So for safety reasons I have to shut my laptop down before putting it in my bag, then have to wait for it to start up (which is slow due to corporate software) before being able to use it again.
(Never liked not having the sleep/hibernate choice on macOS. I know better than the computer what my upcoming plans are!)
My experiences with macOS involved tons of unexpected sharp corners like that. Really feels half-finished when you're coming from Linux, as ironic as that sounds
Sleep was a suspend/hibernate hybrid that allowed fast restarts if you still had power, but would restore from disk hibernate-style if you ran out of power while suspended.
Intel diasabled S3 in Tiger Lake
You start with a laptop at 80% charged if you use Microsofts stupid system. The more I use Linux, the more annoyed I get at Microsoft and how they keep worsening the entire pc experience every year.
Users are not users, they are cattle to be managed by Microsoft.
(Other than this I do actually quite like my XPS. Though I do wish I had gone without the touchscreen. It's just annoying because you can't wipe grime off without it causing a touch.
I don't think it was actually installing updates (I use Enterprise eds), though I've no idea what it was doing. I've since started leaving it plugged in on my desk, and haven't noticed it turning itself on at all since then. Weird.
Seems mad they'd try to install updates while not on AC power, and I'd think it's fairly common for sleeping laptops to be placed in a bag overnight.
Sorry, long time Linux user here. I just presumed the sucky state of this sort of thing was SOLELY due to my insistence on using Linux.
Relatedly; seriously - besides the obvious "mindshare" and so on, and I suppose "mostly for the people here;" Macs I get, but why do people still use Windows?
You interact with the screen, the keyboard and the pointing device all the time and they cannot be changed, so all these have to be good. Things like good wifi or bluetooth are nice, but there are dongles.
High refresh rate is desirable, high resolution is nice-to-have, for me.
Even in an office setting, I find matte displays way more comfortable.
You say:
I have yet to see a touchscreen with a matte display. Is it even possible?- track record of linux compatibility. If it's Windows or out, I'm out.
- good keyboard.
- good screen, > 1920x1080 although 4K is overkill, preferably 16:10.
Macbooks look tempting, but I just don't trust Apple to not break any workflow that isn't editing videos about how great Apple products are. The current keys are good but - sorry, the (pre-butterfly!) keyboard on my OH's MBP is awful, easily the worst keyboard I've ever used on a >$1000 laptop.
They broke that a while back too.
But we disagree on the keyboard. I'd say that all their mobile keyboards past 2015 are utter crap, and I'd wager that this can technically be measured in breakage, dust sensitivity, typing comfort and typing performance.
No, that's not going to do. I don't even live in a town. There are literally rafts (barns) all over where I live.
I can not escape sand. And a single speck is all it takes.
To poke a hole in the screen. To disable a key.
That's not good design.
Shut it down or hibernate and you won't have to worry about that.
And we recently could close laptops, have them sleep/hibernate and not wake up until you open the screen again so sticking them in a backpack was fine.
Not sure if the issue is Windows or the hardware but it's a recent thing.
Dell’s attempt to disclaim warranty in a situation like that won’t fly in Australia.
Not sure about user expectations but it’s the first time I heard about laptops overheating in standby mode.
That does not convey "placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin" in any way.
If a computer cannot simply have its lid closed before being placed in its bag it simply is /not/ a laptop. It should not be advertised as a laptop and it should have a big f&%ing warning on it telling you that it will break if you treat it the way you expect to treat a laptop.
Either Dell didn't know they messed up their laptop design and when they found out made the decision not to recall the faulty product or they knew and sold it fraudulently. "This is a laptop - but we know it isn't and will break if you treat it like one warranty void, sucks if you believed us."
Either way Dell made the decision to screw their customers. There's no getting around that. It's a choice they made.
Sadly Hibernate is very complicated and has largely been deprecated from both Windows and Linux in favor of Sleep.
Since Hibernate is gone, let's take it off the list.
Sleep (S3) has been largely removed from these laptops in favor of a "low power mode" that emulates but does not actually sleep the device.
This is why it was previously very safe to keep your laptop in sleep or hibernate mode in a bag, but now isn't- not because user behavior has changed, or that software has changed, but because Dell's hardware has.
A shutdown and startup incur significant setup times, not just for the computer but mental workflow- remembering to open your applications back to where you left them, etc.
In the past (5 years ago) it was normal to expect a laptop to go to sleep when the lid closed and then wake itself back up.
If Dell is telling people not to expect to be able to simply sleep their laptop by closing it and then putting it in a bag, then they're not expecting people to treat the laptop as a laptop. Back in the 80s, we called such computers "Luggables".
A $2,000 laptop in 2021 should not be assumed to be a glorified luggable, it should be a laptop with the same functionality as laptops had in 2010.
Secondly, the number and types of peripherals were tricky to reconstitute and grab the state of, and this made working with the OS tricky. It would be possible that an application might be in the middle of an operation with a device that was no longer present, for example.
Sleep was easier, and yes, it "just worked".
It feels as though laptops are less functional now than they used to be because of stuff like this!
However I am still on a 2015 MacBook.
https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/