Parts of this look neat... why do they refer to the memory as a fixed factor, though? Is this really a single-SKU product without configuration options?
My work one certainly does, and I've found that replacing the cap with an official ThinkPad one gets you about 50% of the way to "ThinkPad-quality TrackPoint". But it started out as "Is this purely decorative? Have you tried to use this?!" so even with the red cover it was "Well, I guess it works for minimal mousing inbetween typing."
These days I use an external ThinkPad keyboard on it, since I'm mostly docked at a desk anyway.
The had to off-center the trackpad to match the trackpoint in order to fit those keys by the left. I'm a very big fan of page up and down keys, but I absolutely hate off-center trackpads. What do you guys think?
Devs use cursor keys more than anyone and they didn't prioritise a layout you can easily hit with muscle memory. I know because my current laptop has a layout like this machine and it sucks
Inverted-T is a good layout for the most part, but I think IBM/Lenovo have suckered me into their 3x2 arrow cluster. Having pgup and pgdown so close to a single hand really helps me fly through docs and PDFs.
16GB RAM? Is it upgradable or can it be configured higher? If not, why in god's name would you have 16GB RAM as a selling point?
FHD at 14"? That's more than usable sure, but I'd prefer at least 2560x1440, preferably 2560x1600; A 16:9 aspect ratio is a pain in the ass.
4 years ago, these specs (if you can even call it that, we've been given almost no information) would have been decent. Now? This just seems desperate.
EDIT: I know this is quite critical. I like that there is a laptop out there from a traditional OEM, that is being supplied with Pop! OS. I just wish it was a better laptop, because the person looking for a laptop with Pop! OS is more than likely going to be looking for one with decent specs and may have enough additional income to spend on those specs. Other than the 1TB drive (I'm happy with 256GB in a lot of cases thanks to my NAS and streaming), this feels like the bare minimum specs for a laptop in 2022.
I haven't used Pop!_OS so maybe this isn't a valid concern, but some Linux distros have a hard time with DPI scaling, especially by non-integer amounts... So you could end up with an unfortunate situation where a 1440p screen is too small to read at 1x scaling but too clunky to use at 2x
I believe Pop!_OS is based on GNOME, which handles fractional scaling in the same way as macOS, by rendering the UI at 2x and then scaling down. In my experience with macOS, this is good enough for ~95% of cases (I've run into issues with image editing and pixel art).
It hurts battery life, but... this is a developer laptop: make it a bit thicker, and give it as much battery as you legally can.
EDIT: If you're going to down this, please share your disagreement in the comments below; fractional scaling has some good arguments on either side, I'd be interested to hear another perspective.
Not downvoting, but it’s problematic on Linux when you hook up a second display at different scaling/resolution. Whenever I’m in Linux in my home office, I regret having 4K monitors that require scaling to be readable.
It's not clear whether it's also got a dGPU or just the iGPU. Both are Radeon graphics. The vagueness of the description leads me to guess it only has an iGPU.
GPU aside, the fact it comes with FHD not QHD is a bummer. FHD probably just fine for gaming but for text based works like programming, writing, etc, for me the QHD display is a minimum necessity.
To be fair, this HP does seem like a fairly minimal-effort marketing exercise. It claims to be "Built for developers", but it doesn't really have any special developer-oriented features, other than maybe the keyboard and the preloaded Linux distro. Kind of reminds me of some of the early "For Gamerz!!!" products that were actually just tarted-up commodity junk.
This is exactly my impression reading the post on laptops/phones here the past few days.
I now understood why the manufactures doesn't really seems to care for this segment, as everyone seems to have enough dealbreakers that nothing's going to sell well.
I think it's pretty cool, right now I use the clevo-based lemur pro (I'm pretty happy with it) when mobile and would consider this for my next upgrade especially if a decent SKU exists at $1,100
my lemur with 1tb/16gb ram ended up costing around 2k I think
While I agree I'm being picky; for you, what's the minimal spec OEM machine that would still necessitate that comment?
If somebody came out today with a machine with 2GB of RAM, a 1024x600 display, and a 128GB SSD; we'd all agree that that's not a developer machine. So what's the minimum for you?
2012 MacBook Air with 8GB ram. Not ideal but I did found and bootstrap my entire startup just a few years ago using one.
With that said, there are many caveats. The most glaring is that developer needs inevitably vary depending on the project and tooling requirements. For example, at my current day job, the computer I physically use is primarily a gateway to other, more powerful computers and systems.
Doing anything at real scale leads to the eventuality that the world can't fit on and be run from a single notebook sized / spec'd machine.
My comment in this case was triggered more by the way op phrased and presented their needy needs, I interpreted it as unreasonably narrow and selfishly entitled. I've encountered enough, neigh too many odd ducks IRL who come across this way and experientially, they've been "Homer Car" types every single time.
> My comment in this case was triggered more by the way op phrased and presented their needy needs, I interpreted it as unreasonably narrow and selfishly entitled. I've encountered enough, neigh too many odd ducks IRL who come across this way and experientially, they've been "Homer Car" types every single time.
That's somewhat fair, but I did only have two criticisms, so I don't think I quite fit the homer car stereotype (although give it a few decades, and I'm sure I'll be "old man [yelling] at cloud") The rest... I couldn't critique, because we don't really have a solid spec.
Right now I'm using a laptop with 16GB of soldered on RAM; it's not the upgradability there that really concerned me, but rather the fact that they advertised 16GB as a solid selling point. 16GB these days, while respectable, isn't an impressive number. Advertising it as your base, without mentioning upgradability, seems a little out of touch. I don't use much memory myself, I'm a VIM user, and I avoid anything overly heavy, but I have colleagues who could make could use of that RAM.
As for the screen, that does come down to preference, to an extent. But, it's 2022, why has screen quality stagnated at FHD? HiDPI should have been standard half a decade ago.
I think the thing is that different people are commenting. People who say "needs more x, y, z" here are not the same who say "it's too heavy" or whatnot on some other thread.
Also, people who think this laptop is just fine (I don't need more than 16G of memory, and HD is fine for me too) have little to comment about, or the only comment they really have "hey, looks cool!"; which are kind of the unsubstantive comments HN discourages. So by and large, those people won't comment. But people who do have something they want to see better do have substantive things (or rants...) to post about the keyboard, screen, memory, or whatnot, so they will post them.
In short, you're 1) seeing a very biased view of what people think, and 2) HN is not a "hive mind" where everyone agrees.
Welcome to the Linux world, one of the reasons the year of the Linux desktop never came is this constant bikeshedding and bashing over other people efforts. You give them a modern desktop environment and they complain they can't run their obscure tiling window manager, you give them a modern init system and they complain their mess of ugly shell script don't work anymore, you give them a modern audio system and I don't even remember why did people hate on that. And you could go on for days.
This looks like an EliteBook or ProBook (they're the only ones with trackpoints, the chassis looks most similar to the 845 G8/G9, but the logo and display looks more like a ProBook - it's not using the classic not the premium HP logo). Both these models which typically have 2 x SODIMMs, making it one of the better options for thin and lights for upgradeability. HP never has high-res panels for their business laptops, which is one of the reasons I don't even consider them (the other is that they usually don't have S3 suspend support, but for an officially supported Linux version, I'll assume they're at least going to spend a bit more time making sure it can suspend properly).
For the price, it seems fine, although I'd probably go for the similarly priced Starlabs Starbook Mk V if you were ok w/ FHD: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook (it has a 5800U)
I guess it's not surprising that a forum full of tech professionals would ignore price when judging things, but the fact that it's fairly cheap absolutely is important for a tonne of people.
Not everyone needs enough ram to simultaneously run a bunch of VMs and train a neural network and edit 4k video all at the same time lol.
(Although 16gb is almost a non starter for Unreal Engine development, and that does run on Linux albeit with some prerequisite yak shaving)
For the most part I agree. It seems to be quite nice, assuming the screen is decent (my older HP that my work gave me gas a terrible screen).
Having 16 GB and 1 TB SSD for about $1000 is pretty good.
I’m not a fan of the arrow keys, Apple made that same mistake.
Given the other specs I’m sure this isn’t possible without raising the price, but I just can’t believe people are still buying brand new laptops in 2022 that have 1080p screens. I mean if it’s a $400 budget model ok I guess.
I suppose I’m more surprised people find that acceptable than that vendors sell it. Do people not know something much better is available?
Ignoring those two complaints/preferences this seems like a pretty decent PC laptop.
Downvoted only because you didn't elaborate or qualify your criticism, which makes for very lame reading and adds nothing of value to the thread.
I'm trying to be nice by giving you some honest feedback, assuming you don't realize that it sucks for people to read vapid criticisms without substance.
Edit: Yes, thank you, please downvote me without saying why. Thank you! How deep does the rabbit hole go? It stings and bleeds.. lol :)
Counterpoint - my circa 2017 HP Spectre x360 is the best laptop I've ever bought, really happy with that purchase. Getting a bit long in the tooth, though.
I have the same model (I think) and love it. It’s no longer my primary personal laptop, but I stuck Zorin OS on it and my wife uses it now for work. The biggest drawback it has is the touchpad. It’s the model year before HP went with a “precision” touchpad in the Spectre, and it’s noticeably bad compared to more modern machines.
I don’t get why, but it’s not uncommon for people to prefer the aesthetic of the trackpad being centered on the chassis, while being offset relative to the midpoint between the two home rows of the keyboard. Palm rejection nowadays is pretty decent, but still, I’d much rather not have my right palm constantly in contact with the trackpad.
It made me notice the vertical line of keys on the right, which is why the spacebar isn’t centered.
I don’t think any of these keys are useful enough to warrant taking that space and shifting the whole keyboards to the left. Feels really like a checklist driven design.
The offset is due to the presence of a pointer/trackpoint/whatever you call it. Otherwise, you’d need to use two hands to click the mouse buttons while using it.
Looking at the keyboard layout makes me wonder. How many devs here actually use the right shift key and/or the right modifier keys? I've been programming for 20 years (15 or so using emacs) and I exclusively use the left shift and left modifiers. I probably have never used the (physically) right shift/modifier keys on the keyboard I'm currently typing on that I've had for 2 years.
I loathe the four left modifier key layout on keyboards which is probably why I hate typing on my Macbook. It would be nice if I could have a fat left control key with the fn key on the right somewhere.
> How many devs here actually use the right shift key and/or the right modifier keys? I've been programming for 20 years (15 or so using emacs) and I exclusively use the left shift and left modifiers. I probably have never used the (physically) right shift/modifier keys on the keyboard I'm currently typing on that I've had for 2 years.
Why would that be common? I ask because I also don't use the right modifier keys, but that's because I got in the habit years ago on a keyboard which forced me to do it that way.
I guess I assume that left key dominance is more common because that's where some modern laptop keyboards elect to retain the control key and add the fn key.
For me it's highly idiosyncratic. I type a lop of caps with LeftShift+Left hand, and RightShift+Right Hand, and many more with LeftShift+Right Hand or RightShift+LeftHand. I think it even comes down to what I'm typing: whether I'm working on Prose or text, and even the language I'm writing in (English, Irish or French)
I regularly swap between left and right shift depending on which opposite side of the keyboard the key I need to modify is (does that make sense?). However, I strictly use left ctrl (replacing left caps-lock) and left alt.
Same as for the caps lock key, one way to look at it: if you don’t use it, remap it to something useful to you. If you only need ctrl on the left, remap all the other left modifiers to ctrl, etc.
It’s a long tail thing I think, but the right/left modifiers pair are tremendously useful if you use it to switch states. For instance I use it for switching IME modes, I could see it used for switching virtual desktops, show/hide virtual environments etc.
It’s more intuitive than using the same key to switch, it works with muscle memory as you’ll always get into a given state by hit a given key.
I use right shift more than left shift because most of my hotkeys use buttons on the left side of the keyboard and two handed combos are more comfortable than hand stretches.
Right Alt/Alt Gr is a different modifier than left alt, though I'd say 90% of my usage is AltGr+4 for the € sign.
Initially I only used the left-hand modifier keys.. then figured this is pretty terrible for the hand, requiring a bunch of stretching. I tried to use the opposite-hand modifier after that.
Now, I use a custom keyboard, so that I can avoid using my pinky finger as much, and can put the modifiers on the home-row.
Right shift when I'm typing with a single hand (for example while phoning or eating). Without it, it would be pretty much impossible to type anything using only one hand, because the rightmost letters are too far away from the left shift key.
The right alt (gr) is very useful to type many languages (especially accentuated) using a US qwerty.
An (arguably better) alternative to alt gr is a compose key. It allows you to type many more characters than alt gr, and the compose sequences are generally intuitive enough that (unlike alt gr) you don't have to memorise them.
I do it all the time - I don't know another way if you want to touch type. It creates a symmetry - depending if the letter key with which you need to combine is on the left or the right hand, I will use the opposite hand to press the Shift or Ctrl keys. And the AltGr is an absolute must for me as I need to write accents for several western European languages and the English International with AltGr Dead keys is the best solution I found so far (and I do not understand why it is not shipped with Windows).
Proper touch typing dictates that you should not use the same hand to both type the modifier key and the modified key. So a symmetrical setup is necessary in that case.
This seems...underwhelming. In most features, especially the screen. Also: I've used multiple high-end HP laptops at work (a requirement), and they are awful.
The pointer stick is a really great thing to have assuming it works well. That said, my muscle memory would be decimated by the lack of a middle button. On Thinkpads, holding this makes the pointer stick scroll, making it a lot more useful than if it only middle clicked.
The pointer stick on my HP isn't as good as the one on a thinkpad, but it's "okay." Of course my HP has a middle-button so the lack of that here is mind boggling to me.
Do you have a ZBook? Those have always had the middle mouse button (probably for people who use CAD etc). EliteBook trackpoints never had a middle button.
I should have been clearer. HP's mainstream business laptops never had the middle mouse button whilst their workstation laptops (such as your 8560W) have always had them.
I want to like this, but I feel like 32GB of RAM is minimum if I were buying a new laptop. I’ve been heavily eyeing the Framework but I’d prefer AMD. This had AMD but is limited to 16GB of RAM… lots of unnecessary tradeoffs being made here.
I’m non-tech side and snorted at max 16GB for devs. GLWT HP. Concur with the other comment that said it’s a marketing exercise aimed at decision makers.
Problem is it’s not a metal encased laptop with a partially bitten fruit on the back. If it had been that then people would have been happy to pay $2K for 8GB RAM and sing paeans and wait breathlessly to upgrade to next iteration for $2.9K next year, again with 8GB RAM.
I mean, is it clear that it is upgradable? Because I don’t see any information about that on HP’s site. And it isn’t ridiculous to ask this question as most $1100 laptops don’t have upgradable memory.
So if you’re stuck at 16GB, that’s unacceptable for a developer laptop in 2022, I don’t care what logo is on the back. 32GB is the only acceptable starting point.
Yea, I admit, Framework makes an extremely compelling selling point here. If I buy a Framework laptop I can buy my own replacement parts and not have to ever deal with warranty service ever again. I can buy Rev 1 and then a few years later possibly buy a Rev 5 motherboard.. and maybe a Rev 5 lower shell to accommodate it or some other silly stuff.
It kinda reminds me of how some Thinkpad addicts went to crazy lengths to upgrade their 10 year old thinkpads with modern parts lol. Except this time it's official and supported.
That's awesome!
I think this HP is kinda tacky. I don't need a trackpoint and I don't want a keyboard offset to the side like that.
Well linux on desktop mostly just works. Linux on laptops has been a headache for a while with awful battery life, trackpad issues, wifi issues and things like that. So personally I don't feel the need for any dedicated linux desktop release compared to the laptop space where I appreciate more of a guarantee that the drivers actually work and I won't spend all my time messing with linux internals trying to get it to work.
I don't think you should use Apple to put upgrade pricing in perspective. They've used inflated pricing to extract extra money from a captive audience for many years. Other OEMs cannot demand similar premiums for commodity products.
They use on-SoC RAM chips, essentially a cheaper HBM instead of just some random SO-DIMMS.
I think a better comparison would be Dell or Lenovo who do the same thing HP does, and they too charge a lot for what are essentially OEM versions of Samsung and Hynix memory anyone can get.
Not sure, what do other laptops in the same price segment offer these days? I admit it's been a while since I looked, but I really doubt anyone has 32gb on a 1000 dollars laptop, or even 1500.
Virtualization is one that I frequently do. Running a VM to test out programs (especially to test out Windows compat, or macOS if you're feeling up to the challenge). 16GB can barely run an additional VM, and if you have 30-40 FF tabs open, an IDE, and so on, then running with just 16GB of memory becomes very restrictive. Allocating 8GB to the (one) VM would leave you with 8 for the host OS, of which 2GB is going to be used by the kernel/WM, and leaves only 6GB to develop with.
I'm using 18GB on Pop_OS right now and often use more. The main contributors are browser tabs and VS Code. If I closed out the projects I'm not actively working on right now and hunted down anything hogging RAM, I could get back under 16GB, but the nice thing about having 32GB is I almost never have to do that.
They are using as much memory as they can because it is available. Chrome is notorious for this. That is not a valid gauge for how much memory is necessary or even useful.
How about the system freezing? Vscode compiling a flutter project with an Android Emulator open. Firefox with MS Teams, Jura etc, no tab hoarding. Sometimes chrome is open as well. Upgraded to 32gb and the freezes are gone.
16gb is not enough anymore for even such a modest workload.
Electron is never modest. It's an incredible resource hog. Memory has become too cheap, people should think instead of just waste resources. The next generations will need to use an abacus again if this stupidity goes on.
My dev workflows on Manjaro with KDE typically required ~18GB RAM (VSC, nodejs, rust, elixir, mongodb, redis, docker, db mgmt tool, browser, mail client, Slack, etc).
On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I think my example is extremely average and common.
I bought a new System 76 machine about this time last year, and splurged (by my standards) on 64GB of RAM. BEST. DECISION. EVAAAR. as far as I'm concerned. For probably the first time in my life, I feel like I can do basically whatever I want and not have to worry about RAM. Have 8 Firefox windows with 200 tabs open, 3 or 4 Eclipse instances, and a few server apps running, and want to launch a bunch of VM's with Vagrant? Done. Want to launch one more Eclipse instance? Not a problem. Opening another couple of dozen browser tabs? No sweat.
Of course that's not my normal mode of operation (well, except for the 200 tabs part), but the point is, I'm finally not limited by memory. I don't have to think about it now. I don't find myself always running "top" or "free -h" to try and figure out "OK, do I need to kill some stuff now?" and if so, "what should I kill?" Nope. Any and everything I do in my routine workflow fits in the scope of the hardware. It's incredibly liberating.
"Oh," the critics will say, "RAM that isn't used is wasted." To which I say "so fucking what? It's my RAM and I'll damn well waste it if I want."
I'm terrified to think that in a not-so-distant future we'll be complaining about laptops shipping with only 64 GB RAM. I bet it'll still be because of Electron.
I still remember upgrading my first PC from 1 meg of RAM to 4 meg. I thought I was a god, and couldn't imagine what I'd ever do with "all of this memory". Times change...
Who would be able to productively use 200 open browser tabs? Seems like a strange argument to waste even more resources on a more and more ruined planet.
Sometimes if I'm buying some stuff from Amazon I'll do a ton of research on each one, looking for alternatives, specs, discussions, reviews, etc. Each search can sometimes go up to 40-50 tabs, especially if I'm looking for a specific set of attributes in a product and I just can't find the perfect match. I'll do the searches in parallel and switch between them, so I'll keep everything open since closing and re-opening 50 tabs whenever I want to revisit a session is tedious. Getting to 200 tabs is pretty normal in these situations.
Sounds like a bit of a stretch. By this line of reasoning, it's not "your private business" that you breathe, since you are consuming oxygen and emitting carbon dioxide with every breath.
That's why uncontrolled population growth is not considered a sustainable pattern. But granting those who are already born the right to breathe few would dispute.
However, those consuming more resources than the share the planet has to offer for everyone are just denying others an equally good life. Either now or in a future generation. https://www.overshootday.org/
Rather useless growth of computer performance might not be the worst problem. But it's easy to address. I can tell you that working with an old 2 GB computer is no problem at all for many tasks with just a bit of thinking. (For sure there are tasks that require more memory. I also use such machines, but not all the time.)
As a collolary, RAM that's not being used by programs still gets used by the OS as a filesystem cache, so it still contributes towards the system feeling snappier.
It took me a week but think about switching to jetbrains. So far I’ve had 0 people regret my pressuring to get off eclipse. My old workplace didn’t blink about the expense and my new job has it as the standard kit. Just a thought even though it is a pain in the tush in the beginning.
I've tried it. And TBH, I don't get all the hype. It was usable, but I didn't see anywhere near enough appeal to justify investing the time/energy to learn Jetbrains as well as I've learned Eclipse over the years. And for its warts, Eclipse pretty much "just works" at this point, especially given that I have suitable hardware for it now. I think a lot of my issues with Eclipse in the past where pretty directly attributable to running on under-powered hardware.
Is this a custom laptop or a different SKU of an existing one? I haven’t seen a recent EliteBook so I can’t identify it on sight anymore, unfortunately.
Similar specs but with a non-Pro Ryzen 7 CPU and smaller 256GB SSD for $649. Keeping in mind that there's no special sale going on, so this is just the baseline price.
By definition an SKU is unique, it’s a product ID code. The exact same laptop would have two different SKUs if it came in two colors but was otherwise identical.
Well actually... I use vim keybindings everywhere including IntelliJ, and I don't use the backspace to delete as it's inefficient... I sometimes use the return key, but not that often either since I have more efficient ways to open a new line as well. I'm sure there's lots of devs like me...
That said, the location of the power button is unfortunate, I would expect it to be on the corner.
Back in the U I had to use some atrocious desktop keyboards in local classrooms. One had power management buttons right above the arrow keys and they had regular keycaps to boot. After losing my work for the third time after trying to delete something I just popped them all out.
> Am I really to believe that relabeling the win key to super is some sort of engineering feat?
I think it's just worth mentioning in the marketing material because laptop keycaps are generally hard/impossible to swap out individually because they're not really standardized. So it's actually significant that it comes with a non windows logo super key out of the box.
Just one of the little things that all add up to make it feel like Linux is a first class supported thing on it.
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but this seems like something that's so superficial, you'd only call it it out to distract from something else. To convey the feeling of first class support, without actually providing it. If I'd been the product manager, I'd have made the change, then strictly prohibited marketing from mentioning it precisely so that people can notice on their own.
I've run not windows on laptops for years, with custom key bindings for the windows key, and not once has it ever bothered me that the symbol on the super key is some funny squares instead of the word super.
It's a really small point so probably not worth dwelling on, and yet, they chose to make it a focus point of their copy. I get try hard vibes.
True, those double width keys will really screw with your muscle memory even more than the regular half-height ones, especially when you're frequently switching to an external keyboard.
They even have enough room for a normal inverted-T if they would just stop copying Apple and make the right shift key narrower. That would also open up a gap between the left arrow and Ctrl for easier blind navigation. This is too much superfluous style with gimped functionality.
Agree. The Right Shift key looks extra wide on this particular laptop, so that design would've left a decent width for the Right Shift key.
Then again, instead of all the extra wide keys and one extra column of keys to the right of the Enter key, why not two extra columns? Then we can:
1. avoid eating into the space of the Right Shift key
2. have Home/End/PageUp/PageDown in the same layout as in a full size keyboard
3. have Insert in there as oppose to being up on the function key row
4. have the power button in the top right corner instead of the awkward position it is in here, somewhere in the middle
Like I said, nobody gives keyboards one ounce of thought ever.
I don't think it's about copying Apple as much as an industry-wide neglect of keyboard design. Most people don't give the keyboard a lot of weight when making buying decisions, and consequently manufacturers give keyboard designs very little thought.
But they're advertising an "FHD" screen as though that's a selling feature? That's only 1920x1080 - my Sony Vaio Z laptop from 2010 has the same resolution. People doing any kind of user-facing frontend dev-work pretty-much need a screen capable of 2x/200%/192dpi (i.e. 4K) at least.
...that's a deal-killer for me, as is the lack of a true middle-button on the touchpad.
> Keep in mind your X1 was at least twice the price of this thing (honestly I feel they are overpriced, Asus do literally the same thing for $1k less)
You cannot look at Lenovo sticker price. My conspiracy theory is it exists for the same reason Azure sticker price does: to give procurement managers something to do. My understanding is almost nobody pays sticker on either.
I paid the advertised, full-sticker prices for my ThinkPads and my SaaS biz' Azure subscription. So that's painful to hear.
I know with Dell it's just a matter of tracking down an account-executive who can negotiate 10-15% discounts, even for one-off orders, but I haven't been able to do that with Lenovo yet. As for Azure: our spend is well under 6-figures/yr (I think $20k right now?), so we don't have a (named) account-manager yet (we do get personal emails from rotating account-execs once every quarter, but they don't seem keen on saving us money...)
Wayland still doesn't solve this problem because many apps (GTK) become blurry as a result of being scaled poorly, and moving them between displays results in weird behavior where they retain their original scale value rather than adapt to the new display's scale. It's not a good experience.
1920x1080 sounds great to me. I used to have it on an older X1 and battery life was great.
When I got my X1 gen 7 with 4K battery life has become much worse. I have not noticed that I have become a better programmer because the fonts look smoother.
It has a trackpoint with 2 buttons which tells us they did not put any serious effort into this input device. Would you use a 2 button mouse without scroll-wheel or a touchpad without 2-fingers scrolling?
I suspect this low effort goes for the whole product which is a budget laptop with marketing directed at decision makers instead of users.
Good catch. The Trackpoint in the photo had piqued my interest. But Trackpoint has come with 3 buttons for about 20 years, and I'm pretty sure the middle button gets used heavily by many people.
People who are excited about the trackpoint probably aren't interested in switching to another input method for scrolling. Personally I usually disable the touchpad ASAP on any new laptop I get.
You can scroll by holding down the middle trackpad button with your thumb and pushing the trackpoint in one direction or the other. You can even scroll horizontally this way. This is the main reason for the complaint about the missing middle button.
Why would anybody use a laptop keyboard and no mouse for serious development work? It's always an ergonomic nightmare.
Of course when travelling light you might choose to leave extra stuff at home. But how many of us need to travel light to a new location before starting their daily work?
The middle button (or "mouse button 2") is a legit pointer interface function that many apps use. Besides scrolling, it pastes, opens links in new tabs, and many application specific uses in eg Blender.
(But there's always been a middle button challenged user population subset around so apps have alternative ways of doing these, a bit like terminal apps can be used without a working meta)
Actually, since they highlight “auto-tiling” window manager (I’m trying to see which one), I think the assumption is that users won’t be relying on the mouse all that much. Kind of the whole benefit of tiling window managers.
HP's been making two-button "trackpoints" forever. I don't get it either, but it's tradition at this point, not some sign of laziness.
And the laptop is decidedly not a budget laptop rebadge. It looks more like a tweaked EliteBook, their high-end business line. That doesn't automatically make it good, but I think your comment was unfair.
I'm not going to critique this laptop as others have done here. Just over $1K for a laptop with an 8 core Ryzen, 16GB DDR4 and a 1TB SSD isn't outrageous.
The main takeaways I get from this are that HP is now getting on the Linux developer bandwagon, and that they chose Pop!_OS as their distro due to the success and reputation of System76. And I think these are both good things, and a sign that we'll see more of the same with laptop hardware vendors.
I'll admit, I'm delighted to see HP announce this, if only because it means System76 will (probably) get more funding for Pop_OS and that this may "legitimize" the Linux Desktop more with three major manufacturers carrying supported options.
Late but absolutely agreed. I fun an Oryx Pro and while I don’t use PopOS, all their hard work is on display constantly — their improvements there bleed over to other distros so easily (they’ve struck a great balance between releasing compatible stuff but staying sane and not exponentially increasing their support burden)
The weird thing is that HP undermines their effort a bit by they doing the consumer bloatware thing where they 'load it up with stuff for you to do your job' according to their marketing material.
Are you referring to the laptop in this announcement? If so, I can't find anything suggesting that there's anything installed by default other than Pop_OS.
I feel like a lot of developers overestimate the hardware specs that they need.
My main development machine is a simple Ryzen 3 with 8GB RAM, and I run two electron apps (VS Code and Slack) at all times.
A comment in a separate thread here mentioned virtualization. That and gaming would be two legitimate use cases, but for plain-jane development, "8gb ought to be enough for anybody" (har har)
Every 16 GB machine I've used for work in the last three years (until current 32 GB one) I'd occasionally run out of memory. Culprit? Web browsers... On Mac, Linux, and Windows. (Though occasionally other stuff needed significant memory too.)
This only happens if you’re the type to keep 70 tabs (or whatever) open. I run 16GB and have never, ever had a browser cause me to start heavily paging.
>This only happens if you’re the type to keep 70 tabs (or whatever) open.
not really, you can just leave a leaky or script-laden page open for awhile to see the same behavior, depending on how things are put together.
example: blue iris is a cctv package that has a webui module. That web-ui client-side browser tab will inflate to system-memory size if allowed within a few days.
Not much of a point other than there are other (probably pretty esoteric) things that one can do to a browser that'll make them fall apart even on modern hardware.
For me the Android emulator in conjunction with a fairly large react native dev server and an ide is enough to fill 16gb. I've had to resort to closing the ide before starting the emulator, and waiting for the first build to complete or things get OOM killed. If I run the test suite whilst the emulator is open then there's a good chance something will get killed as well.
This looks like it could be a compelling choice for my next laptop but will have to pass if it's not possible to go to 32gb
>There are a lot of people using virtualized development environments, which can make it much simpler to run a production-like system locally.
When running Linux, you do not incur the VM overhead for containers (Docker) that you do on Mac or Windows. This allows for isolated production like environments, without carving out multi GB chunks of RAM. Additionally, if you are targeting Linux for production, you often don't even need to containerize, unless you need to run three different versions of node/python/ruby or something else that is just library conflicts all over the place.
> I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
My 2012 daily driver was a well spec'd HP, and it had 8GB of RAM. It did not support more - I tried and had to take the RAM back because the machine would only address 8GB. A look at Macbook specs in 2012: 4GB or 8GB models. I think the 16GB becoming the norm was a few years later.
Unless your stack involves 5-10 JVM apps (with the smallest ones generally working at -Xmx512m but some expecting around 2-4 GiB), and your IDE is also a resource-hungry Java app, in which case the bare minimum is 32 GiB RAM + about 10 GiB of swap.
I’ve done that! But I also have 32GB RAM in my machine :)
I want 64 GB but I will say for my current needs, 32 GB is the sweet spot. My normal daily use is around 20GB. And it is a MacBook Pro. One day I’ll probably go back to a laptop running Linux. It is the fastest for code compilation in my experience.
Using Linux on a desktop workstation, I'm normally able to get by with half the amount of RAM that my Macbook requires for the same activity. Probably because I'm not having to run MacOS and Linux at the same time to pretend that I'm not running Linux.
But it's not just memory, I find running code on MacOS generates a lot more heat causing the CPU to spike and harder to run in the first place.
I was replying to the whole 8GB is enough for typical development. Java is an extremely popular language to develop in and the IDEs alone eat up 2-4GB on their own.
By default a Java app will set its max heap size to 25% of RAM (Java 11 and above). While it may not use all of that, it’s likely to. So, by default, running two Java apps on Java 11 on 8GB of RAM has the likely potential of eating 4GB RAM. Then there’s the OS needs, browser needs, etc.
Clearly 8GB isn’t enough for such a developer. I’ve had this discussion countless times with people over the past two decades. It always ends the same — with people from both sides of the discussion shaking their heads.
The only claim that I feel anyone can make, given enough experience, is that RAM needs vary. So making a claim that N amount of RAM is enough for many or most will always be patently wrong in my view.
Machine learning will generally swallow as much RAM as you can throw at it, assuming you're not just using a nvidia coprocessor with its own memory (and even in that case, you have to keep it fed).
Does it really make sense to do serious ML in a laptop though? my ML/DL training rig runs pretty hot all the time, I could use it as a space heater in the winter. Even if I could have all its processing power in a notebook I definitely wouldn't want it on my lap.
I disagree. When I have to use a system that isn't Linux which seems to be the corporate rule, the requirements go through the ceiling as it always seems to need to use Docker to prevent to be Linux anyway.
Running multiple OS' is always demanding. They could fix it by just using Linux for the dev environment in the first place since all their tools are always electron or Java based.
What’s your full tech stack and OS, and how much swap/pagefile do you have? My personal Windows machine has 8 GiB, and it’s quite easy to fill it up by just running Firefox (with far too many tabs) and WSL, let alone an IDE.
Looks like Apple really has the “charge outrageously and be hailed for it” license.
If HP also had that license - even a second or a third tier one - they’d have priced it $2989 and make everything not upgradable and announced “Pre-installed Linux for the first time ever in any…… HP laptop” and HN would be filled with comments like “I only have 3GB RAM in my HP laptop and it even lifts my pickup truck. Best ever $3K spent. You don’t need more RAM. If you need then you’re doing it wrong”.
>Looks like Apple really has the “charge outrageously and be hailed for it” license.
A new M1 Macbook Air starts at $999, and will put that Ryzen to shame. Not to mention infinitely better build quality and battery life. Apple has always been a great value for the price, even if that price is slightly higher than the bargain bin stuff.
Even before the M1, you paid a small (IMO) premium for better build quality, a great trackpad and (before the butterfly) keyboard, a solid Unix with really great tailored applications, etc…
With the M1 dominance (and inflation) there’s basically no premium at this point (although there is little to no low-end options).
As long as you don't need more memory or storage, at which point you'll pay about a 4X markup for each upgrade and will need to make sure you prepay that when you buy the laptop as everything is soldered.
So Apple wins by default with their two year old M1 Macbook Air and especially when they are already discounted for as low as $949 and you get better battery life and quality compared to that overpriced snake-oil contraption HP is selling.
For that Macbook Air, it is still a good deal but I'd wait for an M2 version. As for that HP laptop, no thanks and no deal from me.
Sure, but the M1 generally has a high-quality Apple screen (this laptop from HP advertises only “FHD” so - presumably 16:9 1080p and not Retina-quality 16:10…) and the Ryzen, though much less constrained than Intel still likely has a “boost clock speed” and power throttles itself when disconnected from power or due to heat. By comparison, it’s hard to call the M1 the fastest computer I’ve used - desktops are plenty fast - but it’s certainly the most consistently performing laptop chip I’ve ever used, and is entirely quiet and cool to the touch at all times.
It’s hard to compare the values of macOS and Linux because they are very different, but it’s still easy to say that an M1 has excellent uses on macOS and everyone interested in non-Apple machines is (to some degree) waiting to see what Qualcomm or Nvidia can come up with in the ARM chipset space for non-macOS laptops… I think ChromeOS laptops prove that iPad-like performance is possible, but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips.
> but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips
FWIW, ThunderX will sell you a 96 core arm64 desktop that definitely offers x64-like performance. And Ampere will sell you a 256 core arm64 2U server node that matches the performance of the fastest AMD Epyc Milan CPUs. AFAIK there is no desktop case that supports the motherboard of the latter, but there is no reason why you couldn't make one.
These things are a bit niche, since the main benefit of arm64 is the reduced power demand at a given performance level, which desktop/workstation users seldom care much about. In the data center though they are killing it, I believe Azure is using the Ampere Altra stuff for their Graviton2-competitor.
> Sure, but the M1 generally has a high-quality Apple screen (this laptop from HP advertises only “FHD” so - presumably 16:9 1080p and not Retina-quality 16:10…)
This looks like their current generation Pro/EliteBook lines. I have one of the higher end ones (EB 845) and oh boy does the screen suck. Not just compared to my 9 yo MBP. But even on its own. Very low angles, washed out colors. It's only advertised as 72% NTSC IIRC. Cheaper models have 6-bit panels on which you can see the dithering in the window shadows. It's laughably bad. And it cost more than similarly-specced MacBook Air.
Other than that it's a usable PC, plenty fast for my needs, and the RAM and SSD are easily upgradeable. Battery life is OK-ish (I get around 6 hours).
Also, everything works under Linux and is even less of a hassle to get going than on Windows (you need an external mouse to install it).
macOS is pretty close to garbage for my needs, so it varies by the person. Of course I'm looking forward to Asahi becoming more mainstream (I do need Thunderbolt support for example).
Hardly comparable. You can not actually own an Apple laptop. You buy some hardware that can not be used or repaired in any way Apple does not approve of... so it is not really yours.
I consider $6000 good value for a Raptor Engineering Talos II workstation because it is US made and you actually own every part of it down to the firmware and schematics.
Good luck with secure boot or disabling the ME on their closed firmware. It gets extra fun when internal modules or the battery get a firmware update that breaks or degrades Linux support again.
I have ported Linux to previous gen macbooks employers insisted I use and it was a mess to maintain.
Also consider your warranty void, so good luck with sanely priced repairs given only Apple can get parts or make repairs in most cases.
"You can't run anything on macs that Apple doesn't want" suddenly turns into "It's a mess to maintain", which is an entirely different thing from literally not being able to run something.
It also means when something inevitably does go wrong, you throw the entire thing away and get a new one. I do not consider this a reasonable or sustainable approach, particularly when out of warranty.
That’s true but if integration means that it’s very rare for anything to go wrong within the product’s lifetime that may not matter and in fact be a net win.
I’ve never had anything break on a laptop[1] I’ve owned regardless of brand since 2005.
I can’t be that atypical.
1. Apart from maybe the wifi on my XPS13 which I can just about live with by turning wifi on and off.
Linux seems to have much worse memory management for desktop usage than other popular desktop operating systems. I have found that I really need 64GB of RAM to make Chrome run well on Linux, but I can get a similar user experience with as little as 16GB of RAM on other desktop operating systems. Firefox does much better, but Chrome seems to be the standard these days, and a computer that doesn't run Chrome well is probably defective in most people's eyes these days.
Yeah my 2020 work MacBook is always blasting its fans because corporate IT installed some monitoring software that is scanning everything all the time. The laptop is a nuclear hazard site cuz it’s so hot all the time. I need headphones on to drown out the fan noise.
Same! My cats greatly prefer when I'm at my desk working compared to personal time because my work laptop (a Macbook plugged into a monitor and kept shut) gets so warm and they love to sleep on it.
The corporate security software is so awful mine stays at an ambient temperature of around 60°c with the constant background tasks. That can't be good for the hardware.
This seems like a reasonable explanation, given that it fits my experience as well. My work Macbook Pro often is quite laggy when JAMF decides to scan everything (i.e. for several minutes after booting up and periodically throughout the day afterwards), whereas my Linux personal machines are almost always quite snappy, even with games running at fairly high performance settings through WINE at the same time as Firefox, discord, sometimes VS Code, etc.
1 GB would require some serious optimization if you want to do some work. But I have a 2 GB machine running Xubuntu without modifications and it is quite usable for some development work (It was bought as a school laptop years ago. You could not use it in school anymore because their stuff requires 4 GB nowadays, but I sometimes still use it just for fun.) I don't think switching from Xfce to sway saves you a whole GB.
Of course there were numerous ways to make a 2 GB machine starve if you wanted to or just don't think what is feasible or not and run several crazy Electron apps or worse. Some lightweight containers are not a problem, I have run those.
My first Linux machine ran on 8MB RAM. Ok, could be that some modern software would not run well on such a thing any more and a modern web browser is unthinkable.
When I studied computer science the VAX-750 had 4 MB and 15 students could compile at the same time from each their terminal. Swapping got a bit annoying under those conditions, but in the evening when a couple of them had gone home it started to run smoothly.
I remember phones from 20 years ago using something like 150 kB, admittedly they had no real operating system, just a simple task scheduler. Probably color display required a bit more already.
My early professional daily driver Linux workstations had 32-64MB of memory.
I laugh at discussions like this. Linux with a slim window manager and vim can run on just about anything and provide a productive programming environment for a codebase of virtually any size provided you can use a remote system for compiles and a slim browser like elinks to access online documentation.
That said my primary workstation runs separate VMs for every application for high security, so I appreciate my 64 cores and 256gb of memory these days.
Just anecdotally, my dev workflows on Manjaro with KDE typically required ~18GB RAM (VSC, nodejs, rust, elixir, mongodb, redis, docker, db mgmt tool, browser, mail client, Slack, etc).
On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I have no idea about Windows, but I don't think anyone would argue that there's much more room on Linux to adjust and optimize for lower RAM usage than on MacOS / Win
I’m not sure about RAM, but in a large software project that is compiled (even Java) it’s pretty easy to max out every core I have available when building.
I try to humble myself there. While 32GB seems ridiculous for 2005, I've absolutely enjoyed having 64GB in 2022. Yes, apps have gotten more bloated. Yes there are many wasteful framework-built heavy apps. In many cases they are doing much more than in 2005.
I wonder if anyone is tracking the average amount of memory somewhere from 1980-forward. I'd take that value * 2 for a developer.
The moment you have to work on a large code base either in Java or C++ you almost never have enough resources. 64GB RAM is fair, 32GB bare minimum to work on such codebases. Otherwise everything slows down, IntelliJ will take 2 seconds to open up etc.
If you don't work on such code bases then yes 16GB is more than enough and 8GB you can live with on your day to day life.
A equivalent MacBook Air would outdo this configuration with an equivalent configuration based on the price
People who need 32 GB of RAM are where you do mobile development for multiple phones. I don’t think the price can be judged. If the RAm is ddr5 or if the SSD is very fast or how it behaves in real world developer workflows is much more important.
> I'm not going to critique this laptop as others have done here. Just over $1K for a laptop with an 8 core Ryzen, 16GB DDR4 and a 1TB SSD isn't outrageous.
I agree. My only beef is the keyboard:
PLUS: No numpad so trackpad is more less centered (I hate using off-centered trackpads and usually don't care much for the numpad)
MINUS: half-sized arrow keys. As a developer I tend to use those for navigation much more than hjkl, and the half-size arrows get mistyped all the time by my muscle memory.
Not a dealbreaker, though. If I use it often enough the muscle memory will adapt.
The rest of the specs are in line with my expectations for that price-point.
Yes, but it has a configurable delay to engage, so accidentially hitting the power key instead of DEL will not turn off your computer unless you changed the config and then it's really your own fault.
That's interesting; I thought System76 made Pop!_OS specifically to have a distro tuned to their hardware, but assuming this is as official as it looks that implies that they've started going for licensing it out to other vendors
They stuck the Pop!_OS logo right up by the HP logo at the top of the page; I would be astonished if they didn't have some sort of legal agreement to use the trademark.
Is it common to have a proprietary/trademarked logo for an otherwise entirely open source project? That seems a little silly to me but I'm not really aware of what is standard.
I guess you would have to trademark your logo to stop people from slapping it on things that don't even use the product. It's nice to explicitly spell out that you won't actually go after people who aren't doing anything silly.
I dunno, I can see value in saying "If it says ThisDistroName then it is actually this specific build of these components from these people, and anyone else can use the code but they have to call their version something else so there's no confusion." If that wasn't how it worked, I could just make "Ubuntu X" or something that used a lot of Ubuntu but mixed in unstable changes and adware and whatever else I wanted and ride off the Ubuntu name.
Yes, Firefox does this for example. To stop other people building their own products (which could be malicious or just crap) and calling them Firefox. You can do what you like with the Firefox source code, but you can't call it Firefox unless you abide by certain restrictions.
Linux is a trademark of the Linux Foundation (see https://www.linuxfoundation.org/the-linux-mark/), and as mentioned by others Firefox is a trademark of Mozilla. It's fairly common, and used to ensure a fork doesn't pop up and claim to be the original product.
I’ve been running it on a spare drive on my desktop PC for the past 2 weeks and I have to say I’m impressed. The level of polish is near Windows/OSX level.
At this point my only reason for booting into Windows will be for games that don’t run on Linux.
Sure, but there's a difference between "this is available for users to install" and "this is available out of the box from a commercial vendor, who is advertising this as part of the product and is using System76 trademarks in their product page".
Or if you a €2000 laptop where the battery will stop working after a year and a half, only to find out that Dell no longer sells them and DRM-locked the thing so you can't even get a third-party one.
Regardless of all of the specs I would say that the biggest thing I would be interested in would be the the screen aspect ratio. 3:2 vs 16:9 is really important.
The 16:9 screen is an immediate turn off for me. on a machine of this size that extra screen real estate you get with 16:10 or even 3:2 is important to me. Shame too, because this could be the perfect machine for me.
Yeah it's a bit of a joke at this point, especially for a device marketed to developers. To me it screams cost cutting. If Lenovo and Dell can start to go back to taller displays then HP certainly can too.
360 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadThese days I use an external ThinkPad keyboard on it, since I'm mostly docked at a desk anyway.
Devs use cursor keys more than anyone and they didn't prioritise a layout you can easily hit with muscle memory. I know because my current laptop has a layout like this machine and it sucks
FHD at 14"? That's more than usable sure, but I'd prefer at least 2560x1440, preferably 2560x1600; A 16:9 aspect ratio is a pain in the ass.
4 years ago, these specs (if you can even call it that, we've been given almost no information) would have been decent. Now? This just seems desperate.
EDIT: I know this is quite critical. I like that there is a laptop out there from a traditional OEM, that is being supplied with Pop! OS. I just wish it was a better laptop, because the person looking for a laptop with Pop! OS is more than likely going to be looking for one with decent specs and may have enough additional income to spend on those specs. Other than the 1TB drive (I'm happy with 256GB in a lot of cases thanks to my NAS and streaming), this feels like the bare minimum specs for a laptop in 2022.
It hurts battery life, but... this is a developer laptop: make it a bit thicker, and give it as much battery as you legally can.
EDIT: If you're going to down this, please share your disagreement in the comments below; fractional scaling has some good arguments on either side, I'd be interested to hear another perspective.
With 16 GB you can run two whole Electron apps!
Of course, to really work without distractions I'll close Slack.
https://github.com/xou816/spot
For a company that has no specialized team for distro development, partnering with System76 was probably a really good idea.
I now understood why the manufactures doesn't really seems to care for this segment, as everyone seems to have enough dealbreakers that nothing's going to sell well.
my lemur with 1tb/16gb ram ended up costing around 2k I think
If somebody came out today with a machine with 2GB of RAM, a 1024x600 display, and a 128GB SSD; we'd all agree that that's not a developer machine. So what's the minimum for you?
With that said, there are many caveats. The most glaring is that developer needs inevitably vary depending on the project and tooling requirements. For example, at my current day job, the computer I physically use is primarily a gateway to other, more powerful computers and systems.
Doing anything at real scale leads to the eventuality that the world can't fit on and be run from a single notebook sized / spec'd machine.
My comment in this case was triggered more by the way op phrased and presented their needy needs, I interpreted it as unreasonably narrow and selfishly entitled. I've encountered enough, neigh too many odd ducks IRL who come across this way and experientially, they've been "Homer Car" types every single time.
That's somewhat fair, but I did only have two criticisms, so I don't think I quite fit the homer car stereotype (although give it a few decades, and I'm sure I'll be "old man [yelling] at cloud") The rest... I couldn't critique, because we don't really have a solid spec.
Right now I'm using a laptop with 16GB of soldered on RAM; it's not the upgradability there that really concerned me, but rather the fact that they advertised 16GB as a solid selling point. 16GB these days, while respectable, isn't an impressive number. Advertising it as your base, without mentioning upgradability, seems a little out of touch. I don't use much memory myself, I'm a VIM user, and I avoid anything overly heavy, but I have colleagues who could make could use of that RAM.
As for the screen, that does come down to preference, to an extent. But, it's 2022, why has screen quality stagnated at FHD? HiDPI should have been standard half a decade ago.
Also, people who think this laptop is just fine (I don't need more than 16G of memory, and HD is fine for me too) have little to comment about, or the only comment they really have "hey, looks cool!"; which are kind of the unsubstantive comments HN discourages. So by and large, those people won't comment. But people who do have something they want to see better do have substantive things (or rants...) to post about the keyboard, screen, memory, or whatnot, so they will post them.
In short, you're 1) seeing a very biased view of what people think, and 2) HN is not a "hive mind" where everyone agrees.
For the price, it seems fine, although I'd probably go for the similarly priced Starlabs Starbook Mk V if you were ok w/ FHD: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook (it has a 5800U)
Or bite the bullet w/ 12th-gen Alder Lake P and go with the latest Framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31433556
Personally, I'm looking most closely atm at the newly announced (but not yet shipping anywhere) Asus Vivobook S 14X OLED (M5402): https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Vivobook/Vivobook-S-14...
* 45W Ryzen 6900HX (I'll assume RyzenAdj support will come eventually https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj/issues/197)
* 8GB DDR5 soldered, 1 SO-DIMM so up to 40GB of memory
* A ridiculously good display: 14.5" 2880x1800 16:10 120Hz OLED w/ 550nit brightness, 100% DCI-P3, HDR500, Pantone validated (and reportedly no PWM flicker on this generation)
* Decent ports - 1xUSB 2.0, 1xUSB 3.2, 2xUSB C, HDMI 2.0, 3.5mm combo audio jack
* 1.6kg
Not everyone needs enough ram to simultaneously run a bunch of VMs and train a neural network and edit 4k video all at the same time lol.
(Although 16gb is almost a non starter for Unreal Engine development, and that does run on Linux albeit with some prerequisite yak shaving)
Having 16 GB and 1 TB SSD for about $1000 is pretty good.
I’m not a fan of the arrow keys, Apple made that same mistake.
Given the other specs I’m sure this isn’t possible without raising the price, but I just can’t believe people are still buying brand new laptops in 2022 that have 1080p screens. I mean if it’s a $400 budget model ok I guess.
I suppose I’m more surprised people find that acceptable than that vendors sell it. Do people not know something much better is available?
Ignoring those two complaints/preferences this seems like a pretty decent PC laptop.
I'm trying to be nice by giving you some honest feedback, assuming you don't realize that it sucks for people to read vapid criticisms without substance.
Edit: Yes, thank you, please downvote me without saying why. Thank you! How deep does the rabbit hole go? It stings and bleeds.. lol :)
I don’t think any of these keys are useful enough to warrant taking that space and shifting the whole keyboards to the left. Feels really like a checklist driven design.
I'm constantly touching the pad with the heal of my palm and I'll never buy another laptop with an offset trackpad.
I loathe the four left modifier key layout on keyboards which is probably why I hate typing on my Macbook. It would be nice if I could have a fat left control key with the fn key on the right somewhere.
Why would that be common? I ask because I also don't use the right modifier keys, but that's because I got in the habit years ago on a keyboard which forced me to do it that way.
It’s a long tail thing I think, but the right/left modifiers pair are tremendously useful if you use it to switch states. For instance I use it for switching IME modes, I could see it used for switching virtual desktops, show/hide virtual environments etc.
It’s more intuitive than using the same key to switch, it works with muscle memory as you’ll always get into a given state by hit a given key.
Right Alt/Alt Gr is a different modifier than left alt, though I'd say 90% of my usage is AltGr+4 for the € sign.
Now, I use a custom keyboard, so that I can avoid using my pinky finger as much, and can put the modifiers on the home-row.
Right shift when I'm typing with a single hand (for example while phoning or eating). Without it, it would be pretty much impossible to type anything using only one hand, because the rightmost letters are too far away from the left shift key.
The right alt (gr) is very useful to type many languages (especially accentuated) using a US qwerty.
I have right-win set up for this.
That is not correct. My old HP EliteBook 8560W had not one but two sets of three mouse buttons. See the first image at this article: https://notebooks.com/2011/04/12/hp-elitebook-8560w-details-...
Edit: I meant, you can upgrade it when speccing the laptop. The RAM is probably soldered.
So if you’re stuck at 16GB, that’s unacceptable for a developer laptop in 2022, I don’t care what logo is on the back. 32GB is the only acceptable starting point.
And of course you can just order a replacement mainboard for your already purchased Framework laptop, which is awesome.
It kinda reminds me of how some Thinkpad addicts went to crazy lengths to upgrade their 10 year old thinkpads with modern parts lol. Except this time it's official and supported.
That's awesome!
I think this HP is kinda tacky. I don't need a trackpoint and I don't want a keyboard offset to the side like that.
More importantly, if companies keep on releasing Linux laptops and only laptops we may really never see the Year of the Linux desktop :(
So I’ll say that expecting 32GB RAM in a $1K laptop is a little too unrealistic.
I was using it to highlight the unreasonable-ness, IMHO of course, of the above request.
I think a better comparison would be Dell or Lenovo who do the same thing HP does, and they too charge a lot for what are essentially OEM versions of Samsung and Hynix memory anyone can get.
Run a C++ IDE on a medium-large codebase and you can very quickly run out of RAM.
I've been sitting at 27 GB for the past two days with PyCharm open as well.
16gb is not enough anymore for even such a modest workload.
On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I think my example is extremely average and common.
Of course that's not my normal mode of operation (well, except for the 200 tabs part), but the point is, I'm finally not limited by memory. I don't have to think about it now. I don't find myself always running "top" or "free -h" to try and figure out "OK, do I need to kill some stuff now?" and if so, "what should I kill?" Nope. Any and everything I do in my routine workflow fits in the scope of the hardware. It's incredibly liberating.
"Oh," the critics will say, "RAM that isn't used is wasted." To which I say "so fucking what? It's my RAM and I'll damn well waste it if I want."
However, those consuming more resources than the share the planet has to offer for everyone are just denying others an equally good life. Either now or in a future generation. https://www.overshootday.org/
Rather useless growth of computer performance might not be the worst problem. But it's easy to address. I can tell you that working with an old 2 GB computer is no problem at all for many tasks with just a bit of thinking. (For sure there are tasks that require more memory. I also use such machines, but not all the time.)
Actually it looks more like an Elitebook 845. Here's one with similar specs (smaller 512GB SSD) for $1569.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-elitebook-845-g8-notebo...
Original:
Yes, it looks quite a bit like this one:
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-pavilion-laptop-14-ec10...
Similar specs but with a non-Pro Ryzen 7 CPU and smaller 256GB SSD for $649. Keeping in mind that there's no special sale going on, so this is just the baseline price.
Am I really to believe that relabeling the win key to super is some sort of engineering feat?
And it's handy to not ignore the power button. What Apple does is just waiting to trigger the ACPI event unless you press it for half a second or so.
That said, the location of the power button is unfortunate, I would expect it to be on the corner.
I think it's just worth mentioning in the marketing material because laptop keycaps are generally hard/impossible to swap out individually because they're not really standardized. So it's actually significant that it comes with a non windows logo super key out of the box.
Just one of the little things that all add up to make it feel like Linux is a first class supported thing on it.
I've run not windows on laptops for years, with custom key bindings for the windows key, and not once has it ever bothered me that the symbol on the super key is some funny squares instead of the word super.
It's a really small point so probably not worth dwelling on, and yet, they chose to make it a focus point of their copy. I get try hard vibes.
Then again, instead of all the extra wide keys and one extra column of keys to the right of the Enter key, why not two extra columns? Then we can:
1. avoid eating into the space of the Right Shift key
2. have Home/End/PageUp/PageDown in the same layout as in a full size keyboard
3. have Insert in there as oppose to being up on the function key row
4. have the power button in the top right corner instead of the awkward position it is in here, somewhere in the middle
Like I said, nobody gives keyboards one ounce of thought ever.
I don't think it's about copying Apple as much as an industry-wide neglect of keyboard design. Most people don't give the keyboard a lot of weight when making buying decisions, and consequently manufacturers give keyboard designs very little thought.
Here is the hires from landing page
https://media.graphassets.com/resize=width:3300,height:2805,...
Edit: Legit, © Copyright 2022 HP Development Company, L.P.
But they're advertising an "FHD" screen as though that's a selling feature? That's only 1920x1080 - my Sony Vaio Z laptop from 2010 has the same resolution. People doing any kind of user-facing frontend dev-work pretty-much need a screen capable of 2x/200%/192dpi (i.e. 4K) at least.
...that's a deal-killer for me, as is the lack of a true middle-button on the touchpad.
I'll be sticking with my ThinkPad X1.
Keep in mind your X1 was at least twice the price of this thing (honestly I feel they are overpriced, Asus do literally the same thing for $1k less)
You cannot look at Lenovo sticker price. My conspiracy theory is it exists for the same reason Azure sticker price does: to give procurement managers something to do. My understanding is almost nobody pays sticker on either.
I know with Dell it's just a matter of tracking down an account-executive who can negotiate 10-15% discounts, even for one-off orders, but I haven't been able to do that with Lenovo yet. As for Azure: our spend is well under 6-figures/yr (I think $20k right now?), so we don't have a (named) account-manager yet (we do get personal emails from rotating account-execs once every quarter, but they don't seem keen on saving us money...)
When I got my X1 gen 7 with 4K battery life has become much worse. I have not noticed that I have become a better programmer because the fonts look smoother.
I suspect this low effort goes for the whole product which is a budget laptop with marketing directed at decision makers instead of users.
Maybe they're there for nipple users - it has one. Use fingers on the nipple and thumb on the button.
So to speak.
I would expect three-finger middle click emulation (which kinda sucks I agree).
Of course when travelling light you might choose to leave extra stuff at home. But how many of us need to travel light to a new location before starting their daily work?
Wish Apple came up with lightweight folding/sliding out displays for extra real estate tho.
(But there's always been a middle button challenged user population subset around so apps have alternative ways of doing these, a bit like terminal apps can be used without a working meta)
[1] https://github.com/pop-os/shell#readme
FWIW though, that’s the trackpoint they use on other machines too. They don’t have a 3 button trackpoint like on ThinkPads.
And the laptop is decidedly not a budget laptop rebadge. It looks more like a tweaked EliteBook, their high-end business line. That doesn't automatically make it good, but I think your comment was unfair.
It sounds funny that this is part of the advertisement.
The main takeaways I get from this are that HP is now getting on the Linux developer bandwagon, and that they chose Pop!_OS as their distro due to the success and reputation of System76. And I think these are both good things, and a sign that we'll see more of the same with laptop hardware vendors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391880
I'll admit, I'm delighted to see HP announce this, if only because it means System76 will (probably) get more funding for Pop_OS and that this may "legitimize" the Linux Desktop more with three major manufacturers carrying supported options.
My main development machine is a simple Ryzen 3 with 8GB RAM, and I run two electron apps (VS Code and Slack) at all times.
A comment in a separate thread here mentioned virtualization. That and gaming would be two legitimate use cases, but for plain-jane development, "8gb ought to be enough for anybody" (har har)
not really, you can just leave a leaky or script-laden page open for awhile to see the same behavior, depending on how things are put together.
example: blue iris is a cctv package that has a webui module. That web-ui client-side browser tab will inflate to system-memory size if allowed within a few days.
Not much of a point other than there are other (probably pretty esoteric) things that one can do to a browser that'll make them fall apart even on modern hardware.
This looks like it could be a compelling choice for my next laptop but will have to pass if it's not possible to go to 32gb
I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
When running Linux, you do not incur the VM overhead for containers (Docker) that you do on Mac or Windows. This allows for isolated production like environments, without carving out multi GB chunks of RAM. Additionally, if you are targeting Linux for production, you often don't even need to containerize, unless you need to run three different versions of node/python/ruby or something else that is just library conflicts all over the place.
> I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
My 2012 daily driver was a well spec'd HP, and it had 8GB of RAM. It did not support more - I tried and had to take the RAM back because the machine would only address 8GB. A look at Macbook specs in 2012: 4GB or 8GB models. I think the 16GB becoming the norm was a few years later.
I want 64 GB but I will say for my current needs, 32 GB is the sweet spot. My normal daily use is around 20GB. And it is a MacBook Pro. One day I’ll probably go back to a laptop running Linux. It is the fastest for code compilation in my experience.
But it's not just memory, I find running code on MacOS generates a lot more heat causing the CPU to spike and harder to run in the first place.
By default a Java app will set its max heap size to 25% of RAM (Java 11 and above). While it may not use all of that, it’s likely to. So, by default, running two Java apps on Java 11 on 8GB of RAM has the likely potential of eating 4GB RAM. Then there’s the OS needs, browser needs, etc.
Clearly 8GB isn’t enough for such a developer. I’ve had this discussion countless times with people over the past two decades. It always ends the same — with people from both sides of the discussion shaking their heads.
The only claim that I feel anyone can make, given enough experience, is that RAM needs vary. So making a claim that N amount of RAM is enough for many or most will always be patently wrong in my view.
Running multiple OS' is always demanding. They could fix it by just using Linux for the dev environment in the first place since all their tools are always electron or Java based.
Perhaps it's a windows thing?
If HP also had that license - even a second or a third tier one - they’d have priced it $2989 and make everything not upgradable and announced “Pre-installed Linux for the first time ever in any…… HP laptop” and HN would be filled with comments like “I only have 3GB RAM in my HP laptop and it even lifts my pickup truck. Best ever $3K spent. You don’t need more RAM. If you need then you’re doing it wrong”.
A new M1 Macbook Air starts at $999, and will put that Ryzen to shame. Not to mention infinitely better build quality and battery life. Apple has always been a great value for the price, even if that price is slightly higher than the bargain bin stuff.
With the M1 dominance (and inflation) there’s basically no premium at this point (although there is little to no low-end options).
SSD is very annoying, though.
If you want to match those specs it jumps up to $1,649 which is $550 more than the HP.
Is the Mac better though? Of course it is, but not everyone needs the latest and greatest and not everyone needs to pay $550 more for it.
From the benchmarks I’ve seen the M1 chips swap so fast that the penalty for less RAM is much less that I would expect on an Intel based laptop.
I’m pretty sure that if I was to move back to a mac right now I’d get 16Gb over 32Gb because there just isn’t much advantage to doubling the RAM.
I mean there’s a bit but to honest I don’t think I’d notice day to day.
For that Macbook Air, it is still a good deal but I'd wait for an M2 version. As for that HP laptop, no thanks and no deal from me.
It’s hard to compare the values of macOS and Linux because they are very different, but it’s still easy to say that an M1 has excellent uses on macOS and everyone interested in non-Apple machines is (to some degree) waiting to see what Qualcomm or Nvidia can come up with in the ARM chipset space for non-macOS laptops… I think ChromeOS laptops prove that iPad-like performance is possible, but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips.
FWIW, ThunderX will sell you a 96 core arm64 desktop that definitely offers x64-like performance. And Ampere will sell you a 256 core arm64 2U server node that matches the performance of the fastest AMD Epyc Milan CPUs. AFAIK there is no desktop case that supports the motherboard of the latter, but there is no reason why you couldn't make one.
These things are a bit niche, since the main benefit of arm64 is the reduced power demand at a given performance level, which desktop/workstation users seldom care much about. In the data center though they are killing it, I believe Azure is using the Ampere Altra stuff for their Graviton2-competitor.
This looks like their current generation Pro/EliteBook lines. I have one of the higher end ones (EB 845) and oh boy does the screen suck. Not just compared to my 9 yo MBP. But even on its own. Very low angles, washed out colors. It's only advertised as 72% NTSC IIRC. Cheaper models have 6-bit panels on which you can see the dithering in the window shadows. It's laughably bad. And it cost more than similarly-specced MacBook Air.
Other than that it's a usable PC, plenty fast for my needs, and the RAM and SSD are easily upgradeable. Battery life is OK-ish (I get around 6 hours).
Also, everything works under Linux and is even less of a hassle to get going than on Windows (you need an external mouse to install it).
Then again, if you get to run Linux on the M1 some day, this might be slightly different.
Freedom is value.
I have ported Linux to previous gen macbooks employers insisted I use and it was a mess to maintain.
Also consider your warranty void, so good luck with sanely priced repairs given only Apple can get parts or make repairs in most cases.
I have a Dell XPS 13 Dev Edition 9370 and tried to replace the Killer brand wifi unit that’s about 80% reliable waking from sleep.
Turns out wifi is soldered in on that edition forward.
I think the same is true for RAM, although it came with 16Gb, which is the mac its processor supports.
Anyone else remember the days of socketed chips that would work themselves loose due to heat?
Putting everything into a single chip is a pain to upgrade but it does mean there’s less chance of things going wrong.
I’ve never had anything break on a laptop[1] I’ve owned regardless of brand since 2005.
I can’t be that atypical.
1. Apart from maybe the wifi on my XPS13 which I can just about live with by turning wifi on and off.
If they are made with discrete components and still can't be repaired then you'd loose nothing by going to a higher level of integration.
People are like we listen to music, have a few docker instances running and we use VScode, we need 32 gb Ram or more.
Why do you need a text editor/ide which consumes so much ram? Is this the reason that apps have gotten more bloated and slow on older devices?
Idk, I'm not a programmer.
I think the price is fair enough, and if the ram isn't soldered (one would be and the other would be upgradable probably)
Had it launched a few months ago, I'd have probably picked it up. Because AFAIK, this seems to be a fairly decent laptop.
I often have to defend Linux because unknowing colleagues blame the OS, when htop shows it's this or that mandated background process.
The corporate security software is so awful mine stays at an ambient temperature of around 60°c with the constant background tasks. That can't be good for the hardware.
Of course there were numerous ways to make a 2 GB machine starve if you wanted to or just don't think what is feasible or not and run several crazy Electron apps or worse. Some lightweight containers are not a problem, I have run those.
I remember phones from 20 years ago using something like 150 kB, admittedly they had no real operating system, just a simple task scheduler. Probably color display required a bit more already.
I laugh at discussions like this. Linux with a slim window manager and vim can run on just about anything and provide a productive programming environment for a codebase of virtually any size provided you can use a remote system for compiles and a slim browser like elinks to access online documentation.
That said my primary workstation runs separate VMs for every application for high security, so I appreciate my 64 cores and 256gb of memory these days.
On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I have no idea about Windows, but I don't think anyone would argue that there's much more room on Linux to adjust and optimize for lower RAM usage than on MacOS / Win
I wonder if anyone is tracking the average amount of memory somewhere from 1980-forward. I'd take that value * 2 for a developer.
If you don't work on such code bases then yes 16GB is more than enough and 8GB you can live with on your day to day life.
People who need 32 GB of RAM are where you do mobile development for multiple phones. I don’t think the price can be judged. If the RAm is ddr5 or if the SSD is very fast or how it behaves in real world developer workflows is much more important.
The experience is really good. It is not too polished and not too barebones.
And it is extremely reliable which, in my personal experience, matched by only Linux Mint.
I use an high-end Asus TUF series laptop. And my experience with the laptop + OS is really good.
I agree. My only beef is the keyboard:
PLUS: No numpad so trackpad is more less centered (I hate using off-centered trackpads and usually don't care much for the numpad)
MINUS: half-sized arrow keys. As a developer I tend to use those for navigation much more than hjkl, and the half-size arrows get mistyped all the time by my muscle memory.
Not a dealbreaker, though. If I use it often enough the muscle memory will adapt.
The rest of the specs are in line with my expectations for that price-point.
Developers are always going to have very specific wants for laptops and classify anything else as a dealbreaker, which makes sense:
If you're used to one thing that fits your work flow and you use it every day, why would you not stick with the thing that works well for you?
At this point my only reason for booting into Windows will be for games that don’t run on Linux.
I've used it for a couple of years in a Dell Vostro laptop (which was factory-loaded with Ubuntu). Works totally fine.
It has great functionality with no requirement of baby-sitting- just like Linux Mint.
woah
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952
https://devnull.land/laptop-s2idle-to-deep