Expensive luxury land fill like all foldable displays currently are. This takes it to the extreme. I am not impressed. We should be building for sustainability at this stage of our existence and this is exactly the opposite of it.
Plus it runs the worst touch based operating system on the market.
The point is that the iPadOS is not designed to be used with a keyboard but windows is. Having a touchscreen on this laptop is a useful/useless add on and not the primary feature.
Windows 11's window management is brilliant, nothing comes close out of the box (of course i3/sway/etc. can be customized to match it). Windows tablets as laptops are generally more usable than iPads as laptops due to stuff like multi-user support, filesystem access and much better window management. As tablets (media consumption + creative work like drawing) iPads are better.
This foldable device can be a nice primary machine while an iPad can't replace a laptop for most users. Macbooks are of course fine devices, but I think folding can become a nice feature when it matures.
It, uhm, works with a keyboard. While touch-based UX is nearly flawless, there are some weird delays, e.g. when switching keyboard layout (you may not know of this problem if your language uses Latin script) -- very annoying since it tends to swallow characters.
Uhm, I have the iPad Pro 12" and that "magic" Apple keyboard cover (that crazy expensive one) and use Japanese, English, German as my input languages, switching often. Zero lag whatsoever.
Good, maybe it was related to the Logitech keyboard. How do you switch layouts, cmd+space? It opened a small window that blocked all input until it auto-closed half a second later.
It has a dedicated key with a globe symbol in the lower left corner. I know what pop-up you are talking about, but that's non-input-blocking, i.e. the language is active when you press the button, and you can continue typing without any wait.
It's possible that your iPad is not performant enough to both render that popup and and deal with keystrokes at the same time. I'd recommend the Pro iPads for any kind of serious work.
That was Pro 10.5 2017, it’s still a very fast device. The Logitech keyboard didn’t have this dedicated button and I last used it like a year ago, so I’m glad the issue is nonexistent now with proper hardware. Thanks for the response.
Yep. Fuck the butterfly keyboard and touch bar. But I'll still get an Apple laptop next time I get a new device because it's the least annoying when they don't let Ive run amok.
I bet you've heard the saying "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" . That's what Apple is. You can be a "fan" of the one-eyed man without believing everything he makes or says is awesome.
I think most people are aware of fandoms and that some people will blindly support something, but that's very different from saying "this site would be cheering for it".
Only because Apple's track record so far is a lot better than Asus' or other OEMs in terms of not adding novelty or gadget-y features to their pro products.
Apple has mastered the second mover advantage. They let all the other companies blow money on R&D and educating users while they simply observe the pain points. Then, they swoop in a few years later and reap the benefits.
To be fair, they don't just "reap the benefits". They are working hard at improving new technology until it is really a product. They have many prototypes long before the first product, but don't end up selling those prototypes.
What novelty features did Asus do? Apple did touchbar, the thinnest keyboard on earth, a super underpowered 12 inch MacBook, a screen with an iphone build in. And that is only the last few years.
> This means companies are being pushed to build more efficient things.
No, this means companies are being pushed to build the least expensive things, efficiency is just coincidental in some cases.
> Humans will fix sustainability issues automatically.
That depends, if you mean "eventually" I can somewhat agree with the argument but that's just a wishful thinking thought exercise. Eventually sustainability issues will be fixed because if not everyone will eventually die from the lack of resources, doesn't mean that the fixes are timely or with the least suffering that we as a species could be capable of.
> No, this means companies are being pushed to build the least expensive things
Least expensive literally translate to more efficeny. To build cheaper things you need to spend less on electricity for manufacturing, less on transport (fuel), less on labor etc. Which means more efficeny.
> Eventually sustainability issues will be fixed because if not everyone will eventually die from the lack of resources, doesn't mean that the fixes are timely or with the least suffering that we as a species could be capable
Sure. But this also assumes we are on the verge of collapsing because of sustainability issues. We don't know that. This also assumes somehow if we start pushing on sustainability now we are going to overcome that. We don't know that.
> Least expensive literally translate to more efficeny. To build cheaper things you need to spend less on electricity for manufacturing, less on transport (fuel), less on labor etc. Which means more efficeny.
You are just considering the production aspect of efficiency. Cheaper is not higher quality, cheaper goods have a higher rate of failure, higher rate of failure means increased consumption which pushes production up. More efficient and cheaper production with better quality definitely falls into your argument, anything else becomes highly variable if it will translate, ultimately, to better efficiency of resource usage overall.
> Sure. But this also assumes we are on the verge of collapsing because of sustainability issues. We don't know that. This also assumes somehow if we start pushing on sustainability now we are going to overcome that. We don't know that.
Why on the verge? I'm using the same time-scale as you did: eventually, which in mathematical terms would mean a function with its time component using a limit approaching infinity. Eventually automatically solving sustainability because "market forces" push towards efficiency doesn't mean that we should just accept that as a rule and that it's the best course of action given that we can actively model and predict if we should and could be more efficient and sustainable.
What's the argument against focusing on sustainability first? Hampering innovation and some warped sense of progress?
A device that allows me to get both a desktop-like experience as well as a notebook-like experience is more wasteful than having both a desktop and a laptop? (or a desktop dock with monitor and a laptop)
I can't help but see folding screens as a limited-life product. Sure, laptops only last, usefully, about 6 years anyway, but it's such an obvious wear spot which would cripple the entire device.
Please show me this data from any other manufacturer... take Apple, do they put out how many drops they test their latest iPhone, the one that they advertise doesn't need a cover? The standard deviation, Bell curve?
Nobody cares about this - what people care about is: What happens when this breaks ? If Asus offers good warranty on it, why does it matter when it breaks??
But there is no indication that it breaks every month, and there is a strong indication that it breaks less ten once every 6 years. Also there is literally no indication that it takes 2 months to repair.
What I am seeing from you is just negative comments about this technology, literally based on assumption and made-up standards that are not common in the industry.
Samsung's recent foldable phones (e.g. Galaxy Z Fold 3) are proving to be quite reliable, the crease is still visible to some extent but they don't tend to break.
When I read about the 30,000 cycles, I can't help but picture a mechanism which performs a "perfect" opening/closing cycle with equal force distribution.
How many cycles would that translate to when being opened/closed on the go by pulling on a corner? Or being used by a toddler?
I've had a couple of laptops where the mechanical hinges became wonky after a couple of years. Intuitively they should be a lot sturdier than a folding screen, but perhaps intuition is misleading.
Micro-USB plugs are supposed to be designed for a minimum rated lifetime of 10,000 cycles of insertion and removal. My experience has not had one last even 2,000 cycles before becoming unreliable, even for cables that have always been used in ideal circumstances (gently plugged in, resting on a table). As for ones where the device gets used while plugged in, moved around, occasional lateral forces on the plug, well, they’re generally just about completely useless before 2,000 cycles.
USB-C plugs are supposed to be 10,000 cycles too. The A–to–C cable that came with my PinePhone was dead at the C plug end within four months of daily usage with occasional somewhat-stronger-than-ideal-but-not-all-that-excessive forces being applied. A couple of other cables haven’t had issues so far.
When they say 30,000 here, I’d be surprised to get 3,000 before significant problems are apparent, and wouldn’t be surprised if I failed to get 300. I like the idea and want it to work, but don’t expect it to just yet. I wish they’d focus their effort on having two separate screens with a small gap between them rather than trying to straddle the hinge, because that would be somewhere between almost as good and slightly better, and much more likely to be reliable.
This is still early tech. Early generations of mechanically-difficult things are generally terrible. I can speak to the unreliability of the Surface Book hinge: I had four units (19 months with moderate issues by the end (mild battery pillowage, screen yellowing, several split keycaps) that led to warranty replacement; 8 months then battery 2 spontaneously died; roughly DOA; two years before battery 1 died and it was out of warranty and after only a little more use it’s now pretty much a brick, can’t even stay powered on and significant pillowage on both batteries), and their base/clipboard, base/power and clipboard/power connections (which were basically the same interface) always became not completely reliable well within a year, though they weren’t particularly troublesome until maybe fifteen or eighteen months. I do acknowledge that I used this hardware fairly hard, but it was consistently well under a thousand cycles before at least minor issues in the connection were apparent, and these OLED hinges are probably even more demanding.
AFAIK there is absolutely no innovation with software defined keyboards, they statically mimic a physical keyboard. I would expect well defined open APIs so that applications tailor the keyboard for optimal contextualized use for that app.
The only thing that came close is Apple's touchbar but even that one is quite static and not very liberating in practice.
Of course the downside of adaptive software keyboards is that you have a slightly different keyboard layout per application, so mostly a feature for experienced and professional users.
Adaptive keyboards are actually more oriented towards beginners than advanced users. They optimize for feature discoverability (and coolness factor).
Physical keyboard is current optimum for text entry precisely because it is not adaptable, and that enables you to adapt to it. Without muscle memory you are much, much slower. When an advanced user wants to refresh page, they can instantly recall Ctrl+R combo and just press it, without glancing down and coordinating between hand and eye to tap the icon, and then verifying the tap was registered. With adaptable keyboards the advanced users lose all their edge.
That said, swiping is really nice way to enter English text on touchscreens. I still hate switching to numbers and special characters, or entering non-dictionary words, but it works unexpectedly good. I agree with you that more innovation is needed.
> they can instantly recall Ctrl+R combo and just press it, without glancing down and coordinating between hand and eye to tap the icon
Interesting example, I can imagine something like an Ctrl+R combo to be a bit cumbersome on a software keyboard, would need to test it to be sure though.
Touch keyboards don't sound very liberating. I think experienced/professional users will be an especially bad fit for this. Imagine having to constantly look down at the keyboard to see what contextual options are available. It's like getting a new keyboard and having to get used to a different layout, except it's forever. Say goodbye to your flow state, hope you haven't gotten used to it.
That said, this laptop seems to include a physical keyboard, so maybe it's not that bad. I hope manufacturers keep experimenting with computer form factors, but preferably sane, human-centric ones.
I see what you mean here, but am not so sure about that to be honest. We just haven't seen much innovation here IMO. It could specifically optimize for flow, somewhat reminiscent of Github Copilot and the suggestions in phone keyboards.
For example I am wondering how a keyboard could adapt in a spreadsheet application if you focus on a non-empty cell. Depending on what's already there, there might be a predictable set of options on what is likely to be done next. (without limiting free form either).
I don't have good examples, because I simply don't know what could be done. But I am convinced that something that statically mimics a physical keyboard can be improved upon.
I think eventually (5-10 years?) most "laptops" may be using on-screen keyboards. Especially if there is somewhat decent haptic feedback.
It just makes so much more sense from a manufacturing standpoint for one thing. Makes it much simpler and you don't need to create separate keyboard layouts for different languages.
Also, younger generations are quite comfortable using on-screen keyboards on their phones.
But what will really make it take off is contextual and customizable user interfaces that sit next to the virtual letter and symbol keys. Which of course there could be many more symbols or emojis available in subkeyboards or for different contexts.
I have some doubts about this, since I feel like using a screen as a keyboard is more prone to joint based injury or wear and tear like posture or RSI related problems. So at least I don't think it would be the main keyboard type.
I love the innovation but I don't see me buying something like this. I'd use it like a standard laptop and I think most people would do the same.
And then you have all the possible screen problems. We've seen it happening with phones and I wouldn't like paying a considerable sum of money for something that will break easily if I look at it the wrong way.
Gives us connectivity, good screen, power and autonomy. Leave the weird designs, they remind me of the mobile phone era before the iPhone.
Older Asus fold had many issues with Linux. In most cases, you can get headless mode working but forget about GUI. A better solution would be trying out System76, HPDevOne or Dell XPS dev edition for Linux desktop.
The Purism Librem 14 isn't half bad either. Currently using it. Love the build quality of the case, matte screen and kill switches. Quality of the built-in speakers is not that great. Keyboard is acceptable. The trackpad is nice and big.
Most likely only if packaged in ChromeOS or Android workloads, which isn't what you're asking for, but is what OEMs care about after the netbooks market vanished.
Just get a Thinkpad. They have all the features you want. They're not going to be as thing and light, but their keyboards are better than anything out there. The touchpad is iffy, but if you're using Linux (I use it too), your touchpad experience is going to be subpar anyway.
This is especially a problem on the older models. Some Thinkpads are really excellent machines besides their unfortunate 720p, TN panels.
Admittedly though, Lenovo seemed to get their act together on later laptops. My T460s has a matte 1080p display with 90%+ DCI P3 coverage, which is pretty good for a $300 used laptop.
I ordered a 1080p screen and controller from Aliexpress for my trusty old Lenovo T420. Installed in about 30 minutes and worked perfectly. The difference in image quality versus the original crap panel is huge.
I have an X1 Yoga which is capable of all of these things. It is a laptop with a good keyboard setup that can hold up it's own screen w/out a kickstand. When I don't want the keyboard I just fold it up and the keyboard changes to lift and lock so the back of it is solid making it easier to put on a stand (or A frame it and use a couple of books in a pinch. They sell one with linux preinstalled too.
Should be back in stock "soon"... Though I'm keeping an eye on the pipenote instead now - more powerful CPU. Instead of LCD it is epaper which as pros and cons for this use.
I have a Surface Pro 7 and it's great for this. It doesn't have a matte screen but does the rest of it well. I'm running PopOS on it and switch between the included keyboard and an external keyboard with it on a tablet arm.
My solution when traveling was to rest the keyboard on a bit of acrylic over the keyboard. https://www.instagram.com/p/CZRltWhpA6x/
(I didn't like the idea of resting an external keyboard on the laptop's keyboard directly).
The official numbers will be from an optimal test rig, but someone did do a more "realistic" folding screen test recently by flipping a Flip3 manually until it died.
Samsung rates it for 200,000 folds, and it lasted 418,500 folds before the hinge failed, with the screen actually still working.
I don't particularly like Apple, but I use a Macbook Pro. I've been keeping an eye out for a non-Apple alternative to a Macbook, but nothing seems to come close in terms of hardware. I don't mean technical specs. I mean a beautiful screen, reasonable dimensions & weight, a really good touchpad, great battery life, etc.
A big foldable screen looks cool, but doesn't feel at all pragmatic. Could someone please compete with Apple?
The reason that there is no non-Apple alternatives to the MacBook Pro is because everyone is too focused on blue sky innovation rather than actually doing the best job of stuff that already exists.
Quality is the feature that apple sell. I don't think anyone else gets near them.
Selective quality. There were most-expensive-on-the-market-yet-worst-quality fraying cables that my 1$ usb cables from aliexpress could run circles around long after those were discarded (or not, my mother-in-law still carries one around, I guess to remind everyone how crappy engineering looks like). Bending phones (was it 6?). Also some nefarious moves like slowing down older phones.
Every manufacturer has these blops. Yet very few (more like none) have such fanatical crowd of followers who uncritically accept everything and keep peddling the same 'apple is quality, above others, better than google on privacy' and similar wishful thinking/lies. They just have better PR department is all I see, the rest is just another HW/SW company who charge premium.
Its nothing new, other businesses figured this long ago. You can have a normal decent handbag, or have louis vuitton / hermes one. It will cost you 10x (or 100x) more. Its often hand-made quality. Many women love them. Most guys are looking on this in same way we would look on... mentally underdeveloped. Yet the market exists and its booming. And nobody is arguing Hermes doesn't bring higher quality than regular brand.
Coming back to your claims, apple rarely truly innovates these days and technologically its behind most manufacturers (low res cameras producing pleasing but over-processed pics that have colors far from reality, battery charging on level of basic 2016 phones, screen is OK but definitely not top of the market, bluetooth implementation is beyond pathetic for such a manufacturer, literally everybody on the market has it better). They take over others ideas that work and improve them. Which is fine but not the stellar behavior I would expect from 3TN company having 1 centerpiece product.
I never understood WTF people were talking about with the cables. I'd go 5+ years with various Apple cables without a single sign of fraying. Not even careful with them, would just wad them up in bags when moving around, that kind of thing.
... then my kids got older, and my wife move to Apple and started borrowing my cables. They all kill Apple cables in like 6 months flat. It's incredible.
[EDIT] As for how they do that, I'm not sure, but they constantly use them stretched too far from the outlet, so there's a ton of tension on the cable, and frequently arrange them such that they're bent a sharp 90+ degrees right next to the connector, often while also under tension. I never do either of those things. I assume those are the things that cause it.
Apple's built up an incredible lead right now (in quality and specs), but as the son of a of a macbook from a few years ago, the idea that Apple sells "quality" is mistaken, with the most obvious example being the butterfly keyboard, which would make your device unusable if you happened to say the wrong combination of words at the wrong time.
But generally Apple has a history of laptops that have design defects, which Apple does not acknowledge either for years after they stop selling the laptop, and/or are forced to by a lawsuit (which will usually complete years after they stop selling the laptop), at which point most people won't even be aware that Apple has instituted a replacement program and/or discarded their brick for parts on eBay.
100%. I take this opportunity to make people NOT forget 'Staingate' [1]. My colleague had horrible time getting his daughter's Macbook fixed by Apple, as officially they did not acknowledge that the problem exists for months (maybe close to year+).
Ouch. Looking at that link, today I discover my late 2013 MBP had that fault and is in the list of machines that was eligible for repair, but of course the time limit has passed.
I have a late 2013 MBP whose screen developed visible loss of coating in 2014, and cleaning the screen even made an annoying always-on bright pixel due to a tiny chip in the surface. I was sad at that at the time and looked into getting a new display, even paying for it, but there was no way to do it. You couldn't even go to an Apple store and pay for this repair.
That said, this 2013 MBP has been a lovely and excellent machine in almost every respect, and it's still my daily driver (as a software dev), which is great value and longevity for a laptop. I was skeptical of Apple before I got one, but now it's almost a no-brainer to get another when the time is right.
I took my quality Macbook to a dogbark. My quality macbooks' fancy screen broke because of a thin layer of dust at said dogpark. Opening up my quality macbook was like difussing a bomb. I learned from that experience and won't ever buy another Macbook again for as long as I live. the Macbook replacement has made several trips to a dogpark. I did have a good experience at the mac store though. Dude was honest about the situation and could relate to my pain and rage.
Interesting! In our experience, travel and residence in central African dust the likes of which doesn’t exist in EU or NA didn’t do anything to Macbook Air or Macbook Pro. What kind of dust was the dog park? How did it affect the screen in particular?
Which is funny because while current 14' and 16' MBPs are very ahead of competition, previous generation was dogshit in terms of quality, and had a lot of this "blue sky innovation" that decreased usability - like the touch bar.
The M1 and M2 (and the benefits from them, like ridiculous battery life, low heat (enough so that you can run it totally fanless unless you're outside in the direct sun or something), and more importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good. Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now, especially if you have other ios devices.
Or Linux, at this stage. Apple silicon support is not good enough yet to be a pleasant experience. Sure, an x86 laptop doesn't compete with power efficiency of the M1/M2 - might be useful if you regularly need to go multiple days without power, but my x86 laptop already gets more than 8 hours battery which is "good enough", and is just as fast for development usage (I have an M1 MBP too, I have tested this side by side).
As a bonus I have full control of the hardware and the software that I want to run on it. I almost never reach for the Macbook unless I need to test something OSX specific.
I made a similar comment down below..there are many good laptops out there and it's insane what we take for granted now. High PPI super-bright screens, 8+ hour battery life, < 1" thick, < 2lbs, 2tb+ nvme ssd, etc.
I work in the microsoft stack but I use parallels on a MBP.
> importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good
Because it has dedicated hardware to make photo & video editing good. Which is great, if that's your jam. It's dead silicon if it isn't, though. M1/M2 strike a great balance for performance & battery life, absolutely. But it's very narrow in what it can achieve desktop-comparable speeds on when it comes to heavy workloads, and other laptops are drastically faster at rather large areas of consumer computing like gaming.
> Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now
Or if you're just a casual / lite user but want something other than 13.3", which is the only size Apple offers an economical model. Or if you really like having a touch screen, which Apple refuses to do for some reason. That second point is basically the entire reason my SO is hunting for alternatives to the Air.
You're right..the lack of a touch screen is weird.
I do use mine for dev work/etc though (M1) and it's completely fine, even with only 8gb. I've never had any slowdowns or felt like it was holding me back.
> Very generally, Java is one of those things. CPU performance is really, really good for non-rosetta workloads.
Single-threaded (or "lightly threaded") absolutely. But if we're saying "desktop-comparable" and "heavy workloads" I'm gonna assume a multi-core workload and go throw things like the 5950X or 12900K into the ring at a minimum, and the 5995WX at the extreme. M1 ultra starts at $4k after all, it's absolutely fair to include Xeon-W & Threadripper Pros against that. M1's big cores punch above their weight, but they still can't make up that much of a core count deficit.
There's plenty of good laptops out there not made by apple. Dell XPS 13 is excellent, asus has several zenbook models that are on par, etc. They don't get much media coverage because the standards we expect from laptops are so high now that we take it for granted (0.75" thick or less, all day battery, insanely high pixel density (enough to require scaling), fast enough cpu/memory for any day to day task, great screen brightness, 512gb-2tb+ nvme ssds, generic charger ports (usb-c), etc. You can get all of that for under $1k from several makers now.
I don't know what other manufacturers are focusing on, but it sure looks unimpressive. I just received my shiny new macbook pro 14 inch. I spent the last few months using a Linux laptop. Overall a good experience and it works. But I'm glad to be back on a mac.
Quality and performance are where Apple just shines. Most PC manufacturer's seem to mainly compete on how bad of a screen & touchpad combination they can find. There are some truly awful things on the market of manufacturers that just stopped even trying a long time ago. Touchpads are universally awful in the laptop market, with the exception of Apple. I found this out by connecting my magic touchpad 2 to my Linux laptop. Works great! As good as with a mac. The software support in Linux is fine. Precise, responsive, smooth, just like it should be. It's the hardware that is the problem. Even brands that are supposedly premium keep opting for these cheep plastic touchpads with poor sensitivity, awkward button mechanics, etc. Apple nailed this decades ago. On this front they have no competition.
That, the screen, and the stellar performance of the M1 is making the difference right now. I connected an external drive with x-plane on it a few days ago to see how far I could push it. Turns out, I can max out all the sliders and it runs at about 30-40fps at the normal screen resolution. That's with lots of add ons, some of which are really demanding and using the rosetta emulator. Very impressive. For work, this thing runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2-3x.
Looks very niche to me as well. But I can already see it might well be the most ideal laptop for presentations, given you could preview slides on one half and keep keynotes on the ‘keyboard’ half.... I can see myself enjoying using something like this for such purpose.
In East Asia, novelty or "cuteness" of a product, i.e. the look of things, is mostly what counts. That's how East Asian makers try to stay ahead of the competition, because actual innovation that goes beyond the surface (no pun intended) is hard and not actually encouraged in societies with a confucian view of the workplace.
>actual innovation … is not actually encouraged in societies with a confucian view of the workplace.
How does this follow? If the implication is that collectivist societies frown upon excelling relative to one’s peers (which is not true, BTW), then wouldn’t the exact same logic apply to novelty or cuteness?
No, this is the result of corporate bean counters thinking they should maximize short term profit with a splashy product, rather than maximize long term profit with high quality and reliability, which take more time for the market to recognize.
I think this is too shallow a dismissal of innovation in an area so large that it spans 35% of the globe, and there are quite literally numerous existence proofs that it isn't correct.
The idea that all innovation happens in the United States and Europe is fairly ridiculous, innovation happens on all levels of product development, both deep in the guts of products as well further up as well as sometimes entirely new classes of products.
I have anecdata. I worked for an European guy who was designing new (and at least in his mind) innovative hardware from scratch in the US. And getting it manufactured in China. The Chinese looked at him like he was insane because he was designing everything from scratch instead of cloning something.
Guess why - because the East Asian customers want thinness and lightness over power. I know because in Japan, when people saw my Mac (a 2013 MBP), first they were like "oh a Mac, can I try it?", but as soon as they held it, they were extremely surprised by its weight (compared to some 11" Toshiba notebook they preferred). It's understandable because in Japanese and Chinese cities, city people rarely drive but lug around their computers in bags, up and down stairs, standing for 1-2 hours in the crowded subway, etc.
I've been very happy with my Dell XPS 15 - 5 years old and still going strong albeit with reduced battery performance. Great Linux support and a nice screen.
Will probably upgrade in the next year or two primarily because replacing the battery and increasing the ram is pricey enough that I may as well buy a new machine.
+1 for the XPS line! I have one that is probably ~5 years old. Just replaced the battery on it with no hassle (got a reasonably priced OEM replacement from NewEgg). The build quality on these things is excellent, and the specs are not bad either!
The New XPS line doesn't support real sleep mode. It is a huge pain starting work after the weekend and most of your battery is already gone. I'd avoid them until they get this fixed.
I think most people (not devs/designers) view a laptop as something that costs around $750. That is why Windows still has a huge marketshare. Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Microsoft all have laptops that have solid build quality, OLED screens, touchscreens, etc. at $1,500-2,200 price range but no one buys those. If you are in that price range, you are probably in one of those niche industries (design, development, graphics) and you are probably buying an Apple.
I think Linux is still much better than MacOS in terms of design and usability, but that doesn't really mean much when operating systems compete on compatibility with programs (which themselves compete on compatibility with operating systems). It is a vicious cycle.
If your job requires you to run AutoCAD or VSC++ or something, you're just going to use windows. The average user isn't going to figure out how to use KVM or Wine or something. If your job requires some linux/unix tool, is the average user going to fidget with it until it works in MacOS or just use Ubuntu or something? MacOS is the worst of both worlds: it is both closed-source AND a minority OS.
I used a rolling release distro for a while on desktop and a NUC, it was really nice and convenient. But I switched over to Ubuntu for a laptop ("they'll sort out the touchscreen drivers and onscreen keyboard situation" I told myself), now and I kinda regret telling people to "just use Ubuntu or something" in the past.
It worked when I first installed it, until quite recently, when a new version hit. Upgrading every package at the same time is obviously destabilizing, something has changed in the plumbing and under certain circumstances some gtk programs require a 30 second timeout to occur before they start, and there's the whole snap firefox debacle. Longing for the stability of rolling release, oddly enough.
Anyway, I haven't used MacOS, but I've generally been surprised to find that my current system is hovering around near-Windows level usability, other than the familiar terminal which is nice. Probably time to try out tumbleweed...
I disagree. Buying Dell and Samsung laptop in that price range I'd say it is an overpriced rubbish if you compare to current Apple produce.
There is really no comparison when it comes to build quality and performance.
I have an XPS and I personally find it better than the M1 MBP in almost everything except power efficiency, so I have much difference experiences compared to your other review in this thread.
The XPS doesn't make much noise and I notice no difference in speed while developing. Some tasks are even faster, because native Docker instead of running via Docker for Mac. The battery doesn't last as long I guess, but it will still last for 8 hours, which is far longer than I need.
This is not my experience with XPS 15 (2019). It is substantially slower, it is loud and battery used to last less than an hour. Then constantly dying chargers, I had a box of Dell chargers that worked for a month and then laptop stopped recognising them.
For the tasks I do (I use Docker heavily) M1 is more than twice as fast in low power mode and never heard fans going off or felt any slowdowns.
On XPS if I opened a heavier webpage, it was possible for the entire laptop to slow down and not even refreshing the screen timely, so you witnessed a slideshow and usually only way out was to perform a hard reset.
Also random power off or if it goes to sleep it won't wake up. I have to then leave it for an hour and then maybe it will power on (sometimes I have to try a couple of times). This is actually the same experience I had with earlier XPS 13.
Google XPS won't power on - plenty of people have this problem.
That view is so myopic - loads of people buy high end non-apple laptops. I would anecdotally guess many many more than apple overall. Just seems you're lacking in awareness of it. Probably a particular social bubble you are in, combined with myopia to the rest of the world.
> I mean a beautiful screen, reasonable dimensions & weight, a really good touchpad, great battery life, etc.
The competition on the other side is on specs. It's hard to stick hardware with bigger numbers in a thin case. Look at Intel's NUCs vs the Mac Mini... they come with a power brick larger than the computer to win in specs, while Apple has an elegant built in PSU.
And... a working touchpad that can actually replace a mouse for 95% of use cases? How are you going to market that?
You want the largest numbers, you have to go with the others. If you can stomach windows. You want a less annoying experience, Apple unfortunately has about zero competition there. Which is bad even for Apple users because then you get masterpieces like the butterfly keyboard...
The "great battery life" is part hardware, but largely software. See also: iOS devices with "worse" specs and smaller batteries that perform way better than "better" Android counterparts, while also having longer battery life. Some of it's hardware voodoo, but a lot of it's iOS and MacOS and various pieces of Apple software (notably Safari and Mobile Safari) being very respectful of system resources and protective of the battery.
It's a bit like how you used to be able to put BeOS on a Windows or Linux desktop and it'd feel like all the hardware was 4x higher clock / bigger memory size than it had been.
There are plenty of non-Apple alternatives to the MBP. Plenty of laptops with a 6800U or 6800H. None of them have better trackpads, but plenty have nice ones and significantly better keyboards. And some have OLED or 240Hz screens which I'd say are better than the ones in the MacBook Pro. Any laptop with that processor and a reasonable 65Wh+ battery is going to have great battery life.
Some even have great graphics cards, or touchscreens with pen support, or mechanical keyboards, etc... ASUS even makes a few laptops in this category (some of them are branded as gaming laptops but really do everything you want).
The issue with PC laptops isn't that there is no competition for the MBP. It's just that it's very confusing and that there are literally hundreds of options and only 5-6 models that will do what you want.
> I don't particularly like Apple, but I use a Macbook Pro. I've been keeping an eye out for a non-Apple alternative to a Macbook, but nothing seems to come close in terms of hardware.
I used a MacBook Pro for work a few years ago, 2014-18, and really liked the hardware.
Never got the vaunted "It's So Intuitive!" UI hype, though. And from OS "upgrade" experience -- felt more like downgrades, with the ever more limited configurability -- during that time and from everything I've heard since about the constantly shrinking "walled garden" of their ecosystem, I've pretty much come to detest their software side.
Soo... Give Asahi Linux a couple years more to mature, and if in that time they release a fanless (M2, M3?) laptop with a larger (16-17", or, heck, why not even more?) screen, I might be really tempted.
I’m unlikely to buy a foldable laptop, but a foldable monitor while traveling sounds kinda nice. I’m working from a hotel right now, so I can easily imagine it. Folding flat would offer protection from scratches in a bag/backpack and take less space. Would be hard pressed to fit a 17” portable monitor in my bag, but if it folds in half that’s more tenable!
Slightly incidental, but after years of working out of hotel rooms, I’ve found that a 15.6” 4K portable display placed on a small tripod (Arca-Swiss mount) sitting directly above the main display of my 14” Macbook has been the perfect travel setup. It’s a dual-display setup, portable (similar area to the computer itself), similar desktop area and font resolution to the native panel, and prevents you from craning your neck.
I have two Asus ZenScreen Go MB16AHP. Comes with built in battery and a bunch of other great features.
For me, both of them stopped charging and refused to work right after warranty ran out. Now they are sitting on my shelf waiting to be cannibalized.
I very much enjoyed these screens. They were response, relatively light, fit into the bag, and with their own battery, I could chug along for hours without issue. Oh the joys of getting ready for meetings in airport lounges!
So, Asus portable monitors for me were great design, not so good implementation.
Sure, I have an Innocn PU15-PRE. Just to reiterate that a 15.6” 4K is definitely the way to go. I also tried 14” 4K and 1440p panels but - on account of the way scaling and font rendering works in MacOS - they’re a big step down. Even moreso if you’re doing anything graphically intensive - you’ll want to use non-native scaling on a 14” 4K which is expensive for the GPU. The 15.6” panel doesn’t have this problem because the “effective 1080p resolution” divides cleanly into the native 4K panel resolution.
You could also move the camera to film the reflection from the 45 degree glass, if you’re looking for a home office teleprompter solution and not a live presentation version.
Yeah, it's not actually for a teleprompter - I'm using it as my zero-parallax video conferencing solution with a Canon R5 as my webcam. I'm currently using an 11" iPad Pro using the excellent Duet Display software which does the horizontal flip [1] and it works great for that. I'd like the display to be larger though, but that requires upgrading the teleprompter too and I've been toying with that hence my question about monitors that can do the horizontal flip. But I think I'm just going to mirror a 24" monitor underneath my videoconferencing setup so that I can better see presentations during meetings.
...you're using a four thousand dollar (not including lens) mirrorless camera as your webcam for videoconferencing services that are typically barely a few megabits per second?
Yep. But I also use it as a stills camera and a video camera. And you should see the lens that I have mounted to it :) But that's not what I do for a living. Because of that, the camera would otherwise sit on a shelf, unused. I use it for many hours each day and it makes me happy to use it. The only gear that I bought that I wouldn't otherwise have owned is a $250 teleprompter, oh and the Camlink 4K for the HDMI->USB and probably a few other things, but you get the idea. Most of these mirrorless cameras sit around unused all day long. Kind of like your car when you're parked at work.
Yep, this is at eye height. For me this solution is better than using a laptop raiser because: you get two displays instead of one, and in a setup no wider than a laptop, and you don’t need to pack an external keyboard, mouse and/or trackpad. Plus a tripod and portable display packs way better than most laptop raisers I’ve seen.
The upper display becomes your main display, the lower one your secondary. You still have to look down sometimes at the secondary but that is vastly better than craning your neck the whole time.
Edit: [Pic](https://imgur.com/a/sdLmYJG). Bad photo but you get the idea. In reality, both those panels are perfectly angled for viewing when I’m sitting down in front of them, with no overlap.
That’s great that you guys are into this. I feel like I cracked the code with this one. I told my irl friends and they just shrugged.
Sibling, stoked to hear that! Enjoy glorious pain-free travel productivity.
I often use it at home, too - just to get out of the home office from time to time. Can work from the kitchen table without compromise. Takes less than a minute to set up.
But limits the output to 60hz and I get random flickering when reconnecting 60% of the time. However the devs of that app have been super active and it has improved a lot in just a few months so I’m sure it’s temporary.
I tried it - it’s okay, but a bit flaky - especially disconnect/re-connect. While it does _improve_ font rendering on sub-Retina displays, it’s still nowhere near as nice as font rendered on a display recognised as Retina-capable by MacOS - which any 4K display is. It’s particularly noticeable in the setup described above, as your eyes are constantly moving between the in-built Retina display and your external display.
It might be a good solution if you already have an, eg, 1440p display and want better font rendering, but if you’re putting together a setup from scratch, MacOS just works hassle-free with 4K displays. You’ve got to stare at these things for hours every day, so.
I'm using a very similar setup for when I want to work away from my 27" 4K display but still need a second screen to be productive (e.g. doing almost anything coding-related). Like the previous poster, I set it up with the external screen directly above my laptop screen which for me is much more comfortable than trying to put it beside the laptop, and ends up at a perfect eye level.
It’s great, isn’t it? Can’t imagine working any other way now when I’m away from my desk.
I recently added keyboard shortcuts (using BetterTouchTool) on my left hand for moving the mouse cursor up and down between the centre of each display, as vertical mouse movements seem to be more tiresome than horizontal on account of the lie of your arm (less of an issue with the built-in trackpad).
This is really neat and I want to find a similar solution. My concern is how long it takes to set things up - does it get tiring to always set up the tripod and mount together before adding on the screen? I wonder if anything exists with just a mount that attaches directly to the monitor (like Vesa but no screws).
And how is the durability of your portable display? I got one and used it for a year but keeping it in a carryon bag in airplanes eventually messed up the display from being pressed and bumped around.
It’s a bit cumbersome but it probably takes nor more than a minute or two to get set up if I have it all broken down. The Tripod folds up small enough that I can leave the “tablet mount” part connected to it and throw the whole thing in my bag. Then setup is just extending the tripod, clamping in the display, and connecting the cable.
A US-friendly link to a similar product is https://amzn.com/dp/B09H6QV53R (I searched "arca-swiss tablet mount 300mm" to find it; there are others that only go to 230mm width for folks interested in this with smaller portable monitors).
Personally I am currently experimenting with a Lenovo ThinkVision M14[0] perched (a little precariously) atop a Roost V3 Laptop Stand[1], which is a lower-quality but lighter, more minimal setup than what you describe.
When I'm on Zoom call, which is often, I can move the laptop onto the stand for a better camera angle and put the external monitor beneath.
I'm not doing graphics work and I find the 60Hz, 1920x1080, usbc-on-both-sides monitor sufficient for my purposes (much, much better than an old asus one which was 30Hz or less, and laggy).
. Portable 4k screen (the glare in the photo is not really visible in front).
. Custom mount for the laptop and a
. Wireless thinkpad keyboard with a trackpoint (which I love).
The cabling management has improved now, but this setup gives plenty of screen real estate, both displays are touch, and in comparison with a tablet where the applications context is lost the majority of time, here I can be more productive and is a joy to work with it.
I've done a similar setup, but for a minimalist mount, used two 12in rulers, and gaff tape to make a hinge, a strap connecting the other ends, and a stop on one of them. So a heavy thinkpad sits on the desk ruler, leaning back against the other and the strap, with the bottom keyboard edge sitting between strap and stop. It's fragile, and I fear someday there will be a bump, crash, and sadness, but it's light, compact, and easily recreated.
Not nearly 17", but I've found my iPad Pro makes a reasonable second monitor when traveling. It isn't really large enough to want to do work on it - I keep those windows on the main laptop monitor - but it works as a place to drop email/Slack/misc other things.
I advocate this as well. It’s superior in almost all ways to the portable screens of which I’ve tried many, and you also have an iPad, ideally with cellular chip. :-) On many short trips you can leave the actual laptop at home.
FWIW, when I used the Asus portable monitors they came with a folio case that covered the screen when it was in a big and was used to stand the display up at different angles
Agreed, that’s what makes this kind of interesting personally. I tend to prefer smaller devices for travel, being able to get both that and more screen real estate would be pretty cool.
Nice system but it is ironic that nowadays many people are moving to Apple Silicon just for the battery. Beyond the better specs like touch screens, cameras resolution, etc.
Going back in time I just now recognize and remember that one key aspect of the Palm original devices was battery duration comparing to previous experience (e.g. Newton) in innovations.
For me the battery was the least of concern - I am used to having my laptop plugged at all times. Any laptop I had wouldn't last more than an hour on battery after few months of use.
The selling point for me was silent operation and performance. For instance, my XPS 15 will wake up fans even after entering the BIOS and just opening a browser tab with a heavier website would make them fans spin like airplane blades.
It's so annoying that I dread everytime I have to work on it.
Yes, I would clean the fans regularly etc.
Working on a Mac M1 is a pure bliss. It feels next level in every aspect and the battery life is outstanding. The fact that I can run the laptop in low power mode and it is still much more performant than my XPS is mindblowing.
I'd be really excited if they offer this as part of their ZenScreen portable monitor range.
They seem to be currently mostly 1080p but a folding 17" or larger HiDPI screen for an existing laptop would be brilliant.
I generally like smaller laptops like the MacBook Air or XPS 13. I could see me using a tri-fold ZenScreen in hotel room and then just the laptop on a plane/train tray table.
I've been pitching for a while hinged screens, like double laptop screen that unfolds a second same-size screen above the first. The fold seems like a nice touch, if this would come as a separate portable monitor I'd buy it in a pinch.
iPad Pro 12.9” as external second hidpi/retina monitor for Macbook is remarkable in three modes
- USB-C to USB-C for all day powered zero latency extended desktop
- WiFi for cable free extended desktop
- keyboard mouse sharing (by pushing your Macbook cursor against the side of your laptop screen by the iPad, till it “pops” onto the iPad) for seamlessly running Macbook apps and iPad apps side by side using your main keyboard/mouse, able to not just cut and paste but drag and drop (!!!) between the two devices and OSes.
And then just the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard (and its trackpad) on the plane/train tray table (hinge design sets the screen in from the hinge, allowing use in shallower depths like the tray tables).
Which is considerably worse, the monitor or the iPad?
Comparing this:
12.9” mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR display
2732x2048 resolution at 264 pixels per inch (ppi)
2D backlighting system with 2596 full‑array local dimming zones
120 Hz refresh ProMotion technology
Wide color display (P3)
True Tone display
Multi‑Touch input
Apple Pencil input w/ pressure and tilt sensitivity
Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
Fully laminated display
Antireflective coating
1.8% reflectivity
SDR brightness: 600 nits max
XDR brightness: 1000 nits max full screen, 1600 nits peak (HDR content only)
1,000,000:1 contrast ratio
… to what’s available on Amazon in 4K or 5K screens with no computer (iPad or iMac) attached, I can mostly only buy the LGs for $1400 to $1700, and they don’t work with a stylus. The comp isn’t really a monitor anyway, it’s a Wacom Cintiq Pro.
Have you ever used an iPad Pro with Sidecar - ie, as an external moniyor? I have! You're going to be compromising heavily. Bye bye to 120hz, you're going to be struggling to hit 60hz sometimes. Hello to video compression, so all those pixels are going to be far from what they can actually do.
Any real external monitor is, I'm sorry to tell you, going to blow it out of the water in image quality, and it's not even close. Especially if there is any movement or if you're going to be pushing more frames. It's just the name of the game.
It's real competition isn't external displays, because it really can't compete there. It's laptops with pen support. And it can't compete against those either. Believe me, I tried to make it work, it just can't.
You clearly haven't seen a modern iPad Pro screen if you think it's inferior 'in every way' to other portable monitors. 120Hz refresh, super high pixel density, amazing color replication, I could go on. they're beautiful.
What high-refresh rate OLED travel monitors are you comparing it to?
Have you tried using it as an external monitor? It can't even hit 60fps reliably, and there is noticeable lag and compression. As an external monitor, it really sucks.
As a monitor of a machine into its own, at 12.9", I'm comparing it to the OLEDs in the new Vivobooks, which have even higher pixel density, better contrast, very comparable colors, and inherently better motion performance.
As with most Asia-led "novelty" features on electronic devices, this looks like a "because we can" feature rather than a "because it's useful" feature.
It blows my mind that companies have the resources to sink into "innovations" like this that are just so far out that they are sure to fail. The mere sight of this stresses me out with how fragile it looks, and how clumsy it would be to use
They are around and actually very good. I got a flip 3 for my wife and I wish I got one myself, too. While not bad, the camera could be better - I like the pixel camera more.
apple decided to use a paper sticker in place of metal shield, turns out whoever designed the phone in the first place used that metal shield as a structural element. No shield = bendy phone = Touch IC just so happen to be located at the bend and its balls pop off. You end up with
We haven't solved the "bendable glass" problem yet, so foldable displays are made of soft plastic which is extremely easy to damage compared to the toughened glass you're accustomed to. You can put a permanent dent in them with your fingernail if you're not careful.
The innovations in this area are incremental so you won't get the best out of it now. Investment into bending oled already went into smartphones so migrating it to laptops doest require signifiant capital. I would take this over a new set of "emoji innovation" and new OS skin/theme anytime.
I must confess that I like bending/folding screens and "rolling screens" even more (i.e. for TVs). I would fold my iphone if I could(assuming that the screen would not get worse) and I would love to double the screensize of my macbook air or shink it into an ipad.
I really didn't want to do this, but I bit the bullet and bought M1 MacBook Pro.
Oh, having previously worked on XPS 15, this laptop is like next level in terms of pretty much everything.
I feel like manufacturers putting Intel or (to an extent) AMD processor in any laptop just waste their time. Sure there will be people who will buy it (who don't know about M1/M2), but it's like buying a legacy technology for premium price.
So while the folding screen looks impressive, I can't help but think it is just an expensive gimmick.
Rather than churning very much the same laptops year on year I wish manufacturers spent some time on designing a new CPU if Intel and AMD can't keep up or trying to license the CPU tech from Apple.
You're comparing an (I'm guessing) few years old xps that needed replacing, to a last year's premium quality/pricing laptop. I know Intel is still behind on efficiency, but you should try a 12th gen with p/e cores before you write the whole thing off as legacy.
Also I'm not sure apple wants to license anything - they're doing quite well keeping the design to themselves.
I had a couple of generations of XPS and I am not convinced it will be much different. I watched a few comparison videos on YT and there was no contest.
Laptop would have to be constantly plugged to achieve similar performance to M1 and the fans... the fans is a deal breaker for me.
Intel is far far behind now, even with the 12th gen.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadPlus it runs the worst touch based operating system on the market.
Windows 11's window management is brilliant, nothing comes close out of the box (of course i3/sway/etc. can be customized to match it). Windows tablets as laptops are generally more usable than iPads as laptops due to stuff like multi-user support, filesystem access and much better window management. As tablets (media consumption + creative work like drawing) iPads are better.
This foldable device can be a nice primary machine while an iPad can't replace a laptop for most users. Macbooks are of course fine devices, but I think folding can become a nice feature when it matures.
It's possible that your iPad is not performant enough to both render that popup and and deal with keystrokes at the same time. I'd recommend the Pro iPads for any kind of serious work.
I feel apple lost the edge on innovation on the desktop space a long time ago.
Vast majority of the world population don't give a shit about sustainability.
Consumers always want to improve their life by spending as little money as possible.
This means companies are being pushed to build more efficient things.
For example Electric cars can travel much longer than traditional cars for the same cost of fuel.
More efficient means, less pollution.
Humans will fix sustainability issues automatically.
But it would never be by building products whose core service offering is sustainability.
No, this means companies are being pushed to build the least expensive things, efficiency is just coincidental in some cases.
> Humans will fix sustainability issues automatically.
That depends, if you mean "eventually" I can somewhat agree with the argument but that's just a wishful thinking thought exercise. Eventually sustainability issues will be fixed because if not everyone will eventually die from the lack of resources, doesn't mean that the fixes are timely or with the least suffering that we as a species could be capable of.
Least expensive literally translate to more efficeny. To build cheaper things you need to spend less on electricity for manufacturing, less on transport (fuel), less on labor etc. Which means more efficeny.
> Eventually sustainability issues will be fixed because if not everyone will eventually die from the lack of resources, doesn't mean that the fixes are timely or with the least suffering that we as a species could be capable
Sure. But this also assumes we are on the verge of collapsing because of sustainability issues. We don't know that. This also assumes somehow if we start pushing on sustainability now we are going to overcome that. We don't know that.
You are just considering the production aspect of efficiency. Cheaper is not higher quality, cheaper goods have a higher rate of failure, higher rate of failure means increased consumption which pushes production up. More efficient and cheaper production with better quality definitely falls into your argument, anything else becomes highly variable if it will translate, ultimately, to better efficiency of resource usage overall.
> Sure. But this also assumes we are on the verge of collapsing because of sustainability issues. We don't know that. This also assumes somehow if we start pushing on sustainability now we are going to overcome that. We don't know that.
Why on the verge? I'm using the same time-scale as you did: eventually, which in mathematical terms would mean a function with its time component using a limit approaching infinity. Eventually automatically solving sustainability because "market forces" push towards efficiency doesn't mean that we should just accept that as a rule and that it's the best course of action given that we can actively model and predict if we should and could be more efficient and sustainable.
What's the argument against focusing on sustainability first? Hampering innovation and some warped sense of progress?
Also cheaper doesn't mean it have to be low quality.
Computers used to be unaffordable to vast majority of people and companies 50 years back. Now everyone has one in their pocket.
Thanks, but no thanks.
I get it’s tempting to say this will be worse but, will it? I don’t think it’s fair to say this immediately…
Foldable displays have several million times more parts being folded...
Unimaginably poor design detail and QA on the tension setting. Many of this and other Yoga models junked on account of it. Easy enough repair though.
How many did they test?
What's the standard deviation?
What does the bell curve look like?
What are the test conditions?
What happens when you put this in the hands of an average user who does not conform to the test conditions?
Nobody cares about this - what people care about is: What happens when this breaks ? If Asus offers good warranty on it, why does it matter when it breaks??
What I am seeing from you is just negative comments about this technology, literally based on assumption and made-up standards that are not common in the industry.
I have a professional issue with Asus support having dealt with them from a large corp.
I can isolate the two factors but understand the risks are combined.
That’s just logic.
It didn't even hit the shelves.... your bitterness reminds me of the original iPod quip "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame"
You're pulling "facts" and "standards" out of thin air to justify your dislike of Asus.
Uhh, they don't do that. They sell cases - their own and 3rd party - right in the store next to the iPhones.
How many cycles would that translate to when being opened/closed on the go by pulling on a corner? Or being used by a toddler?
USB-C plugs are supposed to be 10,000 cycles too. The A–to–C cable that came with my PinePhone was dead at the C plug end within four months of daily usage with occasional somewhat-stronger-than-ideal-but-not-all-that-excessive forces being applied. A couple of other cables haven’t had issues so far.
When they say 30,000 here, I’d be surprised to get 3,000 before significant problems are apparent, and wouldn’t be surprised if I failed to get 300. I like the idea and want it to work, but don’t expect it to just yet. I wish they’d focus their effort on having two separate screens with a small gap between them rather than trying to straddle the hinge, because that would be somewhere between almost as good and slightly better, and much more likely to be reliable.
This is still early tech. Early generations of mechanically-difficult things are generally terrible. I can speak to the unreliability of the Surface Book hinge: I had four units (19 months with moderate issues by the end (mild battery pillowage, screen yellowing, several split keycaps) that led to warranty replacement; 8 months then battery 2 spontaneously died; roughly DOA; two years before battery 1 died and it was out of warranty and after only a little more use it’s now pretty much a brick, can’t even stay powered on and significant pillowage on both batteries), and their base/clipboard, base/power and clipboard/power connections (which were basically the same interface) always became not completely reliable well within a year, though they weren’t particularly troublesome until maybe fifteen or eighteen months. I do acknowledge that I used this hardware fairly hard, but it was consistently well under a thousand cycles before at least minor issues in the connection were apparent, and these OLED hinges are probably even more demanding.
Physical keyboard is current optimum for text entry precisely because it is not adaptable, and that enables you to adapt to it. Without muscle memory you are much, much slower. When an advanced user wants to refresh page, they can instantly recall Ctrl+R combo and just press it, without glancing down and coordinating between hand and eye to tap the icon, and then verifying the tap was registered. With adaptable keyboards the advanced users lose all their edge.
That said, swiping is really nice way to enter English text on touchscreens. I still hate switching to numbers and special characters, or entering non-dictionary words, but it works unexpectedly good. I agree with you that more innovation is needed.
Interesting example, I can imagine something like an Ctrl+R combo to be a bit cumbersome on a software keyboard, would need to test it to be sure though.
That said, this laptop seems to include a physical keyboard, so maybe it's not that bad. I hope manufacturers keep experimenting with computer form factors, but preferably sane, human-centric ones.
I see what you mean here, but am not so sure about that to be honest. We just haven't seen much innovation here IMO. It could specifically optimize for flow, somewhat reminiscent of Github Copilot and the suggestions in phone keyboards.
For example I am wondering how a keyboard could adapt in a spreadsheet application if you focus on a non-empty cell. Depending on what's already there, there might be a predictable set of options on what is likely to be done next. (without limiting free form either).
I don't have good examples, because I simply don't know what could be done. But I am convinced that something that statically mimics a physical keyboard can be improved upon.
It just makes so much more sense from a manufacturing standpoint for one thing. Makes it much simpler and you don't need to create separate keyboard layouts for different languages.
Also, younger generations are quite comfortable using on-screen keyboards on their phones.
But what will really make it take off is contextual and customizable user interfaces that sit next to the virtual letter and symbol keys. Which of course there could be many more symbols or emojis available in subkeyboards or for different contexts.
If ever?
And then you have all the possible screen problems. We've seen it happening with phones and I wouldn't like paying a considerable sum of money for something that will break easily if I look at it the wrong way.
Gives us connectivity, good screen, power and autonomy. Leave the weird designs, they remind me of the mobile phone era before the iPhone.
A tablet with a matte screen.
That can run Linux.
So I can put it on a stand and a keyboard in front of it.
That would be the ultimate travel setup! Working in cafes without having to look down all the time.
Does something like this exist?
A newer brand that will run linux is the framework laptop that's my personal recommendation.
As for the matte screen you can buy films for both of those that will make the screen matte. Here is the ones for the framework:
https://viascreens.com/screen-protectors/framework/
You should note that mat screens generally sacrifice contrast and colour saturation.
I suspect you won't be happy with any of this though as most hn commenters are extremely picky about these sorts of things.
I can adapt to a bad keyboard, lack of trackpoint and bad touchpad, but a bad screen will always bother me.
Admittedly though, Lenovo seemed to get their act together on later laptops. My T460s has a matte 1080p display with 90%+ DCI P3 coverage, which is pretty good for a $300 used laptop.
That's why I want a tablet and a keyboard.
So I can put the tablet on a stand and the keyboard in front of it.
Maybe the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Tablet would work.
Does anybody know if the keyboard works while disconnected? So one can put the tablet on a stand and still use the keyboard?
I got mine in 2016 and it's been rock solid.
*Everyone is making this manually*. I carry around a music stand, a keyboard and mouse. My laptop has a keyboard I never use.
GIVE US A PORTABLE SCREEN PC THAT RAISES TO EYE LEVEL AND TAKE OUR MONEY.
Nice!
I'm guessing that even the battery will outlive early-generation folding screens.
Samsung rates it for 200,000 folds, and it lasted 418,500 folds before the hinge failed, with the screen actually still working.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k86vsQEDKlg
I don't particularly like Apple, but I use a Macbook Pro. I've been keeping an eye out for a non-Apple alternative to a Macbook, but nothing seems to come close in terms of hardware. I don't mean technical specs. I mean a beautiful screen, reasonable dimensions & weight, a really good touchpad, great battery life, etc.
A big foldable screen looks cool, but doesn't feel at all pragmatic. Could someone please compete with Apple?
Quality is the feature that apple sell. I don't think anyone else gets near them.
Every manufacturer has these blops. Yet very few (more like none) have such fanatical crowd of followers who uncritically accept everything and keep peddling the same 'apple is quality, above others, better than google on privacy' and similar wishful thinking/lies. They just have better PR department is all I see, the rest is just another HW/SW company who charge premium.
Its nothing new, other businesses figured this long ago. You can have a normal decent handbag, or have louis vuitton / hermes one. It will cost you 10x (or 100x) more. Its often hand-made quality. Many women love them. Most guys are looking on this in same way we would look on... mentally underdeveloped. Yet the market exists and its booming. And nobody is arguing Hermes doesn't bring higher quality than regular brand.
Coming back to your claims, apple rarely truly innovates these days and technologically its behind most manufacturers (low res cameras producing pleasing but over-processed pics that have colors far from reality, battery charging on level of basic 2016 phones, screen is OK but definitely not top of the market, bluetooth implementation is beyond pathetic for such a manufacturer, literally everybody on the market has it better). They take over others ideas that work and improve them. Which is fine but not the stellar behavior I would expect from 3TN company having 1 centerpiece product.
Apple is incredibly inconsistent. The iphone cable quality was complete dogshit: https://i.imgur.com/t7Oajul.jpeg
On the other hand, the new macbook pro magsafe cable is probably the best quality cable I've ever owned.
... then my kids got older, and my wife move to Apple and started borrowing my cables. They all kill Apple cables in like 6 months flat. It's incredible.
[EDIT] As for how they do that, I'm not sure, but they constantly use them stretched too far from the outlet, so there's a ton of tension on the cable, and frequently arrange them such that they're bent a sharp 90+ degrees right next to the connector, often while also under tension. I never do either of those things. I assume those are the things that cause it.
It's really good.
The old cables were made of weird extremely low quality rubber? I don't think I've seen worse quality of rubber on any other cable.
But generally Apple has a history of laptops that have design defects, which Apple does not acknowledge either for years after they stop selling the laptop, and/or are forced to by a lawsuit (which will usually complete years after they stop selling the laptop), at which point most people won't even be aware that Apple has instituted a replacement program and/or discarded their brick for parts on eBay.
Whether those people are right or not, Apple is extremely good at positioning itself as the quality option.
Although I have precisely zero complaints with my 14" MBP.
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/macbook-staingate-fixes/
I have a late 2013 MBP whose screen developed visible loss of coating in 2014, and cleaning the screen even made an annoying always-on bright pixel due to a tiny chip in the surface. I was sad at that at the time and looked into getting a new display, even paying for it, but there was no way to do it. You couldn't even go to an Apple store and pay for this repair.
That said, this 2013 MBP has been a lovely and excellent machine in almost every respect, and it's still my daily driver (as a software dev), which is great value and longevity for a laptop. I was skeptical of Apple before I got one, but now it's almost a no-brainer to get another when the time is right.
This tan cloud is dust rolling in:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nPCnELCVMsvn5W0lOHlPxC2Ycq...
Another dust squall:
https://www-cdn.eumetsat.int/files/2020-04/img_il_10_07_05_b...
Or Linux, at this stage. Apple silicon support is not good enough yet to be a pleasant experience. Sure, an x86 laptop doesn't compete with power efficiency of the M1/M2 - might be useful if you regularly need to go multiple days without power, but my x86 laptop already gets more than 8 hours battery which is "good enough", and is just as fast for development usage (I have an M1 MBP too, I have tested this side by side).
As a bonus I have full control of the hardware and the software that I want to run on it. I almost never reach for the Macbook unless I need to test something OSX specific.
I work in the microsoft stack but I use parallels on a MBP.
Because it has dedicated hardware to make photo & video editing good. Which is great, if that's your jam. It's dead silicon if it isn't, though. M1/M2 strike a great balance for performance & battery life, absolutely. But it's very narrow in what it can achieve desktop-comparable speeds on when it comes to heavy workloads, and other laptops are drastically faster at rather large areas of consumer computing like gaming.
> Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now
Or if you're just a casual / lite user but want something other than 13.3", which is the only size Apple offers an economical model. Or if you really like having a touch screen, which Apple refuses to do for some reason. That second point is basically the entire reason my SO is hunting for alternatives to the Air.
I do use mine for dev work/etc though (M1) and it's completely fine, even with only 8gb. I've never had any slowdowns or felt like it was holding me back.
Very generally, Java is one of those things. CPU performance is really, really good for non-rosetta workloads.
I agree though that despite Apple's wild claims the general GPU performance isn't that good - not that it's bad for very quiet laptop.
Single-threaded (or "lightly threaded") absolutely. But if we're saying "desktop-comparable" and "heavy workloads" I'm gonna assume a multi-core workload and go throw things like the 5950X or 12900K into the ring at a minimum, and the 5995WX at the extreme. M1 ultra starts at $4k after all, it's absolutely fair to include Xeon-W & Threadripper Pros against that. M1's big cores punch above their weight, but they still can't make up that much of a core count deficit.
Including, for a while, Apple. How quickly people have forgotten the touchbar!
Quality and performance are where Apple just shines. Most PC manufacturer's seem to mainly compete on how bad of a screen & touchpad combination they can find. There are some truly awful things on the market of manufacturers that just stopped even trying a long time ago. Touchpads are universally awful in the laptop market, with the exception of Apple. I found this out by connecting my magic touchpad 2 to my Linux laptop. Works great! As good as with a mac. The software support in Linux is fine. Precise, responsive, smooth, just like it should be. It's the hardware that is the problem. Even brands that are supposedly premium keep opting for these cheep plastic touchpads with poor sensitivity, awkward button mechanics, etc. Apple nailed this decades ago. On this front they have no competition.
That, the screen, and the stellar performance of the M1 is making the difference right now. I connected an external drive with x-plane on it a few days ago to see how far I could push it. Turns out, I can max out all the sliders and it runs at about 30-40fps at the normal screen resolution. That's with lots of add ons, some of which are really demanding and using the rosetta emulator. Very impressive. For work, this thing runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2-3x.
How does this follow? If the implication is that collectivist societies frown upon excelling relative to one’s peers (which is not true, BTW), then wouldn’t the exact same logic apply to novelty or cuteness?
No, this is the result of corporate bean counters thinking they should maximize short term profit with a splashy product, rather than maximize long term profit with high quality and reliability, which take more time for the market to recognize.
The idea that all innovation happens in the United States and Europe is fairly ridiculous, innovation happens on all levels of product development, both deep in the guts of products as well further up as well as sometimes entirely new classes of products.
I find it hard to believe that this is an exclusively an east asian thing. Apple spent a decade chasing thinness over all else.
Will probably upgrade in the next year or two primarily because replacing the battery and increasing the ram is pricey enough that I may as well buy a new machine.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-15-9510-fails-to-slee...
Now, I'm not sure I'd recommend it for other reasons and I haven't tried the latest gen, but it sure fits your requirements.
If your job requires you to run AutoCAD or VSC++ or something, you're just going to use windows. The average user isn't going to figure out how to use KVM or Wine or something. If your job requires some linux/unix tool, is the average user going to fidget with it until it works in MacOS or just use Ubuntu or something? MacOS is the worst of both worlds: it is both closed-source AND a minority OS.
It worked when I first installed it, until quite recently, when a new version hit. Upgrading every package at the same time is obviously destabilizing, something has changed in the plumbing and under certain circumstances some gtk programs require a 30 second timeout to occur before they start, and there's the whole snap firefox debacle. Longing for the stability of rolling release, oddly enough.
Anyway, I haven't used MacOS, but I've generally been surprised to find that my current system is hovering around near-Windows level usability, other than the familiar terminal which is nice. Probably time to try out tumbleweed...
The XPS doesn't make much noise and I notice no difference in speed while developing. Some tasks are even faster, because native Docker instead of running via Docker for Mac. The battery doesn't last as long I guess, but it will still last for 8 hours, which is far longer than I need.
Individuals may not but companies buy (or lease) truckloads of them.
The competition on the other side is on specs. It's hard to stick hardware with bigger numbers in a thin case. Look at Intel's NUCs vs the Mac Mini... they come with a power brick larger than the computer to win in specs, while Apple has an elegant built in PSU.
And... a working touchpad that can actually replace a mouse for 95% of use cases? How are you going to market that?
You want the largest numbers, you have to go with the others. If you can stomach windows. You want a less annoying experience, Apple unfortunately has about zero competition there. Which is bad even for Apple users because then you get masterpieces like the butterfly keyboard...
The "great battery life" is part hardware, but largely software. See also: iOS devices with "worse" specs and smaller batteries that perform way better than "better" Android counterparts, while also having longer battery life. Some of it's hardware voodoo, but a lot of it's iOS and MacOS and various pieces of Apple software (notably Safari and Mobile Safari) being very respectful of system resources and protective of the battery.
It's a bit like how you used to be able to put BeOS on a Windows or Linux desktop and it'd feel like all the hardware was 4x higher clock / bigger memory size than it had been.
Some even have great graphics cards, or touchscreens with pen support, or mechanical keyboards, etc... ASUS even makes a few laptops in this category (some of them are branded as gaming laptops but really do everything you want).
The issue with PC laptops isn't that there is no competition for the MBP. It's just that it's very confusing and that there are literally hundreds of options and only 5-6 models that will do what you want.
There are a lot of
I used a MacBook Pro for work a few years ago, 2014-18, and really liked the hardware.
Never got the vaunted "It's So Intuitive!" UI hype, though. And from OS "upgrade" experience -- felt more like downgrades, with the ever more limited configurability -- during that time and from everything I've heard since about the constantly shrinking "walled garden" of their ecosystem, I've pretty much come to detest their software side.
Soo... Give Asahi Linux a couple years more to mature, and if in that time they release a fanless (M2, M3?) laptop with a larger (16-17", or, heck, why not even more?) screen, I might be really tempted.
https://www.asus.com/Displays-Desktops/Monitors/ZenScreen/
For me, both of them stopped charging and refused to work right after warranty ran out. Now they are sitting on my shelf waiting to be cannibalized.
I very much enjoyed these screens. They were response, relatively light, fit into the bag, and with their own battery, I could chug along for hours without issue. Oh the joys of getting ready for meetings in airport lounges!
So, Asus portable monitors for me were great design, not so good implementation.
I spent ages working through this.
[1] https://www.duetdisplay.com/
amazon.com link to what I believe is the same product.
The upper display becomes your main display, the lower one your secondary. You still have to look down sometimes at the secondary but that is vastly better than craning your neck the whole time.
Edit: [Pic](https://imgur.com/a/sdLmYJG). Bad photo but you get the idea. In reality, both those panels are perfectly angled for viewing when I’m sitting down in front of them, with no overlap.
That’s great that you guys are into this. I feel like I cracked the code with this one. I told my irl friends and they just shrugged.
Thanks for sharing!
I often use it at home, too - just to get out of the home office from time to time. Can work from the kitchen table without compromise. Takes less than a minute to set up.
You can probably fix this with BetterDisplay (formerly known as BetterDummy?). I used it with my 3440x1440 monitor. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
It might be a good solution if you already have an, eg, 1440p display and want better font rendering, but if you’re putting together a setup from scratch, MacOS just works hassle-free with 4K displays. You’ve got to stare at these things for hours every day, so.
Bought this LG Gram 16" Portable display (2560x1440): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TS43YMT
This portable tripod: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LGGXH1J
And this "tablet" mount that gets large enough to fit the 16" display: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Z7Z7QZ3
Tripod/tablet mount also double as an iPad stand for video calling, etc.
Everything fits easily in my fairly compact backpack along with cables, dongles, mouse, etc.
I recently added keyboard shortcuts (using BetterTouchTool) on my left hand for moving the mouse cursor up and down between the centre of each display, as vertical mouse movements seem to be more tiresome than horizontal on account of the lie of your arm (less of an issue with the built-in trackpad).
And how is the durability of your portable display? I got one and used it for a year but keeping it in a carryon bag in airplanes eventually messed up the display from being pressed and bumped around.
A US-friendly link to a similar product is https://amzn.com/dp/B09H6QV53R (I searched "arca-swiss tablet mount 300mm" to find it; there are others that only go to 230mm width for folks interested in this with smaller portable monitors).
Personally I am currently experimenting with a Lenovo ThinkVision M14[0] perched (a little precariously) atop a Roost V3 Laptop Stand[1], which is a lower-quality but lighter, more minimal setup than what you describe.
When I'm on Zoom call, which is often, I can move the laptop onto the stand for a better camera angle and put the external monitor beneath.
I'm not doing graphics work and I find the 60Hz, 1920x1080, usbc-on-both-sides monitor sufficient for my purposes (much, much better than an old asus one which was 30Hz or less, and laggy).
[0] https://amzn.com/dp/B07YX5NKK2 [1] https://amzn.com/dp/B01C9KG8IG
. Portable 4k screen (the glare in the photo is not really visible in front).
. Custom mount for the laptop and a
. Wireless thinkpad keyboard with a trackpoint (which I love).
The cabling management has improved now, but this setup gives plenty of screen real estate, both displays are touch, and in comparison with a tablet where the applications context is lost the majority of time, here I can be more productive and is a joy to work with it.
I've done a similar setup, but for a minimalist mount, used two 12in rulers, and gaff tape to make a hinge, a strap connecting the other ends, and a stop on one of them. So a heavy thinkpad sits on the desk ruler, leaning back against the other and the strap, with the bottom keyboard edge sitting between strap and stop. It's fragile, and I fear someday there will be a bump, crash, and sadness, but it's light, compact, and easily recreated.
Going back in time I just now recognize and remember that one key aspect of the Palm original devices was battery duration comparing to previous experience (e.g. Newton) in innovations.
The selling point for me was silent operation and performance. For instance, my XPS 15 will wake up fans even after entering the BIOS and just opening a browser tab with a heavier website would make them fans spin like airplane blades. It's so annoying that I dread everytime I have to work on it. Yes, I would clean the fans regularly etc.
Working on a Mac M1 is a pure bliss. It feels next level in every aspect and the battery life is outstanding. The fact that I can run the laptop in low power mode and it is still much more performant than my XPS is mindblowing.
They seem to be currently mostly 1080p but a folding 17" or larger HiDPI screen for an existing laptop would be brilliant.
I generally like smaller laptops like the MacBook Air or XPS 13. I could see me using a tri-fold ZenScreen in hotel room and then just the laptop on a plane/train tray table.
https://www.asus.com/Displays-Desktops/Monitors/ZenScreen/
iPad Pro 12.9” as external second hidpi/retina monitor for Macbook is remarkable in three modes
- USB-C to USB-C for all day powered zero latency extended desktop
- WiFi for cable free extended desktop
- keyboard mouse sharing (by pushing your Macbook cursor against the side of your laptop screen by the iPad, till it “pops” onto the iPad) for seamlessly running Macbook apps and iPad apps side by side using your main keyboard/mouse, able to not just cut and paste but drag and drop (!!!) between the two devices and OSes.
And then just the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard (and its trackpad) on the plane/train tray table (hinge design sets the screen in from the hinge, allowing use in shallower depths like the tray tables).
Comparing this:
… to what’s available on Amazon in 4K or 5K screens with no computer (iPad or iMac) attached, I can mostly only buy the LGs for $1400 to $1700, and they don’t work with a stylus. The comp isn’t really a monitor anyway, it’s a Wacom Cintiq Pro.Any real external monitor is, I'm sorry to tell you, going to blow it out of the water in image quality, and it's not even close. Especially if there is any movement or if you're going to be pushing more frames. It's just the name of the game.
It's real competition isn't external displays, because it really can't compete there. It's laptops with pen support. And it can't compete against those either. Believe me, I tried to make it work, it just can't.
What high-refresh rate OLED travel monitors are you comparing it to?
Have you tried using it as an external monitor? It can't even hit 60fps reliably, and there is noticeable lag and compression. As an external monitor, it really sucks.
As a monitor of a machine into its own, at 12.9", I'm comparing it to the OLEDs in the new Vivobooks, which have even higher pixel density, better contrast, very comparable colors, and inherently better motion performance.
I'm guesstimating $2999 in the US
https://www.coolblue.nl/en/product/905010/asus-zenbook-17-fo...
https://omdia.tech.informa.com/pr/2022-mar/omdia-foldable-sm...
apple decided to use a paper sticker in place of metal shield, turns out whoever designed the phone in the first place used that metal shield as a structural element. No shield = bendy phone = Touch IC just so happen to be located at the bend and its balls pop off. You end up with
https://www.lifewire.com/iphone-touch-disease-4120914
I must confess that I like bending/folding screens and "rolling screens" even more (i.e. for TVs). I would fold my iphone if I could(assuming that the screen would not get worse) and I would love to double the screensize of my macbook air or shink it into an ipad.
At the time people were talking about how hard and clumsy it was to type on and getting your finger grease all over the screen of the phone.
Let them burn some budget on crazy ideas, some will stick.
Also I'm not sure apple wants to license anything - they're doing quite well keeping the design to themselves.
Until it can run Linux smoothly it will be undesirable for me.