I'd add "expandable storage" (and "can be fixed") because even if it's an Apple-esque SoC (which we're clearly going to be seeing more of in the future by other brands), there is no reason to not offer one or ideally two m.2 slots that you can just stick more, "slower", storage in.
I'd venture to guess that the take rate on custom configs from any manufacturer is quite low. Most consumers are going to go to Best Buy, Apple Store, et al and buy what config is available today, not wait to order some custom model.
Then it's a good thing no one charges that. I'm all for calling out Apple for bullshit, but their "768 GB more" model is a $200 upsell, not $500. And yes: it's a huge leap from $200 to $500.
Depends on the model. The MBAs and Mac Mini ship with 256GB by default and getting 1TB (768GB more) is an extra $400 USD. The MBPs and Studio/Pro start at 512GB so 1TB is "only" $200.
you have probably never used a high res display on a laptop, it makes a huge difference ;-)
Macbook Pros have had high res displays since 2012 (2880x1800 for the 15" back then)
The current 14" Macbook Pro comes with 3024x1964. Some other laptops go even higher.
It's my first comment here: don't buy any puri.sm products. Or better say, think thrice before doing so. I used to own Librem 15 v4 which I bought in April 2020. Everything was bad. Just barely usable as a laptop. In January 2022 I spilled a water on the keyboard and some keys got stuck, so it kept on typing some letters sporadically. Tried to replace keyboard –> 150$ + delivery because it's the whole top panel to replace. No. OK, disconnected the keyboard and bought a compact Lenovo keyboard (also appeared to be a trashy thing). Half a year later the battery died. No chance to replace, out-of-stock, not even on chinese eshops.
Also, I preordered Librem 5 all the way back in 2019. Decided to cancel the order a year ago – still waiting for my money to come back.
Puri.sm gave me an impression of a scam copmany, unfortunately.
I'm an owner of Librem 5, Librem 15v3 and Librem 14. First one is the best phone one can dream of: runs desktop GNU/Linux without any proprietary blobs, has a replaceable battery (and I do have a spare one), WiFi and modem, kill switches (for camera/mic, WiFi/Bluetooth, modem), lifetime updates (from mainline Linux). Runs as a desktop if you connect a screen/keyboard.
Librem 15 is an amazing machine, still my daily driver with Qubes OS. Great keyboard, upgradeable RAM and disk, doesn't require any blobs in the userland.
Librem 14 is even better, with two .m2 SSD, upgradeable and powerful. Definitely checks many boxes in TFA. Too smal for my taste but great for travelling.
Yes, Purism has problems with refunds. Don't buy if you want to cancel your order. Everything else is great. Also, forums say that first versions of their devices may have rough edges. Wait until they are well tested to be sure. Librem 14 is well tested and many early problems were solved. Same for Librem 5.
Nothing if you're mainly going to use it to watch HD movies. I don't mind the resolution on a 13-14 inch screen to much to be fair, but IMHO 16:9 is really quite awful on such a small screen (and tolerable on 15-17 inch ones)
I have a surface book (the original) that I inherited from pilot program at work. I love the idea of it, but practically, it just doesn’t work, I rarely if ever used it as a tablet, and when I did it wasn’t a very good tablet because the OS still doesn’t support that input method very well. As a laptop a lot of compromises were made to support that form factor and if just wasn’t worth it.
Sadly JDM exclusive and has soldered RAM, but the latest models come with a 3:2 display, decent I/O (e.g. RJ45, full sized SD card reader, even VGA (!)), magnesium alloy chassis and a removable battery in a sub 1.1 kg package. Can't speak for the quality of the trackpad or keyboard though.
The trackpads are great (assuming new models are similar to past models), and the keyboards are IMO very good, but watch out for the squashed key dimensions on the SR and QR, and the Japanese layout.
Circular trackpad my goodness! I’ll also never go back to metal/plastic handrests on a trackpad after using whatever material is on a pixelbook and the crazy fabric-esque option on a ms surface - huge game changer.
This is amazing, it looks like the laptop an engineer would make if he was told don’t worry about aesthetics, just make the thing exactly as you’d like.
The circular trackpad is an acknowledgement that most engineers hate using trackpads, generally only will use a laptop docked, and would rather have a better typing experience than a giant trackpad that will only get in the way the few times they do use the laptop on the go.
“If you can’t do it in the keyboard it’s not worth doing”
I've always owned 15" laptops, and i've never had any trouble fitting them in bags, even in a sleeve. I understand why people might want 7" or 10" netbooks, but a 12" machine just seems like a waste of space to me. I understand that most people feel very differently, though!
> webcam that doesn’t make it look like your laptop (or you) are a potato during a videoconference
And also doesn't look up your nose - my XPS 15 has the camera underneath the monitor, and it's terrible.
> a great keyboard, look to the 2008-11 era ThinkPads for inspiration
Keyboards are one of those things where tastes vary so much. I dislike every ThinkPad keyboard i've tried. Maybe we need interchangeable keyboards, with various styles available?
> a useful number of ports
Interested to see that ethernet doesn't make the cut. I definitely appreciate having that without having to bedongle the machine.
A high-quality wifi card and software is more valuable to me than ethernet ports, which are so bulky that I don't especially care if they come built in. The Framework approach here is ideal.
I downsized from a 15" MBP to a 13" M1 Air, and I haven't felt much pain from the smaller screen. My approach to IDE-driven development is about the same on both. The big difference is solo laptop vs laptop+external monitor(s).
As someone who travels frequently, the M1 Air has been simply amazing. It's so small and sturdy, and fairly light compared to the bigger/bulkier/heavier 15 I had before... and I'm at far less risk of breaking the screen while it's in my bag.
The bigger machines have a much greater surface area which the contents of the backpack can put pressure against. So the larger screen laptops are more susceptible to being pressed too hard near the middle of their screens and breaking.
I wish there were some ultra-rigid screen backs which would eliminate that concern. I don't need something as serious as a Panasonic Toughbook, but something with some arched curved ridges to add strength would be nice.
I kinda followed a similar trajectory. Started with a 15" MBP (2011) for years, and was super happy with that. It was a beast. But it was also a tank of a laptop.
Then I got a Surface Pro 3. It was FAR more portable, enough to make me realize just how much less portable my MBP was. I couldn't bear to bring the 15" back out. However, the SP3 was definitely too small of a screen for dedicated work. Great for college & notetaking, but reliant on external displays.
Now I've been using a 13" surface laptop for a few years and that's really struck me as the right portability vs productivity balance. 13 inches is big enough for two columns of code, and fits in basically any backpack pouch easy. I probably won't be going back to 15" when this dies.
Over the years, I've gone back and forth on laptop size. I used an 11" (?) Asus Chromebook for my light-duty travel laptop for ages but there really isn't a high-quality substitute these days and, honestly, I'm hard-put to complain too much about my 14" MacBook Pro and, if I did as much travel as I used to, I'd just get a MacBook Pro Air. At one level I wish they still made a smaller model but, honestly, when you add up the weight of chargers and other associated electronics, the difference isn't much and the keyboard on a 13" laptop is pretty much what I want.
I bought and old one second hand a few years ago and it is actually nice; bulky but light enough and really unbreakable. So when backpacking it is a good companion that can be used as a little flat table, can be used in the heat, cold and in the rain, you can drop drinks on it, drop it and beat someone’s head it before getting to work. The only real disadvantage is the battery life, so I carry a spare which works for me when on trips.
My personal laptop is an M1 MacBook Pro 13”, the device I use most frequently for work is a Surface Pro X. I really appreciate having a small, relatively lightweight device that I can easily carry without worrying about it. I don’t really feel hindered by the screen size of either except for some specific cases - code review in Azure DevOps can be a bit cramped for example. If I’m doing serious work for more than a couple hours I almost always have an external monitor to plug into though.
I gradually went from 17” to 15” to 13” laptops for my personal machines.
The main thing I miss is the expansive keyboards on the bigger machines. The 17” ones even had a number pad, and some my 15” ones did too.
My current work laptop is a 15” Thinkpad P15 Gen2 with an i9-11950H, 64gb of ram, and an rtx 3080 mobile. It’s a beast but very reasonably sized for its specs. It’s a little bit chunky but I wouldn’t expect anything less with a high performance cpu and gpa. Lots of ports, 15” OLED display. I love it, even if the battery life is abysmal. It’s a workstation.
But my personal machine needs to be small enough to throw in a bag and not think about, so its a Ryzen powered thinkpad X13. The screen is a little dim and the battery life is way worse than a comparable dell XPS 13, but it was inexpensive and does everything I need. The major downside to the size is the keyboard is also shrunk, so lots of typing sucks.
The biggest problem with both machines, and its true of all thinkpads, is that Lenovo put the function button on the leftmost of the lowest row instead of ctrl button and I often try to copy paste and accidentally hit the function key instead of control. I ended up getting a mouse with some extra buttons and I’ve assigned one of them as ctrl instead, but it would be better if the ctrl button would just be where it was supposed to be.
> I've always owned 15" laptops, and i've never had any trouble fitting them in bags, even in a sleeve. I understand why people might want 7" or 10" netbooks, but a 12" machine just seems like a waste of space to me. I understand that most people feel very differently, though!
In my freshman year of college, I still hadn't gotten a smartphone yet due to being on my parents' phone plan still, but since there was wifi everywhere on campus, I used to carry around a Nexus 7 tablet everywhere. I could literally fit the 7" tablet in my pocket, which always seemed to take people by surprise. I think 7" is a lot smaller than some people realize; I don't think I could even type comfortably with both hands on a netbook that small!
My 12 inch Macbook is half the weight of a 15 inch model of the same year. That's almost a kilo less in your bicycle bag or backpack. It's very noticeable, especially if you're always on the go, but not always between desks.
Really depends on how much time you spend working portable or not. 14" seems like the best compromise for me on power, portability and screen size. 15" is a little big and the lightweight 15" laptops feel a little too flimsy at times.
I bought a used Thinkpad 220 and it's a cool little swiss army type of device. The keyboard is VERY different from modern thinkpads. More tactile and a lot of cool features. Would be interesting with a technical update. I think the Japanese Panasonic Let's Note may be the closest modern equivalent.
I had one of those XPS machines (though a 13) where the webcam was in the "chin" under the screen, and also not in the center horizontally. I basically never used it.
Their later designs have crammed it in at top-center as is more typical.
> I've always owned 15" laptops, and i've never had any trouble fitting them in bags, even in a sleeve. I understand why people might want 7" or 10" netbooks, but a 12" machine just seems like a waste of space to me. I understand that most people feel very differently, though!
I've settled on the 12" size, mostly because it's the smallest viable laptop that you can still type on. If you look at the ThinkPad X201 [1] as an example from the post, the device is the exact width of the keyboard with no bezel. So, you could have an 11" or smaller device, but it would mean sacrificing a lifetime of typing muscle memory to do so.
If you do a lot of walking around, using public transport etc. And you tend to want to pull your laptop out and use it in places where you maybe don't have a proper desk/table to put it on then having a really small laptop can be really nice.
I remember loving my ~8 inch netbook during university. With virtual desktops it was more than adequate for coding projects even if the best seat I could find was on the floor against a wall.
The added rigidity feels good too, even something really cheaply built out of plastic will have little to no flex, and probably survive being dropped at that size.
I believe the primary appeal of a 12” laptop is that it’s the smallest that one can make a laptop while still having a full size keyboard. Any smaller and you have to start shrinking keys, which has strong negative effects on usability.
This is part of why the 12” MacBook and its spiritual ancestor, the 12” PowerBook G4 were popular.
For me, 12" is the smallest size you can fit a non-compromised, normal keyboard layout in.
I also carry around a smaller messenger bag which 12" laptops just about fit in. I tried to pull off a 17" Dell mobile workstation, but got very tired of lugging around a backpack and having no battery life.
I have the older version with the 6900HS but it’s more or less the same. I’ve run pop_os as well as fedora on it. Everything works great but you’ll have to compile the wifi driver https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89.
Surprisingly it has been smooth. Power modes work as you would expect even across OSes. I always run the graphics mode in hybrid mode to I’m using the integrated chip 90% of the time until something really needs the 3050. In Gnome, you can explicitly launch an application using the dGPU or you can set the environment variables on the application shortcut to always use the dGPU.
Two aspects in which Apple's newest Macbook Airs fit at least my own "peak laptop" definition are:
1) no fans whatsoever
2) no coil whine when I plug my headphones in and stress the CPU
The keyboard is exactly the right size and the right font for me, but I'll concede that muscle memory is an individual thing. I've owned Apple's laptops and keyboards made in 2005, 2007, 2010, 2015, 2019, and 2022, and they are very hell-bent on being consistent about key size and placement, I should give it to them.
I'd like a Linux laptop that would beat this.
XPS13 is a close contender because that 3840x2400 screen is the right kind of ratio and super crisp, but man, that fan noise and the coil whine are just killing the mood. Maybe Thinkpad X13s, but Linux support and its screen are both very meh at this point.
There are nice utilities for capping your CPU frequency on Linux. So, IMO it would be better to have the fan, set your cap low enough to not need to use it most of the time. Then if you do need it, you have the ability.
I don't know if I won the lottery, but I have sensitive hearing and I've never heard a coil whine from my XPS 13 (9300). The charging brick did develop a whine which I replaced. It also had the perfect keyboard with no wiggling key caps. Later production 9300 models and recent XPS laptops do have key caps that wiggle (once you notice, it's super annoying, I think I've been spoiled).
Interestingly, the first time I heard a coil whine in a laptop was with the M1 Pro MBP. I never had it with any PC laptops. I found that it depended heavily on the electric wiring. It happened semi-frequently in Brazil, but almost never in the UK.
There are still a few 17" laptops in production, like the razer blade, but I was referring to the 2011 17 inch macbook pro[0]. It was called the "lunch tray" by people who thought it was too big.
I love my P50! Although I'm still a little salty that I couldn't find any decent P51 models on eBay when I was buying, because I have a P51 mustang sticker on the back and the joke doesn't quite... land.
I'm in the same camp, 6'3" giant hands. Yet when I was given the option at work between a 13 and a 15 inch Macbook. I went with the 13" and LOVE it, sure I look a little silly with this tiny laptop. But it really does fit just right for my hands and weighs nothing.
Same, I don't mind carrying a big machine. Problem is most have a numpad, which shifts the keyboard and touch pad to the left. Being right handed, I find this very annoying.
It seems that the 16" Framework will come with separate keyboard and numpad. The numpad can be placed on either side or taken away, and the keyboard centered. If only they had a touchpad with physical buttons...
I'm sure someone will make a split ortholinear keyboard with a numpad in the middle for the Framework. That'd be the dream.
I can't ever imagine using another trackpad with physical buttons though. Just extend the trackpad over the space that the button would have taken up. I should be able to left/middle/right click anywhere on the trackpad, not move my hand back to the button to click.
You're not the only one. I mostly use laptops as notebooks, not on my lap, and usually plugged into a docking station for a decent keyboard, a mouse, and external monitors. I don't need a laptop for ants!
For me, I would much rather carry a 13” laptop, which is not only light but also opens up my bag options to small backpacks, slings, etc. and then pack nice peripherals like a keyboard and mouse. The size and weight requirements for a 17” laptop just do not work for me. When traveling and trying to not check a bag, that space is a premium and the flexibility of being able to store the peripherals separate, rather than the whole inflexible lunch tray really helps. Around town I don’t want to be lugging around that much weight since I like my spine and don’t need anymore back problems.
For those who are budget or environmental conscious a second-hand Huawei Matebook can be a great choice. The older premium models have great battery life (think 13+ hours when undervolted), are passive cooled, have great 3:2 high resolution screens (with very thin bezels) and very good build quality. You can charge them with USB-C so if you have an Android phone you don't need an extra charger. SSD is upgradeable, sadly memory is not.
It's not an alternative for a M2 MacBook, nor is it going to run your 200+ microservices but for 200-300 bucks they tick a lot of the boxes and work great as ultra-portable productivity machines.
Honestly my thing about buying a laptop for gaming is if you're gonna basically be plugged in to use it anyways you might as well get an itx case, throw in all the parts you need with a portable screen and keyboard and it will all fit in a backpack for you to carry around. Granted there aren't as many console style cases around as there used to be. I think I ordered the last Skyreach 4 Tiny.
The perfect laptop (objectively) is the 15" 2015 RMBP. For those few glorious years Apple had a keyboard better than even the old Thinkpads. I'd give anything for that chassis/keyboard combo with an M2 chip in it.
You got downvoted because M1/M2 MBP 16" has practically the same keyboard and chassis as 2015. I own both (2015 and 2021). The keyboard is much better than 2016-2020
The size of a laptop often affects the size and distribution of its keyboard keys.
What's appropriate for the user has a lot to do with the size of their hands, and I think this gets overlooked by many who are instead thinking about display size.
As a person with smallish hands who programs (types a lot), anything larger than an X40/X60 ThinkPad form factor has been very annoying to use.
The move to widescreen aspect ratio displays has completely wrecked laptop typing efficiency in my world, since it tended to stretch out the keyboards beyond what my fingers can reach without lifting a palm.
I wish laptop keyboards were treated more like specialized instruments fitted to buyers hands, like shoe sizes. If you consider how much $$ is paid to people that type all day, it's asinine that the laptop industry hasn't matured into optimizing that interface for individuals. Can't I at least get two hand size variants in the average laptop ordering page? Instead it feels like things have only regressed in this department since the classic ThinkPad days.
I'm tempted to say that it also needs IPS/anti-reflection screen.
I am currently in the process of choosing a laptop and it's one of my main requirements.
So far, I'm looking with tender eyes to the MSI Prestige 13 EVO.
I have no idea about Linux compatibility, thought.
I was initially annoyed at the lack of a headphone jack on my laptop, but USB-C to headphone dongles are very common and good enough for portable use. For desk use, might as well get a devoted DAC/AMP. So, I think they are a waste of space now.
Webcams are a waste of bezel space, might as well get a non-junk USB one. Plus you can position it for shots other than up your nose.
Give me like 8 USB-C ports and nothing else.
16:10 is OK but if we’re going for Perfect Laptop, obviously 4:3 is the correct aspect ratio.
The current Apple Bluetooth magic keyboards are fine, use that (with a non wireless interface of course).
These opinions are my own but they are also objectively correct.
I've tried really hard to understand the outrage of not having a 3.5 mm headphone jack. I have Bose wired headphones and just use a dongle on the plane with my phone and tablet. My Laptop does have a jack, but it would be no big deal to use a dongle. I guess I'm just not an audiophile, but I doubt that many people are.
The outrage comes from having to carry both the wired headphones AND the dongle. The dongle is small and easy to lose. It's much harder to lose your headphones.
I think it isn’t audiophiles because they’d have an external DAC/AMP anyway.
Speaking for myself, I just had a strong attachment to my sort of middle-of-the-road headphones (Sennheiser HD380 pro). I don’t think anyone could reasonably call them audiophile. But they were expensive “to me” on a student budget, so I was worried/annoyed that somebody would mess with my (in retrospect quite limited) “investment.”
HP EliteBooks are pretty solid. I have a few G7's in different sizes and dual boot on all of them. The 840 is probably the perfect size, 14" 16:10 screen, plenty of ports, excellent keyboard, fully upgradable SSD and RAM, and overall great build quality.
I have a super old one (8470p) which I got refurbished, and I love that thing so much. Being from 2012 it's obviously not up for real work these days, but the build quality, how you can just pop open the case and expand and swap all sorts of things, that instantly spoiled me and my next laptop will be something comparable or better.
> an SD card reader, why not, they’re $5 … also the ability to upgrade the basics, like memory and storage
> 12” body … to fit the 13" to 14" screen it would have very small bezels, this is a great size for fitting in bags and sitting on small tables
Remove one and it makes the perfect laptop much more attainable. It’s near impossible to fit removable hardware and many ports in a small body. Thinkpads are pretty close, but even some of those have to have a flip open expanding port for Ethernet. An hdmi port is taller than many laptops. The small body really is a huge plus for mobility and comfort, but you can’t have ports/etc with that.
Oddly enough my perfect laptop is still the google pixelbook. Enough power for what I need, flawless construction, incredible trackpad and keyboard, runs Linux and chromeos/android apps, is absolutely gorgeous, and super portable.
Downside is there are like no ports so you need a usb hub, the bezel is huge, and … it hasn’t been improved in like half a decade.
I'm no die hard apple fan, but you would think I was if you heard me talking about my 16" m1 pro. It's an absolute beast, battery for days, and I've never heard the fan spin up once. It would take a lot for me to even give another machine a chance.
The 15 air is actually quite a bit heavier, it goes from 'easily hold it up with one hand with lid open' to, well, barely possible.
I'm so surprised more people don't want brighter screens.
At night my screen looks gorgeous, though I could even go a touch brighter when doing detailed design stuff.
Daytime? I'd go for literally 2-3x brighter if I could. Let alone working outside! Screen brightness is the biggest QoL improvement I'd get vs any other spec bump.
Yeah a brighter screen would be awesome. i misunderstood that the m1pro would be a huge step up in brightness from the m1air but it’s just as borderline in direct sunlight
There's something about being very well constructed with high attention to detail / finishes. Growing up my parents had a new Subaru and a much older Mercedes station wagon. As a teen driving both, you could feel the difference in finishes, and overall solidness of the Mercedes, it felt like driving an adequately powered slab of marble where as the much newer Subaru felt, well plastic and fragile in comparison.
This was my experience moving from Subaru to Volvo as well. That “solidness” feeling is probably the best way to describe the difference between economy and luxury cars generally.
Good construction relative to what is available. I will take a Macbook with a sharp edge over a dell laptop where the screen frame is falling apart, the hinge is non existent, and the trackpad is useless. If you go out to find faults in Macbooks, you'll find them, just not as many as the alternative.
I've been rocking this same device for a while now and it's revived my apple fanboyness just a little. The hardware itself gets an A+ from me.
What I really want from Apple at this point is better UX on MacOS. Stage Manager is an interesting idea but, to me, it's not really a fix for any of my problems so I've just disabled it. I've used two 4k external monitors for years on MacOS and the same little annoying bugs plague me. Specifically, I think how MacOS handles full-screen apps is just not quite right. I don't understand why things feel clunky in just this area of the experience. We need what happened in iOS a few years ago when they got rid of the home button and were forced to make opening/closing/switching between apps much more fluid. I need MacOS to feel fluid like that. Then, it'd really be "perfect" for me.
I have the same complaint about UX. I sorely miss tiling window managers. I miss configurability of window management.
I have baked into my muscle memory the expectation that when I hit the keyboard shortcut to summon virtual desktop number 5, that desktop will show up on the monitor that currently has focus, no matter which monitor(s) it may have appeared on before. This setup is impossible in Mission Control or whatever the multiple-desktop thing MacOS is called. I can choose between:
"Displays have separate spaces" checked: left monitor has desktops 1,2,3, right monitor has desktop 4,5,6, and if I add a new one to left its number is 7. Want to put desktop #4 on the left? You can't except by dragging all the windows one by one, like a cave-man. What happens to the numbering when you add or remove another monitor? It's weird.
"Displays have separate spaces" unchecked: now I have numbered Left+RightMonitorMonstrosity desktops, but if I want to switch the left monitor between "documentation" and "email", while leaving the right monitor on code, I'm out of luck. This setup behaves a bit better about adding and removing monitors, I will admit.
My old Xmonad setup with numbered desktops (which I cloned from my ion3 setup) behaved beautifully when adding and removing monitors. This is to say nothing of having had a Mod4 key solely for my own use, which I ended up using almost exclusively to interact with the window manager.
I can't wrap my head around a film strip of horizontally situated desktops that I swipe through or page through. I can't fathom the idea of making "full screen" change an app from looking like a window to looking like a desktop, and whats more appending the new desktop to the end of the list. I know that MacOS already knows what the windows on that other desktop are going to look like before I switch, so why does it insist on showing some kind of animation when switching (even "reduce motion" changes it from a wipe motion to a useless fade), like iOS does to hide load time? I know about amethyst and rectangle and setting up a "hyper" key with karabiner-elements or qmk or whatever. No amount of it adds up to the same experience that I had with ion3 back in 2006 and I get worked up that I paid into the ecosystem and bought this otherwise-great laptop and I can't make it work the way I want it.
I have "Displays have separate spaces" checked, and I can drag a desktop from one display to the other by grabbing the desktop from that "film strip" and dragging it over to the other display. I don't have to drag all the windows individually. They move together with desktop.
The limitation, which you might be bumping into, is you can't drag the current desktop that's visible on a display, which is sometimes annoying but makes sense. Switch to a different desktop first.
I agree with you about the confusing ever-changing number labels on the desktops. I would really like to assign names to desktops, like "Work" and "Project 1". The GUI has room for it, as the full-screen app desktops already have names.
Meh. I have battery for 10 hours, better than the 7 on my Linux machine but not stellar. Graphics are mediocre. Lack of ports means I have to carry dongles around. And putting up with macOS (with no Linux available) is a complete dealbreaker.
It's less difficult than I thought to to get an M1 Max chip hot enough to spin up fans. Run CitiesSkylines on a 4K display with all of the graphics maxed out for a few hours. ;)
Or do 8 parallel runs of transforming and merging a massive amount of jpgs into less massive pile of pdfs. Just about fully pegged all of the cores for hours.
What surprised me was how fast everything still was. Without the fan, I wouldn't have known the load the system was under.
This is a tangent but, I cannot for the life of me get Skylines to run without the cursor offset by approximately the height of the notch, even on an external display. Have you not had this problem?
Ya, those workloads would do it. My M1 Pro 16" really made my intel mbp feel sluggish, especially if I'm running any containers. Not quite enough to replace it yet, but sometime in the next year if I can do something useful with it.
Out of curiosity, why would you want to combine jpegs into PDFs? And why did that cause such a load? It wasn't just embedding them into PDFs, but somehow recompressing them too?
Yep, this is what I'm running. Honestly shocked how good it is. Trackpad and monitor are great (the things they have never screwed up, to their credit), keyboard is back to being great, magsafe charger is back, no dumb touchbar gimmick, all usb-c, headphone jack, and I honestly think it seems faster - even on battery - than my beefy workstation I used to have at my office (just with less ram). The performance especially just feels like magic, for a laptop.
I’ve been very happy with the 16” M1 Pro’s I’ve done work on. It’s probably the first laptop I’ve used where the load threshold at which its fans make noticeable noise feels somewhat appropriate (rather than spinning up for little to no reason), its power level feels more desktop-class than laptop-class, and I don’t have to keep my eye glued to the battery meter even when running heavy IDEs.
I’m even kinda happy about the notch, because it prompted Apple to add a strip of extra pixels for the menubar to live in, leaving the remaining 16:10 area fully open for use by apps.
The only downside is its weight, but given all of its other upsides I can live with that.
The thing that's holding me back from getting one is the memory markups. The base configuration is too low and I can't just change the memory myself because everything is soldered.
I used to give Apple the ole' eye roll for that as well. Then I realised, as I got a MacBook myself and dove into running Machine Learning models on it, the RAM setup is pretty unique.
Essentially, the RAM is so close to the CPU and GPU that it can effectively be used as VRAM, at least for the M1 and up chipsets as far as I'm aware. That means a 32GB RAM MacBook would be able to run incredibly large (e.g. LLM) networks on-device. Nvidia GPUs with that much VRAM (although they are clearly better at GPU tasks) can cost as much as an expensive MacBook already.
Yeah, the memory is overpriced. So are eyeglass frames (rimless are especially overpriced). But as long as you can afford it, a few hundred dollars isn't that much spread over a few years. Or, think about the other option. You can get a not-MBP and have a clunky experience [1] but save some money, or spend a the extra few hundred for a MBP with enough memory to be a great experience. (Assuming you like macOS, of course.) I interact with my MBP all-day, every day, and it's totally worth a few hundred dollars to get something I love using.
[1] In addition to the non-MBP hardware being clunky, your choice of OS is cutting your steak with a spoon (Windows), or a huge drawer full of tangs, handles, prongs, and spoon-bowl and you spend your time digging around to assemble a knife, fork, and spoon that are the same style and finally give up and settle for "well, it matches if you squint" (Linux). I love the idea of Linux, but I've never actually gotten my system to where I like it, just to where I can tolerate it.
When I looked at adding my ideal RAM and storage onto the base MBP M2 Pro model, the RAM upgrade came to $1634.56 (£1250), and the storage upgrade came to $2876.83 (£2200).
That's enough to be a long term purchase, so I decided to wait for the M3 and see if 3nm makes a big difference.
>Yeah, the memory is overpriced. So are eyeglass frames (rimless are especially overpriced)
That's not a very good comparison. Glasses are important for helping the visually impaired, while Apple memory is just an add-on for a luxury computer.
>But as long as you can afford it, a few hundred dollars isn't that much spread over a few years.
It is that few hundred dollars is a 10x markup over market rate (I've checked, and Apple's markups are actually that bad).
>You can get a not-MBP and have a clunky experience [1] but save some money, or spend a the extra few hundred for a MBP with enough memory to be a great experience.
I don't think my experience with my current PC is clunky, and if I get an M1 macbook, I'll be using Asahi Linux instead of MacOS.
I don't mind overpriced as much as the paltry maximum. Every other computer I have has at least 64GN of RAM, including all my laptops, but until recently you needed a Mac Studio to get that in Apple land. Among other things you can't run large LLMs on only 32GB.
Same experience here. However, I regret getting the 512GB drive option. I'm constantly monitoring my disk space as I do work and personal stuff on the same machine. Like I build Docker images as part of work and have to regularly purge out old images. Good thing macOS intelligently makes space (I have about 250GB in the Photos library) so I also get a random free 10GB from time to time.
Yet my 4 year gaming laptop that back then costed half of a m1 macbook pro when it was new renders any typical Blender scene 4 times faster than it (using the newest Blender version with Metal support).
I suspect the fan doesn't turn on because it is heavily throttled.
I was issued one by my new employer. I'd much rather have a 4th USB-C port than the less versatile HDMI. For myself I'd probably go for a 15" MacBook Air instead, even if maxed out on RAM it's not that much cheaper than a MBP.
Another factor: I live in the UK, where they have a particularly crackpot derivative of the ISO QWERTY layout that well nigh unusable for a programmer. Apple is the only laptop vendor that will allow you to choose your keyboard layout, so when I buy anything else, I order from the US, with all the customs hassles that implies.
352 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadThere is a very good reason called "profit margin"...
Good luck charging $500 for an extra 768 GB of storage if there is an m2 slot.
And wouldn't most people order online nowadays?
The current 14" Macbook Pro comes with 3024x1964. Some other laptops go even higher.
It's my first comment here: don't buy any puri.sm products. Or better say, think thrice before doing so. I used to own Librem 15 v4 which I bought in April 2020. Everything was bad. Just barely usable as a laptop. In January 2022 I spilled a water on the keyboard and some keys got stuck, so it kept on typing some letters sporadically. Tried to replace keyboard –> 150$ + delivery because it's the whole top panel to replace. No. OK, disconnected the keyboard and bought a compact Lenovo keyboard (also appeared to be a trashy thing). Half a year later the battery died. No chance to replace, out-of-stock, not even on chinese eshops.
Also, I preordered Librem 5 all the way back in 2019. Decided to cancel the order a year ago – still waiting for my money to come back.
Puri.sm gave me an impression of a scam copmany, unfortunately.
Librem 15 is an amazing machine, still my daily driver with Qubes OS. Great keyboard, upgradeable RAM and disk, doesn't require any blobs in the userland.
Librem 14 is even better, with two .m2 SSD, upgradeable and powerful. Definitely checks many boxes in TFA. Too smal for my taste but great for travelling.
Yes, Purism has problems with refunds. Don't buy if you want to cancel your order. Everything else is great. Also, forums say that first versions of their devices may have rough edges. Wait until they are well tested to be sure. Librem 14 is well tested and many early problems were solved. Same for Librem 5.
Nothing if you're mainly going to use it to watch HD movies. I don't mind the resolution on a 13-14 inch screen to much to be fair, but IMHO 16:9 is really quite awful on such a small screen (and tolerable on 15-17 inch ones)
Sadly JDM exclusive and has soldered RAM, but the latest models come with a 3:2 display, decent I/O (e.g. RJ45, full sized SD card reader, even VGA (!)), magnesium alloy chassis and a removable battery in a sub 1.1 kg package. Can't speak for the quality of the trackpad or keyboard though.
https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/
Shame that they are not more widely available.
But I see you can buy the English keyboard on eBay.
The circular trackpad is an acknowledgement that most engineers hate using trackpads, generally only will use a laptop docked, and would rather have a better typing experience than a giant trackpad that will only get in the way the few times they do use the laptop on the go.
“If you can’t do it in the keyboard it’s not worth doing”
I've always owned 15" laptops, and i've never had any trouble fitting them in bags, even in a sleeve. I understand why people might want 7" or 10" netbooks, but a 12" machine just seems like a waste of space to me. I understand that most people feel very differently, though!
> webcam that doesn’t make it look like your laptop (or you) are a potato during a videoconference
And also doesn't look up your nose - my XPS 15 has the camera underneath the monitor, and it's terrible.
> a great keyboard, look to the 2008-11 era ThinkPads for inspiration
Keyboards are one of those things where tastes vary so much. I dislike every ThinkPad keyboard i've tried. Maybe we need interchangeable keyboards, with various styles available?
> a useful number of ports
Interested to see that ethernet doesn't make the cut. I definitely appreciate having that without having to bedongle the machine.
How about adding:
- Ability to charge from USB-PD
Or is that a given these days?
As someone who travels frequently, the M1 Air has been simply amazing. It's so small and sturdy, and fairly light compared to the bigger/bulkier/heavier 15 I had before... and I'm at far less risk of breaking the screen while it's in my bag.
The bigger machines have a much greater surface area which the contents of the backpack can put pressure against. So the larger screen laptops are more susceptible to being pressed too hard near the middle of their screens and breaking.
I wish there were some ultra-rigid screen backs which would eliminate that concern. I don't need something as serious as a Panasonic Toughbook, but something with some arched curved ridges to add strength would be nice.
Then I got a Surface Pro 3. It was FAR more portable, enough to make me realize just how much less portable my MBP was. I couldn't bear to bring the 15" back out. However, the SP3 was definitely too small of a screen for dedicated work. Great for college & notetaking, but reliant on external displays.
Now I've been using a 13" surface laptop for a few years and that's really struck me as the right portability vs productivity balance. 13 inches is big enough for two columns of code, and fits in basically any backpack pouch easy. I probably won't be going back to 15" when this dies.
I bought and old one second hand a few years ago and it is actually nice; bulky but light enough and really unbreakable. So when backpacking it is a good companion that can be used as a little flat table, can be used in the heat, cold and in the rain, you can drop drinks on it, drop it and beat someone’s head it before getting to work. The only real disadvantage is the battery life, so I carry a spare which works for me when on trips.
The main thing I miss is the expansive keyboards on the bigger machines. The 17” ones even had a number pad, and some my 15” ones did too.
My current work laptop is a 15” Thinkpad P15 Gen2 with an i9-11950H, 64gb of ram, and an rtx 3080 mobile. It’s a beast but very reasonably sized for its specs. It’s a little bit chunky but I wouldn’t expect anything less with a high performance cpu and gpa. Lots of ports, 15” OLED display. I love it, even if the battery life is abysmal. It’s a workstation.
But my personal machine needs to be small enough to throw in a bag and not think about, so its a Ryzen powered thinkpad X13. The screen is a little dim and the battery life is way worse than a comparable dell XPS 13, but it was inexpensive and does everything I need. The major downside to the size is the keyboard is also shrunk, so lots of typing sucks.
The biggest problem with both machines, and its true of all thinkpads, is that Lenovo put the function button on the leftmost of the lowest row instead of ctrl button and I often try to copy paste and accidentally hit the function key instead of control. I ended up getting a mouse with some extra buttons and I’ve assigned one of them as ctrl instead, but it would be better if the ctrl button would just be where it was supposed to be.
In my freshman year of college, I still hadn't gotten a smartphone yet due to being on my parents' phone plan still, but since there was wifi everywhere on campus, I used to carry around a Nexus 7 tablet everywhere. I could literally fit the 7" tablet in my pocket, which always seemed to take people by surprise. I think 7" is a lot smaller than some people realize; I don't think I could even type comfortably with both hands on a netbook that small!
Not a given on the Thinkpads the author mentions as being near-perfect, which are known to get perma-bricked using PD from a charger while plugged into a monitor also providing PD: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X1-Ca...
2016-2019 MBPs also had an issue with PD on the left side causing thermal throttling.
I bought a used Thinkpad 220 and it's a cool little swiss army type of device. The keyboard is VERY different from modern thinkpads. More tactile and a lot of cool features. Would be interesting with a technical update. I think the Japanese Panasonic Let's Note may be the closest modern equivalent.
Their later designs have crammed it in at top-center as is more typical.
I've settled on the 12" size, mostly because it's the smallest viable laptop that you can still type on. If you look at the ThinkPad X201 [1] as an example from the post, the device is the exact width of the keyboard with no bezel. So, you could have an 11" or smaller device, but it would mean sacrificing a lifetime of typing muscle memory to do so.
[1] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/3822/lenovo_x201.JPG
I remember loving my ~8 inch netbook during university. With virtual desktops it was more than adequate for coding projects even if the best seat I could find was on the floor against a wall.
The added rigidity feels good too, even something really cheaply built out of plastic will have little to no flex, and probably survive being dropped at that size.
This is part of why the 12” MacBook and its spiritual ancestor, the 12” PowerBook G4 were popular.
I also carry around a smaller messenger bag which 12" laptops just about fit in. I tried to pull off a 17" Dell mobile workstation, but got very tired of lugging around a backpack and having no battery life.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/1797659/lenovo-slim-pro-7-re...
I’m mainly interested in it having the Nvidia RTX 3050 6GB as mobile GPU for hw encoding and decoding and some CUDA.
Have you run into any problems with their fancy power modes or mixing onboard AMD graphics and the NVIDIA card?
1) no fans whatsoever
2) no coil whine when I plug my headphones in and stress the CPU
The keyboard is exactly the right size and the right font for me, but I'll concede that muscle memory is an individual thing. I've owned Apple's laptops and keyboards made in 2005, 2007, 2010, 2015, 2019, and 2022, and they are very hell-bent on being consistent about key size and placement, I should give it to them.
I'd like a Linux laptop that would beat this.
XPS13 is a close contender because that 3840x2400 screen is the right kind of ratio and super crisp, but man, that fan noise and the coil whine are just killing the mood. Maybe Thinkpad X13s, but Linux support and its screen are both very meh at this point.
Por que no los dos?
Asahi is running on M2 now: https://asahilinux.org/2022/07/july-2022-release/
Sorry, I’m not paying mad bucks for something that’s “yes, but”.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqfc9NBYfr0
(No first-hand experience with any of those.)
(Updated: to add more models.)
I can't ever imagine using another trackpad with physical buttons though. Just extend the trackpad over the space that the button would have taken up. I should be able to left/middle/right click anywhere on the trackpad, not move my hand back to the button to click.
It's not an alternative for a M2 MacBook, nor is it going to run your 200+ microservices but for 200-300 bucks they tick a lot of the boxes and work great as ultra-portable productivity machines.
I love the combo of my 14" M2 + Anker 737
What's appropriate for the user has a lot to do with the size of their hands, and I think this gets overlooked by many who are instead thinking about display size.
As a person with smallish hands who programs (types a lot), anything larger than an X40/X60 ThinkPad form factor has been very annoying to use.
The move to widescreen aspect ratio displays has completely wrecked laptop typing efficiency in my world, since it tended to stretch out the keyboards beyond what my fingers can reach without lifting a palm.
I wish laptop keyboards were treated more like specialized instruments fitted to buyers hands, like shoe sizes. If you consider how much $$ is paid to people that type all day, it's asinine that the laptop industry hasn't matured into optimizing that interface for individuals. Can't I at least get two hand size variants in the average laptop ordering page? Instead it feels like things have only regressed in this department since the classic ThinkPad days.
It also has quite nice system specs - 11th gen i7 and 32 GB RAM.
I am currently in the process of choosing a laptop and it's one of my main requirements. So far, I'm looking with tender eyes to the MSI Prestige 13 EVO. I have no idea about Linux compatibility, thought.
Webcams are a waste of bezel space, might as well get a non-junk USB one. Plus you can position it for shots other than up your nose.
Give me like 8 USB-C ports and nothing else.
16:10 is OK but if we’re going for Perfect Laptop, obviously 4:3 is the correct aspect ratio.
The current Apple Bluetooth magic keyboards are fine, use that (with a non wireless interface of course).
These opinions are my own but they are also objectively correct.
+1 to 8 USB-Cs!
Speaking for myself, I just had a strong attachment to my sort of middle-of-the-road headphones (Sennheiser HD380 pro). I don’t think anyone could reasonably call them audiophile. But they were expensive “to me” on a student budget, so I was worried/annoyed that somebody would mess with my (in retrospect quite limited) “investment.”
Then I tried a cheap external dongle, the Ifi Go Link. It's fantastic and I'd never go back to the crap they put into the phone.
> 12” body … to fit the 13" to 14" screen it would have very small bezels, this is a great size for fitting in bags and sitting on small tables
Remove one and it makes the perfect laptop much more attainable. It’s near impossible to fit removable hardware and many ports in a small body. Thinkpads are pretty close, but even some of those have to have a flip open expanding port for Ethernet. An hdmi port is taller than many laptops. The small body really is a huge plus for mobility and comfort, but you can’t have ports/etc with that.
Oddly enough my perfect laptop is still the google pixelbook. Enough power for what I need, flawless construction, incredible trackpad and keyboard, runs Linux and chromeos/android apps, is absolutely gorgeous, and super portable.
Downside is there are like no ports so you need a usb hub, the bezel is huge, and … it hasn’t been improved in like half a decade.
I can’t help wonder if the m2 air 15” is the best on the market currently.
I'm so surprised more people don't want brighter screens.
At night my screen looks gorgeous, though I could even go a touch brighter when doing detailed design stuff.
Daytime? I'd go for literally 2-3x brighter if I could. Let alone working outside! Screen brightness is the biggest QoL improvement I'd get vs any other spec bump.
The only things it doesn’t check off is the HDMI out and other ports issues IMO.
I work with my laptop only. No peripherals and I move around a lot. Makes it easier for me to work this way.
What I really want from Apple at this point is better UX on MacOS. Stage Manager is an interesting idea but, to me, it's not really a fix for any of my problems so I've just disabled it. I've used two 4k external monitors for years on MacOS and the same little annoying bugs plague me. Specifically, I think how MacOS handles full-screen apps is just not quite right. I don't understand why things feel clunky in just this area of the experience. We need what happened in iOS a few years ago when they got rid of the home button and were forced to make opening/closing/switching between apps much more fluid. I need MacOS to feel fluid like that. Then, it'd really be "perfect" for me.
I have baked into my muscle memory the expectation that when I hit the keyboard shortcut to summon virtual desktop number 5, that desktop will show up on the monitor that currently has focus, no matter which monitor(s) it may have appeared on before. This setup is impossible in Mission Control or whatever the multiple-desktop thing MacOS is called. I can choose between:
"Displays have separate spaces" checked: left monitor has desktops 1,2,3, right monitor has desktop 4,5,6, and if I add a new one to left its number is 7. Want to put desktop #4 on the left? You can't except by dragging all the windows one by one, like a cave-man. What happens to the numbering when you add or remove another monitor? It's weird.
"Displays have separate spaces" unchecked: now I have numbered Left+RightMonitorMonstrosity desktops, but if I want to switch the left monitor between "documentation" and "email", while leaving the right monitor on code, I'm out of luck. This setup behaves a bit better about adding and removing monitors, I will admit.
My old Xmonad setup with numbered desktops (which I cloned from my ion3 setup) behaved beautifully when adding and removing monitors. This is to say nothing of having had a Mod4 key solely for my own use, which I ended up using almost exclusively to interact with the window manager.
I can't wrap my head around a film strip of horizontally situated desktops that I swipe through or page through. I can't fathom the idea of making "full screen" change an app from looking like a window to looking like a desktop, and whats more appending the new desktop to the end of the list. I know that MacOS already knows what the windows on that other desktop are going to look like before I switch, so why does it insist on showing some kind of animation when switching (even "reduce motion" changes it from a wipe motion to a useless fade), like iOS does to hide load time? I know about amethyst and rectangle and setting up a "hyper" key with karabiner-elements or qmk or whatever. No amount of it adds up to the same experience that I had with ion3 back in 2006 and I get worked up that I paid into the ecosystem and bought this otherwise-great laptop and I can't make it work the way I want it.
The limitation, which you might be bumping into, is you can't drag the current desktop that's visible on a display, which is sometimes annoying but makes sense. Switch to a different desktop first.
I agree with you about the confusing ever-changing number labels on the desktops. I would really like to assign names to desktops, like "Work" and "Project 1". The GUI has room for it, as the full-screen app desktops already have names.
Or do 8 parallel runs of transforming and merging a massive amount of jpgs into less massive pile of pdfs. Just about fully pegged all of the cores for hours.
What surprised me was how fast everything still was. Without the fan, I wouldn't have known the load the system was under.
I don't know what imagemagick does when you ask it to merge jpgs into a pdf. :)
14 inch M2 Macbook Pro.
Combine it with the Anker 737 Power Bank, and it's a match made in heaven.
Never heard the fan. Stays cool to the touch, which is quite unexpected and pleasant.
I’m even kinda happy about the notch, because it prompted Apple to add a strip of extra pixels for the menubar to live in, leaving the remaining 16:10 area fully open for use by apps.
The only downside is its weight, but given all of its other upsides I can live with that.
Essentially, the RAM is so close to the CPU and GPU that it can effectively be used as VRAM, at least for the M1 and up chipsets as far as I'm aware. That means a 32GB RAM MacBook would be able to run incredibly large (e.g. LLM) networks on-device. Nvidia GPUs with that much VRAM (although they are clearly better at GPU tasks) can cost as much as an expensive MacBook already.
[1] In addition to the non-MBP hardware being clunky, your choice of OS is cutting your steak with a spoon (Windows), or a huge drawer full of tangs, handles, prongs, and spoon-bowl and you spend your time digging around to assemble a knife, fork, and spoon that are the same style and finally give up and settle for "well, it matches if you squint" (Linux). I love the idea of Linux, but I've never actually gotten my system to where I like it, just to where I can tolerate it.
When I looked at adding my ideal RAM and storage onto the base MBP M2 Pro model, the RAM upgrade came to $1634.56 (£1250), and the storage upgrade came to $2876.83 (£2200).
That's enough to be a long term purchase, so I decided to wait for the M3 and see if 3nm makes a big difference.
That's not a very good comparison. Glasses are important for helping the visually impaired, while Apple memory is just an add-on for a luxury computer.
>But as long as you can afford it, a few hundred dollars isn't that much spread over a few years.
It is that few hundred dollars is a 10x markup over market rate (I've checked, and Apple's markups are actually that bad).
>You can get a not-MBP and have a clunky experience [1] but save some money, or spend a the extra few hundred for a MBP with enough memory to be a great experience.
I don't think my experience with my current PC is clunky, and if I get an M1 macbook, I'll be using Asahi Linux instead of MacOS.
I suspect the fan doesn't turn on because it is heavily throttled.
Another factor: I live in the UK, where they have a particularly crackpot derivative of the ISO QWERTY layout that well nigh unusable for a programmer. Apple is the only laptop vendor that will allow you to choose your keyboard layout, so when I buy anything else, I order from the US, with all the customs hassles that implies.