I've been using System76's PopOS with my Asus Zephyrus G14 (4800hs) as a daily driver and I really like it. (freelance/web)

The battery life is comparable to Windows (on integrated graphics mode, it has graphics switching available)at 7-10 hours with 70% brightness and balanced power settings using VScode and firefox.

The g14 has a 75wh battery vs the pangolin's 49wh, so I would expect less battery life from the pangolin despite the 4700u having a lower default tdp, since the 4800hs likes to sit at around 6-10 watts when doing non-intensive tasks anyway.

In 2021 I'm not missing any major programs. It's pretty incredible how much is cross-platform now.

I guess that could just be my sight, but the reviews for the XPS laptop vs the 4k model of the same were pretty much unanimous on the 4k variant being a waste of battery for a neglible return on image quality, so it's at least not a fringe view

I have a ThinkPad, and this has been my experience. Sitting next to my Macbook Pro 13" retina, there is not much difference. 14" 16:9 1080p vs. 13" 16:10 1600p. The matte finish + slight diagonal increase closes the gap between the two. Unless you're in your 20s with perfect vision, I doubt the average person could tell a visual difference between the two.

I will also say that at 13", the difference between 16:9 and 16:10 is practically nonexistent. Especially 14" vs 13". I thought this would be a major issue for me. But it's not. On a 27" desktop monitor? Sure, that can make a difference.

Both laptops are 15".

Yep. What's getting lost in this whole discussion over resolution and whether >1080p is necessary is the issue of panel quality. Most laptops have always had absolute shit that is useless for photo editing or color-accurate work. Even at the high end they rarely advertise things like gamut coverage.

I absolutely hate viewing text on my LO-DPI PC vs my 6 year old HD-DPI Macbook Pro or either my 4 year old android smartphone or my 1 year old iPhone or my 7 year old iPad. It's like playing a NES game vs a PS4 Game. Sure some are fun and it's nostalgic but the world as moved on and lo-res is old.

This is exactly what the product people who are building blazing fast, high spec laptops with top-of-the-line circa 2006 displays need to hear.

But support for 1440p on Linux (and as far as I know not just Linux) is crap.

Anyway in my experience having a high quality display is much much much more important then the display resolution (as long as it's at least 1080p).

Sure some wayland implementations do support fractional scaling but only in a way which leads to not so crisp fonts and images (scaling by 2 and then down scaling the pixel output to the given 1.x scaling factor), which defeats the whole point of getting a higher resolution screen.

Sure if your 1440p screen is also size wise bigger this might not matter but then my argument was always about increasing resolution without increasing monitor size. E.g. like a 1440p14" Laptop or similar.

Also a perfect size scaling on a 1440p14" to make the UI be the same size as on a 1080p14" monitor is technically impossible, through there are ways to get solutions which are good enough anyway (but not scaling to exactly the same size but something close by, separately for each font and other elements in a UI).

And while X impl. might work better, lets be honest X is dead. Still used, sure, but dead anyway.

Perfect vision is usually understood to be the ability to discern details of about 1/60 of a degree, or 0.29 milliradians. By the arc length formula (s=rθ), we find that the distance needed to precisely align this angle with the level of detail provided by a 1080p screen is about 20 inches.

In other words, if you sit closer than 20 inches away from your screen (perhaps not that unlikely for a laptop), you might be able to discern details beyond the 1080p level. This would only be possible for extremely contrast sensitive small details, like text in a small font size at 1:1 (no DPI scaling).

So... it's a bit complicated, but I suspect 1080p would be good enough for nearly everyone at 13 inches, but move up to 15 inches and I could see many people preferring 1440p.

High DPI screens are able to render text without aliasing, and that makes a significant difference, especially with less-than-perfect eyesight.

What you're saying is true insofar as I had to squint up to a 1080p screen at 13" to actually see the pixels. But everything was slightly blurry, and switching to a "Retina" (1600p iirc) screen fixed that.

Which was the lack of subpixel aliasing: you can make those screens look blurry as well, by turning it back on. But a 1080 without it just looks like it has janky text rendering.

An actual 4K screen is unnecessary at 13", imho, but the extra pixels are harmless except in battery life. I do detect a real difference in textual rendering between 170ppi and 227, because it's the difference between leaning on subpixel aliasing and turning it off while still getting good results.

First of all the cone spacing in the fovea is around 31arcsec or about half the arcmin you assume. IMO that is more relevant than the 20/20 vision number because that number is not based on any intrinsic quantisation of the visual system but rather mostly limited by blur which tends to be very much not gausian -> not an ideal low pass filter for most eyes.

Now consider the nyquist shannon sampling theorem that tells us that any signal we want to fully capture needs to be sampled at at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency of interest. So if we want to be able to fully represent any state of our visual system on a display we need at least twice the resolution of our visual system (ignoring for a minute that that assumes an ideal lpf which your eye is not as stated above). so already 4x your 1arcmin resolution number.

But that all quickly becomes rather theoretical when you look at jagged elephant in the room: aliasing and scaling! a lot of what we look at is either rendered with pixel precision being very prone to aliasing at scales that are much much larger than your pixel pitch (see this worst case demonstration https://www.testufo.com/aliasing-visibility) or image or video files that might be displayed at a size that isn't an integer multiple or fraction of its native resolution. scaling just like aliasing causes artifacts that go way beyond the scale of your pixel pitch and one way to mitigate the issue is to just have a very high target resolution to scale too. So yeah I don't thing "can't distinguish individual pixels" is a meaningful threshold and even way beyond that there is still benefit to be had even for those with less than perfect eyesight

Especially with Chinese/Japanese characters, these can sometimes become unreadable on smaller fonts on 1080p.

I have two 14” Thinkpads I switch between which have almost identical setups, but one is 1080p and one is 1440. I’m not buying another 1080p if I can avoid it. And yes I have been tweaking fonts and X11 quite a bit already.

Once you see and appreciate the difference, you can’t unsee it. Anything less is jarring.

Print media figured out three to four decades ago that print buyers prefer at least 144 lpi for black shapes, at least 300-600 dpi for grey images, and minimally 300 dpi but ideally 1200 dpi for colour photos people will consider high quality. (Note: For reader convenience I’m mixing lines per inch or lpi with dots per inch or dpi here, lines is per screen but there may be several screens per image, so dpi is the source material you’re trying to reproduce with screens.)

We’ve been settling on computer screen quality for too long. If all we did was video, fine, but we spend most time simulating print.

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/4k-1080p-201311153442.htm

https://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/comment-pa...

https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/4K-vs-8K--Who-can-tell-...

The biggest thing keeping me on my Macbook is it's hard to find a 13 inch, hi dpi, close as possible to mac keyboard laptop. The Razer 13 inch was sooo close but they made tilde and backslash half keys for some reason....

https://www.ultrabookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/k...

This has less space than 4k at 200% (normal for 15") or 1080p at 100%.

That's not my experience at all. For a while I was using a 27" 4k display at an effective resolution of 2560x1440. Obviously it wasn't as nice as 5k at 2x scaling would have been, but it was much sharper than a native 1440p display.

How does Windows fix this? I have used so many Win32 apps that are jus broken in one way or another on HiDPI displays, most shockingly Visual Studio, my experience of HiDPI on Windows is always worse.

Not sure why it is that way - it's just a matter finding a global pixel size, rendering all screens to these bitmaps and then 2D scaling them down to panel resolution.

Now, seriously, I find it hard to see the difference between 1080 and 4K. What would be nice is a good HDR display panel.

If the computer can only hold up a 1.5 hour battery it really doesn't satisfy the use case of a laptop, doubling the battery up to 99 wh really allows for a 3-4 hour minimum battery life and a longer battery life for non-GPU work.

But then, at the office, they got some HP Elitedesk minis, which are very small - but use regular desktop CPUs - and I bought one for myself. Now the laptop spends most of its days in a drawer because the desktop is much beefier and just as portable.

Of course, there are use-cases that a computer requiring an external screen and AC to even work can't handle. That's why I would be much more interested in having a "big" laptop, as in powerful CPU, tons of RAM, glorious screen. Could even be tempted to throw in a dedicated GPU. Don't care about it being 1 cm thin, featherweight and all-day battery. I do care about it not spinning up its fans when I'm just running vim in a console. I don't mind lugging around 2-3 kg of copper if that means the CPU can do a lot of work in silence.

I have a friend who's moving much more around, in meetings, etc. Her old macbook air is perfect for what she does. Also, the latest and greatest AMD wouldn't make a difference for her job, but she would clearly hate to lug around a heavy, bulky beast.

I think the issue is that, with today's technology, there's clearly no one size fits all. And there seems to be a trend in laptops to optimize for size and battery-life. Luckily, there are people for whom this is the right compromise. Don't know if they're the majority, but clearly there are other use-cases for which choices are more limited.

For Intel based laptops built in the last 10 years basically the only thing making a difference in battery life for laptops with same CPU is screen, and battery.

Everything else is almost the same everywhere. NVME SSD + WiFi will uniformly eat 2W. Power conversion will also eat at to 500-800mW. All other peripherals combined will unlikely to eat more than 1 watt, with exception of 1GB ethernet if working full speed.

From my desk, to my easy chair, to my bed, and back again.

Not hard on my battery (two of those have charge cables handy) but difficult to pull off with a desktop.

Now that you mention it, it's been more than a year since my laptop has left my home. Ouch.

Granted, becoming a parent also meant that things like watching a movie are “haha, I’m going to sleep” now, too.

I use a sit/stand desk but barely ever sit at it, so fifteen minutes of down time here and there helps.

On related note - does external display works without nvidia GPU? A lot of manufactures have lately decided to hardwire external HDMI connection to descrete GPU and hence it has been pretty painful to use NVIDIA powered Laptops on Linux. :(

- What kind of external webcam do you use? Does it have any problem with any video-conferencing software?

- Do you access any streaming service (with DRM)? Any issues?

- Any issues with drivers, returning from sleep/hybernation?

Thanks!

The nvidia driver is a bit of a pain to set up, especially if you're on wayland or if you want to use displays via USB C (reverse prime does not work yet due to an nvidia driver bug, so you need to use the nvidia gpu as primary when docked). Other than that, everything works and the community (arch wiki and rog-core) provide good support for getting everything up and running. A bit of configuration and a somewhat recent kernel will be needed (it's pretty new hardware after all), but it's not that hard if you either know Linux or are willing to spend some time. I'm running this config for 8 months now, so the situation from a fresh install might be even better.

Similar to the sister comment, I came from an XPS 13, but I'm happy. The laptop is a bit heavier, but in exchange you get a lot more power, far more RAM (up to 48GB), more ports and, subjectively, a dar better keyboard. Initially I wanted to stay with an XPS, but now I'm happy I made the jump.

EDIT: One unbelievably good point I initially forgot: You can run a VM with GPU passthrough on the laptop. If you need Windows with graphics performance, especially on the go, this is an incredible advantage.

Can you speak more to this? Does Pop_OS! configure this (more-or-less) out of the box? Would it work with any Nvidia card or are there restrictions?

I'm interested in such a setup and have done research from afar. I've developed on Linux for years, but have heard GPU passthrough can be difficult unless you wrangle drivers a bit.

EDIT: I'd also like to use it for CUDA in Linux. Do you have to reboot when enabling GPU passthrough (not a dealbreaker, just curious)?

Sure! Regards working out of the box, you'll probably have no luck with that. VFIO is still somewhat of a niche and VFIO on a laptop is a niche of a niche, so you'll need to expect some command line usage and a bit of config file editing. This being said, getting it to work is not too hard and, if you've done VFIO in the past, you should feel right at home.

For the initial setup, you can mostly follow the guide on the arch wiki [0]. You might need to adapt it a bit on ubuntu(-based) systems, but the major points are the same. The only difference to the usual setup is that you need to include an APCI-table [3] to get the laptop driver to work in the VM. This reddit thread [1] describes it quite well. The author of that thread also has a repo [2] where he published his files and on which I based my scripts on. Note that you need the usual CPUID work-around (see the "Error 43" section on the arch vfio page). Also, you'll need an USB C to HDMI/DisplayPort/... cable and a monitor for the initial setup, after that you can use a dummy plug [5] and looking glass (also described on the arch wiki) to use pass through without external monitor. The setup is also very stable for me, with the exception of the looking glass part - if you absolutely depend on the setup, having a monitor handy will save you a bit of headache, but you can always revert to a VM display in the worst case.

Regarding GPU support: It should support all GPU configurations, but you should check reddit etc to be sure. If you're talking about other laptops, the situation is a bit different. The big advantage of the G14 is (1) that the GPU has its own IOMMU group and is therefore easy to isolate and (2) that the display ports are well split between the two GPUs (the HDMI out and the internal display are connected to the AMD iGPU and the USB C DP-channel is connected to the RTX). This is rather rare, but makes setting this up (comparatively) easy. Note that the USB channel of the USB C out is not routed via the GPU, so if you're connected to a docking station, its display ports will be used by the VM, but the USB ports are on the host, still. This, however, comes with the drawback that you can not pass through an USB controller, as the groups for those do not work out. The ACS override patch (see arch wiki) might fix this, but unless you need to use audio interfaces, the "normal" USB redirector will suffice anyway.

Rebooting is semi-required. In order to change from VM to Linux and back, you'll need to [un-]bind the nvidia driver and switch to vfio-pci. Going from Linux to VM is only possible when nothing uses the nvidia driver, which either needs a restart of your display server or only using the iGPU for all apps (quite easy on sway/wayland, haven't tried on X). The reverse should work as well - the author of the reddit threads above has scripts to do so, but this did not work out for me. Leaving the vfio-pci driver for the GPU is not an option either, as this will prevent it from going into the low power state and therefore heat up the laptop and use up the battery. Because of this, I usually simply reboot. In summary, if you don't mind rebooting, having the GPU bound to vfio-pci via kernel parameter on a secondary boot option is by far the easier way :) But it should be possible without, it'll just be a bit of work.

To work with CUDA, you'll need to have the nvidia driver loaded, but you'll want to have that anyway to enable low-power states, as mentioned above. Using only the iGPU for display is possible in combination with CUDA, you'll simply need to stop your CUDA-apps before unbinding the driver. That's actually the setup I use, too :)

Hope this helps!

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/hx5j8q/success_with_l...

[2] https://git.deck.sh/shark/g14gpu

[3] Since the original link is down for me: You need the ACPI table [4] and include it like this in the `<domain>`-part:

  <qemu:commandline>
    <qemu:arg value='-acpitable'/>
    <qemu:arg value='file=/home/cole/vfio/acpitable.bin'/>
  </qemu:commandline>

[4] https://git.deck.sh/shark/g14gpu/src/branch/master/acpitable...

[5] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086MKR9WH - no affiliation, anything should work

* Locks up on suspend/resume

* Locks up when inserting an external USB-C monitor

* Requires a recent kernel to work properly (5.8 or later)

* Locks up without amdgpu.runpm=0 kernel command line

* dGPU can't be turned off, so increases power consumption

* Locks up with vsync on with the dGPU

* Kernel warning on startup, but doesn't affect stability

Besides these issues (which can be worked around), it's very solid.

It's worked great so far except for plugging into Dell's USB-c dock in the morning. This is a guessing game of which (of 3) monitors are going to work, often requiring opening/closing the lid a time or two or turning on/off screens.

Battery life is decent (VERY good if you turn down brightness and ssh to your work) and it's blazing fast. It does get egg cooking hot when unplugged and running the GPU (games).

Running Win10 currently, but trying to figure out which Linux is going to run with 3 monitors without doing hours of research. Suggestions welcome. Guess I'll try PopOS next.

A side note: the build quality was extremely disappointing, coming from an XPS 13.

Thank you for the pointer. I have the exact same laptop and tried Ubuntu on it - couldn't even change the screen brightness.

This would also work for Ubuntu.

https://github.com/bkw777/mainline

It wouldn't turn me off from System76 if the hardware were good, but it's just... bad... real bad.

System76 should take a risk and truly make an interesting laptop. leaving the standard, boring design to the big name companies.

If you want great design that matches a Mac (overall, better in some areas, worse in others), look at the flagship ThinkPad models, Microsoft Surface devices, etc. There are many laptops that have "standout design features" such as convertible designs, novel display and input options including pen-and-touch, etc. If anything, I think Macs lag behind in these innovations, although they have other benefits.

Anyway, that's basically the creation myth of the iPhone, no? That it supposedly was basically iterated on for quite a few years before the technology got to the point where a high-quality execution was allowed. I also had Windows Mobile smartphones and remember the iPhone releasing. I didn't recognize or appreciate that difference then.

Turns out I was entirely wrong: Apple wasn't positioning this phone for IT/business professionals for corporate use. They were building a consumer product. The feature set they were prioritizing was entirely counter-intuitive from my perspective. The features that I thought were gimmicks at the time ended up being the features that made it successful: natural multi-touch input, a (then) gigantic screen, and a bare-bones UI/UX. It had nothing that I wanted or needed, but it had everything that they needed to open up the market to millions of people who weren't using HTC bricks on their Verizon corporate plan that their IT admin configured for them.

Just search "windows mobile" on YouTube and look back at the awful (but feature filled!) experiences we used to think was awesome. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXDgsZvSTP8

* extremely, extremely thin margins

* in general, users are pretty low-discretion, which makes it hard to meaningfully differentiate your product

* deeply entrenched competition (what % of laptops are sold at best buy/etc?)

* the users who are high-discretion are going to be extremely demanding users. They're going to nitpick over small details in both hardware and software. And they're probably going to be installing their own OS (or at least reinstalling the existing one) and will generally be more demanding of both product design and support. Also, they probably have the tech skills to correctly point the finger at you when it's your fault. Whereas less discerning users might just go "Ugh bill gates!"

Doesn't help that the "linux laptop" niche was probably a big part of this "niche laptop" market segment and Dell and Lenovo are both kinda warming back up to that niche. e.g. the newest XPS's all work great on (latest kernel) linux.

[1] https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-...

The XPS 13 competes directly with the mac in terms of (familiar but) industrial design, standout display and inner design (with the white carbon fiber) and USB-C ports for a lifetime. Stating it first, because its the most obvious competitor.

The Razer, Asus, HP and Surface flagships have clear standout designs and similar features.

The only 2 laptops that are purposely boring are the Thinkpad and System76, because they seem to cater to people who need them as work machines, first and foremost. (LG Gram is not a flagship)

I don't _hate_ the XPS 13, but I wouldn't recommend it and I probably won't be getting a 3rd one (unless they change).

The build quality just isn't there. First of all, the flexible chassis is annoying. If I pick it up on the side with one hand, it's likely to flex enough to trigger a trackpad click. Secondly, while it's pretty quiet, it does get rather hot. Third, the trackpad and mouse aren't Macbook-quality (butterfly keyboard aside). In my first one, the trackpad and battery had to be replaced. The keyboard on my current one (9300) has very mild issues (I think they reduced the travel distance and it, like butterfly, is somewhat susceptible to dust/dirt)

Not sure what I'll replace it with. Will see how the reviews for the Framework laptop are.

OEM are very risk averse. They only produce cookie cutter designs because most of their buyers themselves look for most casual buyers.

The iGPU has a hard-locked 64MB of RAM allocated to it, which means the Nvidia graphics chip is ALWAYS on, causing it to get maybe 2~ hours of battery life at best

The build quality is miserable, I ended up replacing all of the screws in the machine to make it more properly sturdy (which also fixed the case flex causing the fans to grind to a halt if you nudged the machine too harshly)

Linux support still isn't 100%. The Nvidia blob doesn't support GPU switching for what ever reason and Nouveau just causes kernel oopses

After suffering with it for so many years I finally bought an "MSI Modern 14" Ryzen laptop, which I'm moderately content with. I'll probably send the Mibook off to some people I know that work at Red Hat so they can at least improve its Linux support for those who still have it though

Seems like the reasonable choice, given that host-side USB-C is still dead in the water.

I find them completely useless and am ready for them to be gone, but it's like they didn't even try.

At this point Apple can design any gimmicky piece of hardware, stick their logo on it, sell it for three times the price of equivalent third party products and still run out of stock on launch. You can't beat that.

$1000 for the M1 air is not a huge premium. It's actually very cheap.

Which is a huge problem for the competition. I know that I can get just get a cheap Mac and it will still be fast, it will still have a great screen and the build quality will be higher than the majority of PC laptops.

I happen to like macOS, so it's not a huge issue, but if I want to get a laptop for Linux, then I need to go to a store to see the models. Otherwise I can't be sure if I'll like the screen, keyboard or overall look an feel. The minor price difference for an Apple product is acceptable, given that I know what I'll getting a usable laptop regardless of which model I pick.

Retail prices already include higher profit margins than bulk order prices would include, which makes this markup even more egregious.

I calculated it the other day, and Apple is charging $0.52/GB for SSDs on their M1 MacBook Air.

Samsung's 980 Pro is under $0.20/GB for the 1TB model on Amazon right now. That is arguably one of the best SSDs on the market right now, and I'm fairly sure Samsung' 980 Pro is actually significantly better than the internal SSD that Apple is using on the M1 MacBook Air.

That means Apple is charging a 160% markup above retail price, minimum.

The Western Digital SN550 1TB PCIe SSD is priced at about $0.10/GB at retail on Amazon, which means Apple is charging over a 400% markup relative to the retail prices of that perfectly good SSD. Most users would not be able to tell the difference between the SN550 and the internal SSDs Apple is currently using.

I recognize that other OEMs can sometimes charge steep upgrade markups too... but Apple's prices for storage are personally annoying to me because the M1 MacBook Air seems reasonably priced until you get into the upgrades. I wanted to get more storage, but I'm not going to pay $0.52/GB for additional storage these days... I just don't find it reasonable.

Since we’re on the topic of System76, a fully upgraded Oryx Pro (except leaving the GPU at the base option) costs about half of what a fully upgraded 16” MBP costs (also leaving the GPU at the base option), while offering similar specs — $3158 vs $6000. The System76 chooses to go for a 144Hz panel instead of a HiDPI panel, but different people value different things. The System76 obviously has a better port selection (for most people), while obviously not being as sleek — but it’s not huge either, it’s reasonably thin and light. It’s more durable while not as shiny. It’s easy for people to pull out the “no true Scotsman” defense at this point, but it all depends on what the customer is looking for. It’s Apple’s fault if they don’t offer enough variety to meet the needs of their customers.

I’m sure I could dig into comparative analysis of other OEMs vs Apple and come up with other examples, but this one is easy enough.

Spec for spec, Apple charges much more than twice as much for many important upgrades... so a sufficiently upgraded Apple laptop can be more than twice as much, even if it’s often “only” a 70% markup or something. That doesn’t excuse charging egregious prices for storage. Customers want storage, and Apple withholds it unless customers want to pay a large ransom. They solder the SSDs so that customers cannot upgrade their own computers.

I own an M1 MacBook Air. I’m not some “Apple hater”, but their upgrade pricing is truly appalling, and for all their talk of environmental friendliness, their attempts to thwart aftermarket repair and upgrades significantly hinders the total potential lifetime of their products, which increases their environmental impact relative to what could be.

I bought the 256GB/16GB model, and that 256GB SSD is borderline too small for me to deal with, and I’m not even like an average user that would be attempting to store music and pictures on it. I’m almost exclusively using it for software dev and web browsing. I would swap out the SSD, but... that’s obviously not possible.

If I can’t make the 256GB of storage work long term, I think I would rather sell this thing and buy something else than give Apple $0.52/GB. The M1 is good... but it’s not priceless. My opinions are subject to change, of course.

Not sure where you're getting these numbers. Comparing like for like and maxing out the Oryx, and the Mac's processor, they both have 64GB RAM and a 4TB SSD. The price I'm getting for that Mac config is $4800 vs the $3168 that you mention. $6000 doubles the Mac's storage to an 8TB SSD, which the Oryx does not offer. 6K is indeed a lot, but how many PC laptops even offer an 8TB SSD at any price? I haven't seen many.

But I digress. That's roughly a 50% markup, which is indeed a lot. For the extra $1500 you get a much higher resolution display (2880 x 1800) with good color reproduction, much better build quality, macOS and the Mac software ecosystem, Thunderbolt ports, Mac trackpad and keyboard, etc. Maybe these things are not valuable to you! But it's not like you're not getting anything for that money. The products are not equivalent, even if their specs were the same on paper.

I own System76 products and Apple products, and have owned countless PC laptops in the past. I do the math regularly and know what I'm paying for with Apple stuff, and it's almost never a 70% markup. And Apple stuff has specs you just can't find in other products, like the high-res displays and high number of Thunderbolt ports. Which isn't to say it's perfect! I don't like the Touch Bar and would like an SD card reader and HDMI out. But in general, statements about the price inflation are overblown. It exists but it's not as bad as many people think.

The rest of your points I’ve already addressed. More thunderbolt ports is actually bad for most users if it comes at the expense of ports they can actually use without a dongle. The build quality is not really any better... I’ve owned both as well, and I’ve also had a work MacBook Pro 15 with the butterfly keyboard. Until recently, Mac keyboards were the worst in the industry, including reliability. Now they’re decent, but nothing to write home about. Definitely not an advantage. Trackpads are what you make of them... Apple certainly makes good ones, but it’s not 2010 anymore. Every mid-to-high end laptop I’ve used in the last 5 years has had a good trackpad, but I still reach for a mouse even on my Macs.

I already addressed the display as well. It’s a trade off. Apple doesn’t offer high refresh rate displays on their laptops, which matter to some people. If they didn’t matter, Apple wouldn’t put them on their iPad Pro.

System76 used to offer 4K displays (optionally matte) on the Oryx Pro, and mine was exceptionally good! And that’s higher resolution than Apple uses, in addition to the wonderful matte effect cutting down on glare. I’m just guessing the massive ongoing part shortage has affected which displays they can actually acquire for the moment.

So yes, I agree you get different things with a Mac, but those things are unlikely to be worth 50% more to most people, with the exception of macOS itself... and that’s only valuable to people who like macOS or are literally required to use macOS.

> in general, statements about the price inflation are overblown. It exists but it's not as bad as many people think.

I started this conversation by pointing out the price inflation I care about the most: storage, and it’s on the order of a 400% markup. It’s extremely awful.

If Apple would be environmentally friendly and allow people to repair and upgrade their computers, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, because I’d have a 1TB SSD in my MacBook Air, and it would have cost me $100. If Apple would charge a healthy 100% profit margin, I would probably have paid them for the SSD... I’m just not willing to go to 400% markup.

Apple has basically always charged egregious upgrade prices, it didn’t start when they started soldering things down, so the small number of people like myself who would actually upgrade components should not be considered a threat to their profit margins... but even if most people did it, Apple should allow it because it’s the right thing to do long term, even if it impacts short term profits. Instead, they seem to be optimizing their products to eek out every last percentage point of profit. Which is understandable... it is a company, but it would be nice if they didn’t. They already have hundreds of billions of dollars of cash.

I mean, yeah. This is the one thing that's basically inarguable. Their computers increasingly do not contain serviceable parts, except for the Mac Pro, which is absurdly expensive. I suspect they just prefer compactness and longer battery life to repairable devices. I have to admit this isn't something I care about very much because I don't upgrade my machines and I use them until they break, which is often around a decade with Macs. Because you have different preferences I can see how you'd find these changes upsetting.

$999 Starting Price. tempting

+$249 +265Gb SSD (and a 8th GPU core)

+$200 +8Gb RAM (to a reasonable 16Gb)

+$200 +512Gb (to a nice 1Tb)

So that's $649 for a 768Gigs of SSD, 8 Gigs of RAM (and a GPU core). Cost of 1Tb gen-4 and a stick of RAM is about $200

i.e. You've paid the absolutely necessary $249 to get the 512Gb... then it's only $200 to get an extra 512Gb. Once you've overcome that first hurdle, the 2nd looks almost good value.

Now, if you spec out their Mac Pro, especially as it gets updated so infrequently, those get very out of line with competitor hardware quickly.

Still has soldered in RAM, unfortunately.

Apple has huge volume, big margins a very tight supply chain and a mountain of cash in tax havens. They have a lot more options.

If a seller like System 76 adds too much margin on their models people will buy a Clevo rebadged by some other seller which is a shame because System76 are adding value with their firmware and OS tweaks.

I am looking forward to the day when a company like System76 can release their own designs but without being in Apples position of fleecing customers for music, video, apps, cloud, mobile, tablets etc in a closed ecosystem it might be a long time coming.

* trackpoint + buttons (can be without touchpad, disabled anyway) * full keyboard * strong durable * removable battery * 4k screen * ecc 64-128gb * rj45 * lots of ports * hardware switches to disable: networking, camera, mic,..

Thinkpad's are move farther away each year. I hope some company will fill the gap.

Sure the above wont work for everybody, but if you are like me, you unpacked the laptop at home and at work each day at exactly the same space, where all the cables and extra monitors were.

I used to use laptop in coffee shops and outdoors, but nowadays between phone, and tablets (wel phone and kindle in my case) I almost never feel the need.

Buy silent box, mobo for overclocking and underclock it for extra silence, and throw the box under the table.

Still have my laptop, but its mostly just "backup" and in case I travel somewhere, but honestly I don't care about it as much

I’m on Linux, and use mosh as a more reliable ssh client.

I use wireguard to access my home network when I'm visiting my parents.

A laptop (xps 13 9360) for traveling or working in remote places.

Even have a yubikey on each desktop and one for travel. All storing the ssh keys.

I don't use the laptop for months, open it and update the packages and dotfiles before going for a travel and that's it. Ready to go.

This is something other than just having your dot files in git, and system config in git via etc keeper?

Systems are slightly different, at work i have two 27 inch monitors and at home i have one 30 inch, and I do play some paradox games on home computer on ocasion

Did you solve those problems? and if so how?

That same git repo has scripts that apply some of my system configurations, and a readme to walk me through the GUI stuff I have to do.

My first few setups were hard. I had to debug some weird issues on my Linux install. (Not sleeping properly, remapping some keyboard keys).

But now I've got it cased. I setup 3 machines (2 Linux, 1 windows) over the past couple days and all are essentially equal development experience now. Was super fast to setup l. If your going the Linux route, make a repo where you record all the tweaks your making so you can redo them if you need to on a new machine.

It's shitty the first time, but now I know I can buy any new machine and have it ready to rip in mere minutes. With my custom keyboard layout (home, end, pageup, pagedown, alt, cntrl, alt+tab), my custom VSCode hotkeys, my ssh key identity management, my terminal font and themes, my system hotkeys (moving windows around and switching workspaces). Now that I've got all this setup, it feels great. Feels very fluid on all 3 machines.

Setting up Syncthing in the cloud was a challenge, had to tunnel the web-ui with ssh port forwarding.

If you don't want to do something like that, with a Microsoft account a lot of settings can be applied to multiple machines.

Sync isn't an issue. All work is on VMs, and they get backed up every day to my Synology.

My backup laptop is a 6 year old Thinkpad, which hasn't been out of it's bag in over a year.

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I can't understand why Thinkpads are moving away from this absolutely perfect design in the name of... slickness?

Why are laptops with a minimal (or non-existing) touchpad so difficult to find? Once you start using the trackpoint your wrists feel incredibly relaxed at all times.

Why do so few vendors offer RJ45 ports? When in the lab, I find my self needing one almost daily.

Why this trend of including keyboards with shorter and shorter travel distance?

There was a campaign to bring attention to all these details a few years ago which (surprisingly!) resulted in Lenovo releasing the "Thinkpad 25 anniversary edition" [1] which ticked most (but not all) of my boxes and which is unfortunately no longer available.

Do people really prefer the new design trends? Am I out of touch with reality?

[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/outletus/laptops/thinkpad/think...

The X61s was far closer to an absolutely perfect design, it just needed less plastic in the chassis. Things started going downhill with the X201s in the transition to wide aspect ratio displays, and X220/X230 arrived at full retard on that trajectory.

Slow by modern standards, being pre-Nehalem, yes. But not 32-bit, the X61s tops out at a 1.8Ghz c2d L7700, which is 64-bit:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/32243/i...

  Intel® Turbo Boost Technology: No
  Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology: No
  Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x): Yes
  Intel® 64: Yes
  Instruction Set: 64-bit
  Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology: Yes
  Intel® Demand Based Switching: No

Lots of games on Steam has achievements for extremely simple tasks, such as launching the game for the first time or playing it for five minutes, and popularity of those is typically around 82.5% and 75% respectively among audiences for most popular titles.

IOW, 17.5% of PC game enthusiasts pay for a game and immediately put it on a shelf and don’t even double click on the icon. 25% reaches past the loading screen. Of all purchasers, maybe 10% reaches the final boss or end of the storyline. Potentially less.

A person who has issues with a mainstream laptop for its lack of an Ethernet port few years into ownership, who knows how many of those exist in the whole world?

At least, many people in HN and most people in /r/thinkpad seem to agree! :)

Having been a user of the old X lines throughout the years the current X/T and X1 lines seem like a definite improvement to me. And I also use the trackpoint exclusively.

It's mainly due to two factors: 1) thanks to having a very small touchpad, the keyboard is closer to the edge and I feel much less strain on the lower part of the arm, near my wrists, which becomes more apparent after long coding sessions; and 2) the key travel is much longer and typing feels "better" (I make far less mistakes).

Also, because the x395 is almost half the thickness, they could not fit a bigger battery (which is definitely my main complaint on these newer machines).

Don't get me wrong, the "X" series is great and I will probably get the latest version when I need a replacement *but* I'm sad they make these sacrifices in the name of "design".

Feels quite well built despite the low weight, too. It doesn't sacrifice on solidness to achieve its weight.

Plus the extra battery life in the Carbon. But the X1 Nano beats my 2020 intel macbook air in battery life from the benchmarks I've seen, which could be longer I have not found lacking

However I think that yes, most people (including me) prefer the new to the old. Eg.: I dislike full keyboards because it shifts my hands to a side and moves the mouse further away. I tried track points but I find touchpads superior. I don’t need an RJ45 because even if I wanted to use it, I’d much rather have it on a USB-C dongle with pass through power, so I only have one cable to disconnect when moving around. And call me crazy, even though I use a mechanical external keyboard most of the time, I actually like typing on the butterfly keyboard more than on other laptop keyboards I have and had.

They also have the T25 frankenpad: https://www.xyte.ch/shop/t25-frankenpad-kit/ and https://www.xyte.ch/thinkpads/t25-frankenpad/

> Why do so few vendors offer RJ45 ports?

I'm guessing that because laptops are portable machines, almost nobody ever uses the network port and if you need one, you can use an adapter with the USB port.

The nearly identical Clevo NL51RU/NL50RU [1] has a 2.5" drive caddy but a 36 Wh battery. Take a look at the internal photo of the System76 unit at [2]. It's the same laptop. Heck, they didn't even bother removing the boss and brass insert for the 2.5" drive retaining screw by the left speaker.

System76 is not an OEM, they whitelabel and have tweaks made to Clevo/Sager laptops. I think they do a great service to the Linux community with PopOS and driver development/compatibility to make those into machines where Linux "just works" out of the box, don't get me wrong.

This obsession with thin-and-light goes completely counter to the whole point of "Our laptops’ guts are fully accessible!". They say they've got a tactile keyboard, to fit in 20mm thin right on top of the heat sink for the high-power Ryzen processor and discrete graphics I think I'm pretty safe in assuming it's a pathetic <1mm key-travel scissor unit.

1" thick or more is not too much. You could fit in all the ports, as well as an 80 Wh battery, and cooling to run at boost frequencies for more than 20ms. You don't have to match the dimensions of a Macbook Air and be able to slice tomatoes with the wrist rest.

[1]: https://laptopwithlinux.com/wp-content/uploads/Clevo-NL51RU-... from https://laptopwithlinux.com/product/clevo-nl51ru/ [2]: https://assets.system76.com/products/pang10/internal.png

I think it depends a lot on an individual's needs. Like in my case, a recent laptop purchasing decision revolved around qualities that make a laptop particularly good at being a laptop — that is, high portability, low/no noise, little/no heat. Power and ports were a cherry on top because I already have another machine that fills those needs.

In that situation, 1" isn't necessarily too thick, but it is negatively impacting its functionality as a laptop, if only because added thickness implies added weight (especially for sizes larger than 13").

With that said, ultraportables shouldn't exist at the cost of models more oriented toward power and flexibility… they should be an option alongside more traditional laptops.

https://www.xyte.ch/

I have a thinkpad x2100 and it is a great laptop.

I am glad I am not the only one.

I have an x200 as well, so if I was really worried I could just carry a spare battery.

The laptop market churns way too much for my liking and I feel like the second I move away from my macbook pro (work) I'm going to be disappointed with the quality.

When it comes to development, my goal is to be able to ssh into my linux box and use that for most development (tmux + vim). That plus ZeroTier and I now have access to my dev machine from wherever.

Even on large codebases written in Typescript, vim + plugins are "good enough."

macbook pro + live inside an ssh terminal seems to be working well enough for me.

1) Mixed DPI is insanely bad on Linux, and that issue is amplified if you have Nvidia hardware. At least as of last month, Wayland and XWayland are basically unusable with Nvidia. Since the laptop screen is 4k, but I was using a Thunderbolt dock plugged into 2x1080p monitors, I'd have to turn off display scaling on the laptop, and, because I was stuck on X11 because Nvidia, I'd have to restart the laptop for the scaling change to take effect.

2) There was no Thunderbolt dock support for unlocking full disk encryption, so if you wanted FDE, you either had to unplug the laptop from the dock, open it, type the password and plug it back in every time you turn the laptop on, or just not used a Thunderbolt dock. This wouldn't be a big deal except I was restarting the laptop frequently when changing pretty much any display parameter.

3) There was no clear best practice for managing switchable graphics. There are options like Bumblebee that I never really figured out if they were working properly - especially for games. Then, Nvidia supposedly added a "primus-run" feature to the driver, but again, it seemed to just not work. Eventually I settled on "prime-select" but that involves rebooting every time you switch.

4) Selecting the Nvidia graphics disabled on-board audio. I had to either use USB or Bluetooth. I never figured this out despite countless hours of messing around with alsamixer. My best guess is that it was trying to direct everything over the HDMI out even though that wasn't plugged in. The Intel drivers were loaded, just every time I selected the Nvidia chip, the audio devices would disappear.

In the end, I settled on picking up an Acer Aspire refurbished from eBay. It has an i5 10400, 12GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD. I put a 1050 Ti in it without any problems. The total system ran me $500. It's much nicer. So the moral of the story is for me, if you do go Linux laptop, avoid Nvidia like the plague.

Try sudo alsactl restore

I have a Dell G5 with Nvidia RTX and my headphones do not work when I start it

Took me a few months of investigation, but that alsactl command fixes it in 90% of situations

Possibly a stupid question, but isn't a "1050 Ti" an Nvidia chip? How did this help you with the driver issues?

Given the number of people these days who don't even own a desktop, I don't understand why mouse buttons aren't the standard. With the XPS I can even play casual games while sitting on the couch. No need to move to a desk and dig a corded mouse of the drawer!

I never used gestures. But I seriously miss inertia scrolling. You never realize how much a pain in the ass it is scrolling web pages until you don't have it. Firefox has it, but you have to turn on an environment variable to get it and it feels a bit weird to me. Chrome does not have it all on Linux. And the way they are implementing it means that every app has to reimplement inertia scrolling on its own. Sigh. At least you can hold down the middle mouse and use the trackpoint to swiftly scroll.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but this is just when you scroll, release your fingers, and it slows to a stop instead of stopping instantly, right? I have that out of the box here on Linux. Firefox + X + touchpad with the synaptics driver.

I had thought this was what "Use smooth scrolling" did it in the Firefox preferences.

Edit: I also just checked and I have this in my terminal (Konsole), text editor (KWrite), and PDF viewer (Okular) so this is at the very least not a Firefox only thing. It feels exactly the same in each application. I bet it's a feature of the touchpad driver.

They're not a gimmick if well implemented. Useful gestures are very dependant on deep software integration, however.

I accidentally spilled a glass of water on my old thinkpad w, and all I had to do was to replace the keyboard (happened twice). It also helped that I could find spare part easily online. Would it be possible with lesser-know brands? It also fell several time on the ground but never broke anything. I'm honestly very interested to know if there are laptops as durable as thinkpads.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

But I totally agree: Input and output to the user (keyboard, trackpoint/mouse buttons/touchpad/screen) are of critical importance. I can be really effective on a decade-old Thinkpad (with the IPS display mod!) and woefully out-of-date processor, but if it takes too long to adjust to the keyboard I'll be frustrated every time I have to use it.

It is so annoying to type with your hands off-center from the screen.

It is so annoying to have to type long sequences of digits without one.

I know this sounds crazy, but IME the worst part of keyboard ergonomics on mac laptops is that my hands are much closer together than my shoulders are; widening to shoulder width makes for much more comfortable typing.

I'm sure nobody will crazy enough to build a laptop like this, but it makes me wonder...

That said if you're a numpad user a keyboard with centered numpad is pretty much the best concept other than the rabbit hole of custom ergonomic keyboard layouts. Either way you can only get into that realm with a lot of money unfortunately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Sebeolsik_Flnal.svg

I use an ErgoDox, and there's just enough space in the middle for a numpad.

But I often stick my phone there, and I just don't think I'd use it very often. Technically I can pop up a layer to turn the right side keys into a numpad (advantage of ortholinear) but I don't quite have the muscle memory to really take advantage of it so that's basically wasted.

I've mulled over having a special lighting routine that lights up only those characters, in distinct colors, that would probably get me close enough. But it's just enough hassle that I never get around to it.

A trackpad should fit, because you really want the halves parallel to your shoulders or just a bit tighter. Though as I think about the movements and gestures, you might find one of the halves interfering by being where your wrist naturally wants to be.

EDIT: hadn't seen the sibling commenter mention https://atulloh.github.io/oddball/ which looks interesting, but perhaps too minimal for my taste (eg; where's the space button?)

Ergodox, if you're reading this, an integrated trackpad/trackball solution would be pretty appealing!

Turns out it even has a touchpad, though its size is pitiful. Alas the whole keyboard reeks more of ‘mechanical + wacky layout‘ approach, with dubious ergonomics aside from the split halves.

Otherwise, trackballs on keyboards don't seem too rare: image search turns up this Adesso board (https://www.hippo-deals.com/products-images/1500/65915.jpg or better-ish https://www.adesso.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/2017061601...), something named KeyTronic, etc.

I've been thinking of getting an ergodox and putting a trackpad in the middle..not sure if the windows Trackpads on Amazon will work on Linux though.

I don't usually do a lot of numerical stuff so rarely need the number pad... it'd just be nice to have a wider laptop keyboard when I'm roaming about (though tbf I'm not sure I'd want a laptop that large...)

It is also far more ergonomic than the current status quo.

Next step would be adding more keys under thumbs: backspace and arrows would be good candidates.

Given the reportedly awful quality of webcams and especially speakers on those Clevo laptops, you might be on to something...

Actually, thinking about it, it strikes me as slightly absurd that this isn't an option on at least a few mainstream laptops.

(because left hand is on the keyboard, and right hand is on the mouse or stylus, and putting down the mouse to reach for a numpad is just weird.)

Doing it with the laptop would be even worse, I imagine.

However, I think there are use cases and people who prefer using them. Some software is really geared around the full cluster being there. I've got a full size, numpad-ed keyboard (some old stock DEC thing that went to a mid 90s alphastation I believe, I got it for dirt cheap) attached to my "windows gaming machine", and I use the numpad on a few shortcut-heavy games.

Otherwise, though, I just don't have any muscle memory for it. I have to look and hunt/peck for keys on a numpad. I'm mostly using bash and vim for work, though...

Now I feel crippled whenever I'm on my laptop, which doesn't have a numpad, my own fingers flailing uselessly over numbers that whilst in mind are not available to my right hand.

I should probably get one of those external numpad USB things, but I much prefer a whinge.

This includes a surprising variety, from accountants and POS, to 3D modelling artists...

I can't remember when was the last time I had to type more than 8 at any time.