Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by on Friday December 02 2016, @08:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the price-is-no-object dept.

Ars Technica has an editorial on what they'd want in a laptop in 2017. Inspired by this, I figured to make my own list and ask SN for input. I'm not looking for a laptop, but it's fun to think about specs, right?

Anyway, I do think use case is important. My use case: working and travelling daily with laptop, sometimes to various institutes to give presentations. This already leads to some important requirements:

  • Lightweight (I frequently take the laptop somewhere)
  • Not needing a plethora of dongles. (I've forgotten the power supply more than once already, I'm sure forgetting a dongle or two will happen more frequently).

Thinking about it more, most of the things the Ars Editor loves are things I honestly don't use, or actively do not want (touch screen).

With that in mind, I'd arrive at:

  • No touchscreen - it adds weight while I don't use its features
  • 13 inch screen seems to balance portability and screen size well.
  • 1920x1080 resolution - higher will drain the battery faster, and is not needed on 13 inch
  • VGA port - almost all presentation places I come across need converters (dongles) for anything else.
  • USB 2 and 3 ports - again, for compatibility
  • 512 GB SDD
  • 10GB or more memory
  • Dual boot compatible with Ubuntu (I use Ubuntu, but for the occasional gadget that can get updates via your computer, you'll still need Windows or MacOS)
  • Preferably with regular ethernet port - there are still hotels where wired is free, but wifi is paid.

Other than that I'd go for modern iterations of specs for things like ethernet, wifi, CPU, etc. So Kaby Lake processor, things like that. GPU is not a big issue, so probably the integrated Intel thing on a modern Intel CPU will be sufficient.

Anything I missed? Anything you'd do radically different? If so: why?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @09:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @09:24PM (#436228)

    We're going to be forced into upgrading all our win machines to Win10. Currently I run Win 7 with linux in a VM. Ahead of the forced upgrade, I want to get a new laptop that will run linux and have Win10 in a VM.

    What to people use for linux laptops these days? I use my computer for developing software and running scientific software. Like the article submitter, I don't need a lot of the fancy crap, but I wouldn't mind a screen bigger than 13".

  • (Score: 1) by rev_irreverence on Saturday December 03 2016, @05:01AM

    by rev_irreverence (144) on Saturday December 03 2016, @05:01AM (#436405)

    I have a Lenovo X1 carbon running Fedora 25 and Windows 10 inside a VM. Everything pretty much worked out of the box and has been rock solid stable ever since.