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from the renewed-interest-in-Compaq-Portable-computers dept.
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
The pursuit of thinner, lighter laptops, a trend driven by Apple, means we have screwed ourselves out of performance.
Over the last few days we’ve seen outcry about Apple’s new MacBook Pro, which offers an optional top-end i9 processor, and how its performance is throttled to the point of parody as the laptop heats up over time.
Sparked by a video from YouTuber Dave Lee, who demonstrates that the only way to get Apple’s quoted performance from the MacBook Pro is by keeping it in a refrigerator, the outcry has been brutal.
Thousands of comments on the video say things like “Wow if it cant even maintain stock speeds that's pretty sad” and “Apple should offer a fridge that goes with the Macbook i9,” but the sobering reality is that this practice is normal across laptops—we’re just starting to see it more often.
[...] If Pro users really were Apple’s target market, the company could redesign these laptops to use the older, thicker MacBook Pro form factor from 2015. With that available space, and improvements in processor design, it would be able to better cool the same hardware and squeeze out more performance—but it’ll never happen. Thicker laptops would mean admitting failure.
Thinner and lighter is great, and if we’re honest, we’re all sucked in by the allure. The unfortunate reality for those of us that need these machines for work is that it’s just not good enough, and we’d welcome thicker machines in exchange for hardware that isn’t constrained by heat. Apple insists these new MacBooks are for ‘pro users,’ and while it has some of the best-in-class hardware design out there today, it simply doesn’t hold up if you push them hard enough.
The MacBook Pro isn’t designed for pro users at all, it’s a slick marketing machine designed to sell to the wealthy ‘prosumer’ that wouldn’t notice anyway. That much has been clear since the introduction of the Touch Bar and death of the SD slot—and it’s making a ton of money anyway.
Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-and-lighter-laptops-have-screwed-us-all
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:11PM (23 children)
I don't want "Thin & Light", I want it thick, chunky, full of ports, have sufficient heat disapation capabilities not to throttle itself or torch my flesh, a battery that lasts days if not weeks, & not to be charged a "premium" for a T&L machine that is none of those aforementioned things.
In the name of making it T&L you cut out all the ports- headphone, RJ45, SD card slot, etc -and charge us MORE for the "improved" version. Then charge us AGAIN to replace all the bits you've removed in order to regain those functions.
You've just profited twice on the same device for the same things, and we're supposed to LIKE being fleeced?
Hell No.
I vote with my wallet. You go the T&L route, I take another route entirely. I'll go visit a system builder that doesn't think T&L is A-Ok & reward them with my money for offering a safe & sane product.
I want that headphone jack, that RJ45 ethernet port, that SD card slot, that removeable battery, the user replaceable/upgradeable bits, & all the other things a *Professional* requires in a *Professional* device.
I vote with my wallet & my wallet demands professional gear. Your stuff ain't it.
On a more humorous note...
*Deep breath & starts to sing*
I like big chass' and I can not lie! All you other bruthas can't deny, when an itty bitty thing gets up in yo face you get SPRUNG...
*AmusedCough*
=-)p
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:24PM (3 children)
I've been using an HP Zbook, but it's been over heating lately. Who do you buy from?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Informative) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:36PM (2 children)
I've purchased from Emporer, System76, & ThinkPenguin. All three offered customizeable machines with all the ports, flexability, & repairability I could ever hope for. Just don't pick a unit described as T&L, pick a (mobile) workstation or desktop replacement one instead. A "gaming" machine might not be _too_ bad, but I'm not willing to pay for the Alienware "gamer bling" mentality either. All those flashing lights, backlit keyboards, dedicated (function) keys, et alia make me shake my head & consider just how much more *computer* I could buy if I forego all the "gamer" bits.
I know Dell, HP, & others supposedly offer Linux friendly machines that come preinstalled with some form of Linux on them, but every time I try to find one their own site searches come up zilch for "Linux". Even searching Dell for their Project Sputnik "Developer Edition" (the XPS13 with Linux) comes up with machines with Win10 on them. I had to do a DuckDuckGo search to find the Sputnik unit on Dell, because I couldn't get Dell to tell me about it otherwise. Ditto for the others: I've got to use DDG just to find *any* systems they offer with Linux on them, and even then the site navigation is so bad that my screen reader has a cow trying to describe it; forget being able to configure/buy a Linux system from them.
Emporer, System76, & ThinkPenguin are my first choices, then I'd go with an older model ThinkPad that's been out long enough for the Linux community to have written drivers for the hardware. The newer models might work with generic drivers, but I'd do research on a specific model before buying it.
Hope that helps, & happy computing! =-)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:42AM (1 child)
I second Emperor Linux. They do a good job with their machines. Great support, too.
I'm in your camp, philosophically, also. Go high-end, configure the machine as your needs evolve, but keep your basic system set up the way it makes you most productive. It's always been hard for me to wrap my head around the way most other users live, upgrading when somebody else decides they need to make more money, having to buy more machines because some remote marketroid decides the old designs just don't look sexy enough.
As an aside, is it me, or have laptops and desktops stalled out with their standard specs? I went into Micro Center a couple days ago to get some peripherals, walked past the computer section and out of curiosity browsed the specs; the laptop I bought from Emperor 5 years ago still has twice the specs that everything on offer there did. Their "gaming" laptop was significantly less than my old machine. They didn't seem any thinner or lighter or longer lasting on battery life either.
It made me a little concerned for the future of personal computing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:50AM
802.11n max speed?
What year is this?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:40PM (14 children)
The thicker laptops with more ports are much cheaper, and even thicc "gaming laptops" are cheaper than Apple fare. Oh wait, a lot cheaper. These Core i9 Macbook Pros apparently cost around $2,800 to $4,700 [cnet.com]. I don't see many Core i9 laptops [newegg.com] yet, but there will probably be some under-$2k ones soon enough.
And of course, there are always desktops, which are very thicc and chunky.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:40PM (13 children)
I'll agree that thicker (non-Apple) laptops are indeed the way to go, but personally I've completely given up on desktops. Laptops (good ones: the business-grade ones) are just too convenient, and desktops really don't offer anything to justify not being able to easily carry it around. In fact, desktops haven't really changed in any significant way in probably 15 years. The ATX standard is positively ancient, going back to the mid-90s or so. They tried to come up with a successor with BTX, but that didn't go anywhere. MiniITX was better, but still not all that compact, I think frequently because they still use the same gargantuan power supplies as ATX, or some completely proprietary size. Various large vendors (Dell etc.) came up with various proprietary SFF formats, but of course there's little standardization there.
Desktops were great for a long time precisely because of standardization, but that's really all gone now because no one's come up with a new standard that's actually caught on; it's just like how bad floppy drives became, where no one could push anything to succeed the 3.5" 1.44MB standard as a true standard, and it decayed until it finally became completely obsoleted by CD-RWs and finally USB thumb drives, when it would have been really nice in the intervening years to have a universal standard for removable storage.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:14PM (1 child)
I don't want to carry my desktop around. That's what I have my laptop for.
Why do you care how old the standard is? The standard of my clock's display is centuries old, and still beats everything more modern on its purpose of telling time. The technology behind it is more modern, though, because I really value not having to rewind every few days, and not having to adjust the time showing every now and then. But I value it not for being more modern, I value it for being more convenient.
So what? When I buy a desktop, I don'twant compact I want lots of space to put stuff in.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:19PM
To follow up, desktops have gotten smaller with form factors such as Intel's NUC (see sidebar here [wikipedia.org] for others). But at a certain point you run into heat issues yet again.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:18PM
Some of us actually need the computing power and mass storage you can only get in a desktop.
They keyboards for desktops are also MUCH nicer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @02:35AM (1 child)
Good luck carrying that second or third monitor in your laptop bag.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 26 2018, @03:19AM
Actually, isn't there a thin display you can roll up? thought I saw something about that a while back.
[looks] Cripes, that was 4years ago.
https://www.itworld.com/article/2832688/hardware/lg-introduced-oled-displays-you-can-roll-up-and-see-through.html [itworld.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:12PM (3 children)
Why not have both? No-one carries desktops around so it does not matter how easy or not they are to carry.
They continue to be great because of that standardisation. I am using a desktop now with components from from up to 25 years ago, like the Model M keyboard. If a "new standard" has not caught on then that is what standards are about - if you keep having new "standards" they are not standards even if the inventor wants them to be. In fact there have been new standards for the desktop (remember they started with ISA slots and DIN keyboard connectors), but generally were only adopted when they offered real improvement, not just because of a marketing or lock-in opportunity.
As for size, I don't give a shit about how big or heavy my desktop unit is because I don't pick it up and it is on the floor in the angle of my corner desk. In fact it weighs about 15-20 kg and houses about 4 HDDs, a speaker unit, tape drive, two DVD drives (European and USA standards), floppy drive, a 4-way network hub (with its power supply) and a module with dials for temperature etc that I never look at.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 26 2018, @05:16PM (2 children)
Why not have both?
What's the benefit? I don't see any. It's a lot easier to just have one computer and not worry about syncing issues.
I am using a desktop now with components from from up to 25 years ago, like the Model M keyboard.
Irrelevant. I use a Model M on my laptop. This has absolutely nothing to do with desktops.
In fact it weighs about 15-20 kg and houses about 4 HDDs
With modern hard drives, there's little reason to have 4 HDDs in a computer any more. If you really need that much storage, you should be using a NAS so you're not tied to a single PC.
floppy drive
WTF? When does anyone use these any more?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday July 26 2018, @10:43PM (1 child)
I was giving an example of the benefits of standardisation, which you seemed to be decrying; not saying you could not use a Model M with your laptop. Your laptop is following a standard to that extent too, which is good and supports my point.
Here is a reason : I once had a PC with one HDD. I bought a bigger HDD as space was getting short. I had to install the second while the first was still in situ in order to copy data across. Afterwards there would have been no reason to remove the first HDD, in fact there was no reason even to copy the old data across as it remained accessible as a data area. Rinse and repeat with further bigger HDDS.
Second reason for at least two drives : dual booting Windows and Linux. I prefer to keep Windows boxed in on its own disk. You don't need to, it is just safer.
I put it in to copy a lot of old data (and things like retro DOS games) from floppies, a project I finished some time ago. I have not bothered to remove it since and it is still possible for some old floppies to turn up that I am missing.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday July 27 2018, @06:55PM
Here is a reason : I once had a PC with one HDD. I bought a bigger HDD as space was getting short. I had to install the second while the first was still in situ in order to copy data across.
There's USB-to-SATA cables you can get for connected extra HDs temporarily to a laptop.
Second reason for at least two drives : dual booting Windows and Linux. I prefer to keep Windows boxed in on its own disk. You don't need to, it is just safer.
That's easy: put HD caddies (the thing that lets you slide an HD into your laptop) on both drives, and then swap the drives as necessary.
As for floppies, there's USB floppy drives too.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Friday July 27 2018, @03:19AM (3 children)
I like my desktop with tons of storage and its high end graphics card. I also like multiple, large monitors, a real keyboard, and a mouse. Lots of USB ports, E-sata, Firewire, multiple ethernet ports. I also like being max it out at 100% indefinitely without it throttling.
I realize that you can get high end laptops with gobs of power and storage, and buy a docking station for it so you can use your monitors, keyboards, mice, etc. like a desktop. But you'll pay for it, and pay even more in the long run since you'll have to buy new, expensive laptops more often since you can't just upgrade it piecemeal like the desktop. And I've been pretty impressed with what they charge for docking stations - probably because they assume that corporate customers will just pay it.
I do have a laptop but it's really only used for when I really need a laptop for something. It was a higher end machine back in the 2000's. It still does what I need and I don't use it much so I see little reason to replace it so long as it keeps working and the hinge doesn't finally break.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday July 27 2018, @06:52PM (2 children)
I also like multiple, large monitors, a real keyboard, and a mouse.
Yeah, me too. What exactly does this have to do with desktops vs. laptops? In case you haven't noticed, you can plug these things into laptops. My large monitors, Model M keyboard, and mouse are all plugged into a docking station for my laptop.
Lots of USB ports, E-sata, Firewire, multiple ethernet ports.
Any decent laptop has lots of USB ports and probably even e-SATA. No one uses Firewire any more, and you don't need multiple Ethernet ports unless you're doing something really unusual.
As for "tons of storage", that's what a NAS box is for. High-end graphics is useless to me: I don't play games.
But you'll pay for it, and pay even more in the long run since you'll have to buy new, expensive laptops more often since you can't just upgrade it piecemeal like the desktop.
You can get barely-used off-lease business laptops a few years old for cheap, plus the docking stations for them. Corporate equipment is cheap and plentiful since they never keep anything more than a few years.
And I've been pretty impressed with what they charge for docking stations
I think I got mine for $50; it's the very latest Dell one. They don't change them often.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday July 28 2018, @03:34AM (1 child)
With all that stuff plugged into it, it's not really a laptop anymore. And I don't see the point of spending the money on a high-end laptop if it's going to be in its docking station practically all the time.
Granted I don't use my Firewire ports either except for some old external drives from back when that was the in thing. And I don't know what you mean by lots of USB ports. Seeing a laptop with more than 4 is exceedingly rare. And even 4 ports isn't exactly common.
That's probably how I'll get my next laptop, since it's cheaper and I should be able to get a machine that will be good enough for what I want a laptop for. But if I want a high end machine I'm not going buying a used laptop from a few years ago. And if you're buying used you'll likely be replacing it more often as a portion of its useful life has already been used up.
A quick look at dell.com suggests the going price is more like $150-$160.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday July 28 2018, @08:14PM
With all that stuff plugged into it, it's not really a laptop anymore. And I don't see the point of spending the money on a high-end laptop if it's going to be in its docking station practically all the time.
Ok, this is just silly. Yes, it is a laptop: I can undock it any time and take it places (and yes, I do, a lot). Even at home, I use it a lot for watching movies in my bedroom, away from the docking station.
Have you never worked in a workplace with a laptop and a docking station? This is exactly the use case: being able to take your work computer places with you, such as conference rooms for meetings or to customer sites.
Honestly, I feel sometimes like this site is full of 60-year-old luddites.
As for "the money", my docking station and laptop together probably cost about $250. Used business-grade equipment is cheap.
And I don't know what you mean by lots of USB ports. Seeing a laptop with more than 4 is exceedingly rare. And even 4 ports isn't exactly common.
If you actually have more than 4 USB devices plugged in at one time, you're doing something weird.
Don't forget, for permanently-plugged in USB devices (like keyboards and mice), the docking station has its own USB ports.
That's probably how I'll get my next laptop, since it's cheaper and I should be able to get a machine that will be good enough for what I want a laptop for
This is exactly my mindset. I don't play high-end modern games or use Solidworks or do anything else that requires huge compute or GPU power, so a 2-5yo business laptop works just fine for me. If you need more GPU/CPU, you can always get a used Dell Precision.
And if you're buying used you'll likely be replacing it more often as a portion of its useful life has already been used up.
These business-grade laptops don't wear out nearly as quickly as the consumer-grade ones. And it's easy to get spare parts for them on Ebay too.
A quick look at dell.com suggests the going price is more like $150-$160.
You're looking in the wrong place; try Ebay.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:41PM
Apple markets to soy latte hipsters who want to be NOTICED when sitting at Starbux, but there's always system76 for a laptop like you describe.
I considered getting one of the $2800 models but that's the base price, if you want the GTX1080 and as much memory and storage as the vmware image I rdesktop into with RAID SSDs, its ends up being a hair over $7000 so yeah I'll just keep using rdesktop on my chromebook OK thanks see ya later.
Just pointing out that the product you seek is available.
I know a guy who bought one and is very happy, which is good to know if you're gonna buy a laptop that costs 1/3 of my cheap new commuter car.
(Score: 2, Troll) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:27PM (1 child)
Do you remember the Kaypros [google.com]? Something like that might fit your description.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @07:44AM
I used to use a kaypro. It had no battery iirc...but I suppose large enough to house enough batteries to last a week using modern hardware.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday July 27 2018, @03:12AM
I have a "thin and light" laptop from System76, a Galago Pro [system76.com]. From what I can see, it hasn't skimped on ports much. It has a Gigabit Ethernet RJ45, SD card slot, full size HDMI, mini DisplayPort, 3.5mm headphone/mic, two type A USB, and one type C USB. I've seen bigger and chunkier laptops with less ports. The only port I really miss is VGA, but not too much as HDMI is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Further, despite being so thin and light it's somehow possible to even put a second hard drive or SSD into this thing (I didn't take this option, too expensive), add more memory, and replace things like the Wi-Fi module and such. So it doesn't seem that removing ports and the ability to upgrade is a necessary compromise for making a T&L laptop. Other system builders are just lazy. (I don't work for System76 btw, just a satisfied customer).
Admittedly, the Galago Pro is rather middling in performance, probably a compromise given how thin and light they made it. Putting a high-end GPU inside it would probably lead to terrible thermal issues. Battery doesn't last days or weeks between charges but I've never yet seen any real laptop for which this was true. Its battery life is squarely in the middle of the pack. However, it's still got more than enough juice to do just about everything I need to do, and I've not had overheating issues with it in the nearly one year I've had it. I take the compromise since I find myself travelling a lot, and I'd rather not break my back carrying it while commuting in the various cities around the world. I've tried big, powerful, heavy laptops before and they are very inconvenient in this regard. Try standing for half an hour in a crowded train in Tokyo and then walking another ten minutes from the train station to a client's office, while lugging around a 5 kg laptop.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.