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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:24PM (3 children)

    by mhajicek (51) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:24PM (#712412)

    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
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:36PM (2 children)

    by ShadowSystems (6185) <ShadowSystemsNO@SPAMGmail.com> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:36PM (#712505)

    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)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:42AM (#712849) Journal

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:50AM (#712979)

        802.11n max speed?

        What year is this?