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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?
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Friday December 02 2016, @10:03PM
A 7th generation (Kaybee Lake) Intel I7 at 4GHz or faster, 32GiB of DDR4 (64 would be nice), ~256GiB NVMe 2GiB/s SSD, integrated audio/video, SD reader, wired gigabit LAN, 4x USB3.0 ports, a 1080 13" matte screen, IBM Thinkpad with fully user replaceable parts.
I wouldn't mind it being "Thin & Light" as long as it can properly dissapate the heat from a full throttle desktop grade CPU (UltraLowVoltage & Mobile need not apply), the parts aren't soldered in place, & it hasn't pulled an Apple to drop all the ports (INCLUDING HEADPHONE) in an idiotic attempt at "courage". Stick your "courage" to screw me over for the dongles to replace the ports you've charged me extra for not including in the first place. Give me the damned ports back you fekkin bastadges.
*Cough*
I've been finding that I have to look for "desktop replacement" or "mobile workstation" class machines in order to find what I want as a Windows machine. I looked at various Linux vendors & realized that I can get the machine I've described without having to jump through any hoops harder than picking the configuration options. I was already wanting to jump ship off the MS treadmill & the Linux vendors (Emporer, System76, ZaReason, etc) make the jump an easy one.
A 4GHz CPU, 32GiB DDR4, & a 256GiB NVMe SSD running Linux? Daaaaaammmmnnnn would that sucker be fast! Why, I could almost play PONG on it! =-D
*COUGH*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @10:25PM
Perfect. Thank you for this. It answers my post above [soylentnews.org].
The last linux-only system I purchased was a workstation back in 2000 (VALinux Systems); I've lived off of installing over older hardware since. I wasn't sure who was serving that market anymore, or whether there was that market anymore.