Quote from: Nate on May 24, 2023, 22:07:31This article kind of feels like it's a criticism of Dell's handling of its XPS line generalized onto the entire industry. Yes, there are many other bad decisions coming out of other OEMs, and it has driven me crazy too when shopping around. But there are also plenty of sensible laptops with good input and output devices, reasonable battery life, upgradable RAM and SSDs, and powerful processors and GPUs. You just need to know where to look.

So maybe the real problem is the "paradox of choice" infecting the industry that makes finding that needle in the haystack a tough problem. It's awfully confusing when each manufacturer sells half a dozen product lines each with half a dozen models, all similarly named and specced out.

I wish more manufacturers did it like Apple with 2 or 3 product lines that exhibit clear market segmentation so it's easy to figure out which one you would be best served with, and then making sure that every model gets the basics right. That way you only really need to make a few choices ("big screen or small screen?" "dedicated GPU or iGPU?" "more power or more battery life?" etc) and you're more likely to make a choice you end up happy with.

FWIW it sounds like the author would be well served by a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme or an ASUS ROG Zephyrus. These "thin and light" laptops are always compromises, and XPS models are particularly extreme examples of it.

No, the biggest problem is the illusion of choice. Back in the day we actually had multiple choices. You would first pick a model that you like as a base, then customize it how you wish with plenty of options. That has changed, if you go to customize, they will let you choose a few choices at best and if you want other choices you have to opt for a different model completely. Aka, most models just because derivative models of the same thing with minor changes.

Even if you go through many models, it becomes harder as poor practices take over like crappy touchpads without buttons, thinning the laptop at expense of keyboard travel, soldering ram (pretty much almost all lenovo these days are soldered ram, X1 Extreme isn't soldered in Gen 5 but it is dated, I wouldn't be surprised if it is in Gen 6, plus no option for using the internal gpu. Not to mention the high price of 2x what the specs are worth)

This article kind of feels like it's a criticism of Dell's handling of its XPS line generalized onto the entire industry. Yes, there are many other bad decisions coming out of other OEMs, and it has driven me crazy too when shopping around. But there are also plenty of sensible laptops with good input and output devices, reasonable battery life, upgradable RAM and SSDs, and powerful processors and GPUs. You just need to know where to look.

So maybe the real problem is the "paradox of choice" infecting the industry that makes finding that needle in the haystack a tough problem. It's awfully confusing when each manufacturer sells half a dozen product lines each with half a dozen models, all similarly named and specced out.

I wish more manufacturers did it like Apple with 2 or 3 product lines that exhibit clear market segmentation so it's easy to figure out which one you would be best served with, and then making sure that every model gets the basics right. That way you only really need to make a few choices ("big screen or small screen?" "dedicated GPU or iGPU?" "more power or more battery life?" etc) and you're more likely to make a choice you end up happy with.

FWIW it sounds like the author would be well served by a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme or an ASUS ROG Zephyrus. These "thin and light" laptops are always compromises, and XPS models are particularly extreme examples of it.

Quote from: AHA on May 19, 2023, 20:36:41You dwell on the past too much. I should know - I suspect I'm well older than you. 😆

Your criteria list is wobbly. Excluding Apple silicon is cutting yourself off from a lot of the laptops that would otherwise fulfil your other criteria easily. When one considers how much better the support & user experience is with MacOS compared to other brands, it's hard to take your 'suspect business practices' caveat seriously.

That said, check out the HP Pavillion Plus.

But that is his needs, not YOUR needs. The macbook was discarded due to soldering everything. And not everyone likes the locked down ecosystem. For things like support, most tech users have no need for it unless the computer breaks down and personally, I'd take someone who offers inhome warranty in that case then being forced to find an Apple store and wasting a day getting there. As for user experience, that is also up for debate, I can't speak for the author but I have a recent macbook for ios development, in my opinion it is one of the worst laptops I've owned. Many x86 programs don't run properly, the touchpad is terrible due to having no buttons and MacOS is unintuitive and frustrating to use. Of course your opinion may be different, but that is life, no 2 people are the same. This is why options exist

You dwell on the past too much. I should know - I suspect I'm well older than you. 😆

Your criteria list is wobbly. Excluding Apple silicon is cutting yourself off from a lot of the laptops that would otherwise fulfil your other criteria easily. When one considers how much better the support & user experience is with MacOS compared to other brands, it's hard to take your 'suspect business practices' caveat seriously.

That said, check out the HP Pavillion Plus.

I found one last month and paid £699 in uk - zenbook 14 oled screen  2880x 1800, battery 75wh, i5 1240p,  16gb ram, 500gb pcie3.0, I replaced with 1 tb pcie 4.0. Almost perfect laptop. In some tests, it performs better than i7 version. It's a shame that notebookcheck.net did not make review of this model, but I understand quite well modern world...

I'm just happy that this kind of article exists. This article should be pinned because, even though the author said it's just an opinion, for me, it's actually a real problem not only in the laptop industry, but in many others too such as phones, games, services, home appliances, and more.

These days, you need to pay for everything on a monthly basis. In the past, it was a one-time payment, but now they want easy money by the excuse of maintaining the unstable app with thousands of useless updates that will stay like this forever. Even the operating system like Windows has countless updates and, many times, it ruins the system rather than fixing it, and you need to fix the thing by yourself. I remember in the old days of Windows 95 and 98, especially Windows XP, it ran smoothly without updates, and when there was an update, it came on a CD to install.

On the laptop side, the price has gone very high, opposite to the quality, which has become very low. It seems the manufacturers don't actually look around the world, but more like they live in their own bubble of greed without any effort to be innovative or make a quality product. All we get are rubbish products for a premium price. For example, the recent topic about Asus motherboards and their irresponsibility for their own mistakes and lack of sincerity to provide a solid and trustworthy product.

And some companies make fraudulent advertisements like the monitor that has a response time of 1ms when it's far away from that. Or Apple, who claims that their recent laptop, MacBook Pro 16 M1, has 10,000 mini LED lights inside the display, but in reality, it's just 8,420 mini lights, and this fact almost most of the people are not aware of. This information was exposed by a Chinese YouTuber who opened the display and counted them, making us count them as well, and the result was really disappointing when you know a large company like Apple is making this kind of fraudulent claim against their customers.

On the other hand, some YouTubers receive free products or sponsorships, and then they keep advising people to buy each new product, saying that it can bring quality of life (this is a really laughable statement for me). They want people to consume the tech product like a food.

This kind of topic needs to be the main discussion these days. I was surprised when I first saw this article, as I always talk about this every time the tech topic arises.

Quote from: Voice of Reason on May 12, 2023, 20:48:27Apple laptops meet all your criteria, so  by dismissing them outright you're a moron. And since when is an eGPU "mobile computing"?

Did you not see the "no soldered ssd" criteria?

LOL!

My sentiments exactly!!

I'm typing this on a well used MacBookPro13 (2013) running High Sierra. Don't get me wrong - I have a 2019 version of it (NIB) however the newer model has a keyboard+trackpad that really really suck and Apple along the way decided that "32bits" was taboo so it and newer versions of their OS no longer support software I paid good hard earned cash for.

My windows boxes are of a similar vintage, many have GTX1050-1070 chips in them. I have a couple copies of the smallest Razor Blade because the 1st one I bought had a fugly 1080P screen and while the replacement has a beautiful 4K screen the Nvidia GPU is to weak to do much with. At least both have ports where I could hook up a EGPU.

While Microsoft keeps doing its part of making perfectly good computers to slow and useless with its constantly changing+updating bloatware OEM's keep tossing "more power" into these devices (to run the bloatware) while having less and less space for battery capacity.

OEM's fail to understand that portable/remote/on-the-go users want the best: screen, keyboard and battery life possible.

It seemed like 10-16hrs of use on a laptop was about "standard" but it seems that the industry has been having difficulty getting even 8hrs use of late.

Quote from: Petar on May 11, 2023, 14:26:23Regarding the keyboard, while luckily there are still few companies (Clevo, Gigabyte and Lenovo on some models) that provide proper layout (with dedicated HOME/END/PGUP/PGDN and full-sized cursor keys), there are practically no companies that provide a touchpad with dedicated buttons anymore.

Doesn't lenovo do those tiny arrow keys with tiny pg up keys? I am hoping maybe the stars align and Framework offers a touchpad with clicky buttons. But no luck so far.

Quote from: Douglas Black on May 11, 2023, 15:44:12Spoiler about how my laptop search ended: While I originally wanted an XPS 15 7590 and I tried to buy one on eBay, it turned out to be out of stock. I ended up getting an i7-10850 XPS 15 9500 FHD/GTX 1650Ti/1TB SSD for $560 on eBay, which was a steal. The battery life is indeed great, and it runs Linux Mint without a hitch, but the fact that there is no USB A and there are still no USB-C dongles from logitech is frustrating. For the price, though, I can't complain.

Is that really such a steal? It sounds slightly better in specs over the laptop I bought for a family member for $680 about 3-4 years ago. Just slightly worse cpu but better gpu. Though its battery life is probably worse but they use it on wire so it isn't a big deal. Point being 3 year old computers should cost a lot less. I'd hardly call it a steal.

Quote from: RobertJasiek on May 11, 2023, 17:30:16Precisely, and the reason why I am buying a desktop instead of a notebook this time.

I did that during covid, gave up on laptops and bought a tiny pc, loaded up 64gb ram in it and it worked well.

For a mobile device, I would accept every display size. Ultrabooks together with eGPU I have reflected but eventually excluded because dGPU would be my main usage so a desktop replacement should be a single device. Others may have different preferences. The ultrabooks with dGPU I have considered as described.

Without need for a fast dGPU, I would find some suitable notebook easily because then my hardware requirements are rather moderate.

You are asking for 13-14" ultrabooks to be like 15-16" ultrabooks which is simply unreasonable. Thinkpad T16 would easily settle all the gripes you found in HP Dragonfly and Asus ZenBook S 13.
Of course you will be disapointed searching for upgradable components, variety ports, cool temps, tactile keyboard, and big battery - all in a "trendy and hip" flagship 13-inch ultrabook market.

Honestly, what did you expect Douglas?

I forgot:
- data theft by system control software (such as Gigabyte's AI mode).

Since January 2023, I have considered every of 47 notebook series with RTX 4000, except 4050. Initially, speeds were unclear but now I know that 4070 would be too slow for me and I would need at least 4080 in a notebook. Each series has failed for some of these reasons:

- Excessive greed of the manufacturer (especially Alienware outside the USA, Scar, Zephyrus, Titan and XMG).
- At most 4070 instead of also offering 4080 at medium TDP (altogether 16 series often including so called creator series).
- Too loud under GPU load in a balanced fan mode (at least 16 series and counting). Some models also have coil whine.
- 16:9 instead of at most 16:10 (6 series, of which I would have strongly considered 4 series).
- No mechanical keyboard (38 series, and their keyboards are too weak being weaker than the barely acceptable non-mechanical keyboard of Medion Akoya).
- Small arrow keys (19 series, of which I would have strongly considered 11 series).
- No numpad (15 series) or small numpad (another 15 series).
- Fewer than 4 page navigation keys (42 series).
- Missing keys or secondary key functions (especially Razer).
- Suboptimal keyboard layout in the details (badly arranged keys, mutually touching keys, small keys).
- Very hard maintenance (especially fan cleaning of Alienwares).
- Severe or frequent bugs of the system software (especially Gigabyte and Alienwares).
- Improper build quality (such as CPU pasting of Alienwares).
- Partially selling old, too heavy power bricks (especially Alienware in the USA it seems).
- Annoying permanent lights or logos (such as Alienware and Strix).
- Only OLED models with flickering (those series carrying OLED in their names for worse PR).
- Only overkill CPUs (expensive, hot, bad for battery life).
- No German keyboard ever or yet.
- Camera bump.
- Only 32GB RAM possible.
- No liquid metal on the GPU (although some is on the CPU).

The closest candidate only has 2 disadvantages (somewhat wobbly, non-mechanical keys) but I cannot stand them. I have tried - after more than a few minutes, I would want to return such a notebook. What is the purpose of a €3000 device if the manufacturer has saved €50 too much during production? Let me pay €3050 including a proper keyboard and I buy it. They won't but their greed prevails and their devices may rot.

What disqualifies any laptop for me:
-not centered  (moved to the left) trackpad (Lenovo, Acer and many more);
-loudness (HP, Acer, MSI, Gigabyte);
-less then 90% sRGB, PWM;
-soldered RAM;
-no numeric keys (if a space allows);
-and of course, unjustified price.

Quote from: Petar on May 11, 2023, 14:26:23To me these are fundamental, and the main reason laptops are moving in the wrong direction - the keyboard and the touchpad. [...] if I have to connect an external keyboard and mouse because the laptop keyboard and touchpad are unusable, what exactly is the point of a laptop???

Precisely, and the reason why I am buying a desktop instead of a notebook this time.

QuoteRegarding the keyboard, while luckily there are still few companies (Clevo, Gigabyte and Lenovo on some models) that provide proper layout (with dedicated HOME/END/PGUP/PGDN and full-sized cursor keys)

About right, but Clevo and clones get the arithmetic keys' layout wrong.