Opinion: It’s 2023, so shouldn’t mobile computing be better than this?

[A]

Apple 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?

[sya]

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.

[Ab]

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...

[AHA]

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.

[A]

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.

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

[Nate]

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.

[A]

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.

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)