I want it thick enough for a decent battery and a keyboard with nice travel. Oh and make it easy to open and close it an replace/add stuff. Sure add some room for a 2.5" sata drive. Like you, I don't really get the race to the thinnest. Perhaps it pushes tech in other aspects to limits that allow for better batteries in my thicker laptop... in that case, I'm ok with it ;)
> We’re lucky that we still have removable M.2 SSDs at all. It looks like devices will be moving to fully soldered storage in the next few years.
What makes you say that? Unlike smartphones, laptops are still widely used as productivity stations. Surely that means there will continue to be high demand for upgradable and replaceable internal storage.
And this is probably the only reason we still have that as an option. The Surface Pro 7 Plus just came out with a removable drive, so hopefully that shows there really is still a need for removable drives. But for consumers I think the only option will soon be cloud.
I want it to be thick enough to allow for proper cooling so the laptop doesn't immediately throttle as soon as it boosts. That requirement would pretty much allow for everything else anyways.
My Thinkpad T480s has a collapsed ethernet port and it sucks. I tried it a couple of times with different cables and the clip got stuck in the port and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it out. I had to open up the case and unscrew the trap-door holding the cable just to get it out.
I have an ultrabook from tuxedo (clevo reseller like System76) since several years. The foldable ethernet port still works. Used to treat my stuff badly too.
I have a such Fujitsu Lifebook. To be honest, I always use an USB-Ethernet adapter instead of the built in foldable. But it's great to have an Ethernet port for emergency use. It's a nice notebook anyway. Very light, mate touch and pen display (a pen can be stored inside of the notebook), a lot of ports. Battery and SSD can be replaced very easy (sadly RAM not).
I've thought about this a fair amount and come to the conclusion that HN readers as a group just cannot wrap their heads around why the majority of consumers are so enamored by thin stuff - but they are, and that's why these companies keep doing this.
It seems wildly stupid, and it is in some objective sense, but people make bad purchasing decisions. See: Cars in the united states continuing to get bigger and bigger.
Are they really enamoured with it, or is it just that when they go to upgrade their (phone|laptop|fridge) the mainstream store only has a choice of the 10 best-advertised products?
I searched for weeks to find a phone matching my SO's requirements and in the end had to order it from China . Few 'majority consumers' have the time or patience for that, so they just put up with thin batteries and camera bumps.
> dunno, this seems like a sane thing to want AND think that this is what your users might want.
I don't think most people care about RAM upgrades. Non-technical people will probably either just put up with their computer becoming somewhat slower if software requirements change over time, or they don't have use cases where they'd run out of RAM in the first place.
A nice and "modern" looking form factor is probably a greater factor for most people even if they did care about the upgradability to some extent.
I don't really get the trend towards non-replaceable batteries, though, at least not from a customer perspective. Batteries often begin to degrade much earlier than a decent laptop would otherwise show any age, so it makes almost no sense whatsoever (except perhaps some kind of a small improvement in size due to simpler construction) to not be able to replace those. Maybe people get their batteries replaced at a shop or they just put up with degraded batteries, too.
I agree it replacements and upgrades should be doable, and that it would be responsible, and I'd appreciate it if at least models marketed towards developers, engineers and other technical professionals would have that. Most people probably just won't care enough, though.
> Like this trend with protruding cameras out of phone's body. Just make the body that bit thicker and slap bigger battery on it.
I had always assumed they did this for case reasons. A smaller phone means room the case could occupy. Fairly logical imo, though it feels like crap if you don't have a case.
As it is my iPhone 10, a fairly small phone (not a large model, i forget which) feels huge with a case. Cases make it weird.
Yes please. Glued batteries make for difficult repairs, which ultimately reduces lifespan. Of course, that's the goal, that way you can be a thinner, crappier version in 3 years time, with a further reduced feature set, an even worse keyboard, and a dongle for your dongle.
OTOH a good thing for now is that there are many portable batteries that enough to power laptop via USB Type-C. It's inexpensive alternative way to extend product life.
Wow. Those are still pretty expensive. I've been considering replacing my T430, but I'm not sure it's worthwhile. Mine has 16GB of RAM, i7 quad core, 1TB SSD, etc. I think my money would be better spent upgrading the screen on my existing machine. It's also worth noting that I was able to buy a backup/spare T430 to use for parts and experimentation for ~$100. All in all, I've been very happy with this model.
My main laptop is still an ~7-year-old ThinkPad W530. I pretty much maxed it out when I bought it: quad-core i7-3740QM, 32 GB of RAM, a pair of Samsung 850 Pro SSDs (RAID1), Nvidia something 2GB, FHD screen, etc.
I was thinking about upgrading recently and was leaning towards the T470 for various reasons, including seeing a few nice used ones available locally at "okay" prices... until I started to actually compare them!
Based on the benchmarks I could find, I came to the conclusion that the performance of the T470 was no better than that of my old tank, the W530 -- and may have even been worse! Once I looked into the cost of upgrading the RAM on the T470 (as I tend to run several VMs concurrently) I decided I'd simply be wasting money "upgrading" to the T470.
Additionally, I've got a T420 which, although even older, still performs amazingly well -- once it was upgraded to 16 GB of RAM and a 480 GB SSD. I've only got ~$150 in it and it'll do a fine job if/when the W530 finally dies.
(The "upgrade" wasn't really a priority anyways, as I've got a beast of a workstation that I use 90% of the time.)
Sorry I don’t know any good vendors but I do see an i7 with the rarer IPS 1920p display on eBay for 500 bucks and I’m sure other marketplaces have more than a few.
Personally I’d like it to be thick (and possibly heavy) enough that I can open the lid without having to hold down the bottom. I yearn to be able to set a laptop down on my desk and not have it slide around or move when I’m adjusting the screen.
Yep, it's decent. I also have its successor, T490s, which is much worse (e.g., no full ethernet port).
That being said, my T480s had to go into warranty aleady, three times total if you count the TB3 docking station (which to me counts as one system I use together all the time): the motherboard was fried on the T480s. And since everything is one block of silicon, they had to switch out the entire thing, except for the hard drive.
The TB3 dock gen1 is the single worst bit of technology I ever had the displeasure of owning and using. Next to countless incompatibilities and instabilities, it just died a sudden death on me recently. Still a couple months within the 3-year warranty.
That's a serious engineering flaw on Lenovo's side. A better manufacturer would've made sure it died outside of warranty. They're really dropping the ball, you can tell by that.
