> the value propositions of 2021/2022 hardware doesn't look better
I'm glad you managed to distill my feelings so clearly.
Most new things are just gimmicks, it's pretty rare that good innovations come into the laptop area.
Think of stuff like non-16:9 displays: older thinkpads had beautiful displays that were amazing for doing actual work. Now we're seeing 16:10 displays coming back, and it's awesome.
The ThinkPad T42 I had in high school had a 14" 1400x1050 display and writing documents was very comfortable. Then a dark age came, and all laptops had 16:9 displays... Editing a document in Word/Writer was a pain in the ass. Between the title bar, the windows icon bar (start menu and iconized applications) and the various office toolbars (and the f-ing ribbon toolbar) you could barely see the text you're writing. It was really moronic.
Getting off-topic, but you know that ribbon bar is collapsible, right? Also Windows up until 10 supported slim task bar, 11 unfortunately doesn't, probably as a compensation for the better displays available :(.
> Getting off-topic, but you know that ribbon bar is collapsible, right?
Yes but it was really meant as an example. Take for example another program like a web browser: between the title bar, the menu bar, the tab bar and the bookmark bar and you're losing a lot of vertical screen real estate.
Yeah the bookmark bar is collapsible and nowadays firefox and other browsers hide the menu bar, but those are useful features (particularly the bookmark bar) and I just want them around.
The problem is not that I should be hiding useful stuff like the ribbon bar or the bookmarks bar, the problem is that 16:9 displays are moronic and should not have been pushed onto everybody forcefully.
They might be okay for content-consumption-oriented laptops, but they're awful for real-work-oriented laptops (readl work raning from editing a spreadsheet, editing a document in word and even editing code of course).
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No wonder that high-end external display vendors like Dell/HP (and others) kept selling 16:10 external displays for professional use.
And newer laptops are all so damned huge, and they have terrible keyboards and trackpads with no buttons that are offset to one side.
My favorite laptop currently is an HP EliteBook 2760p that I got for free from a friend who works at a company that was throwing it away. Aside from the battery being dead, it's the best laptop I've ever used.
I'm glad you managed to distill my feelings so clearly.
Most new things are just gimmicks, it's pretty rare that good innovations come into the laptop area.
Think of stuff like non-16:9 displays: older thinkpads had beautiful displays that were amazing for doing actual work. Now we're seeing 16:10 displays coming back, and it's awesome.
The ThinkPad T42 I had in high school had a 14" 1400x1050 display and writing documents was very comfortable. Then a dark age came, and all laptops had 16:9 displays... Editing a document in Word/Writer was a pain in the ass. Between the title bar, the windows icon bar (start menu and iconized applications) and the various office toolbars (and the f-ing ribbon toolbar) you could barely see the text you're writing. It was really moronic.