6 ms·
You know how thick I want my laptop? Just thick enough for an ethernet port with no dongle.
by phren0logy 6y ago
You know how thick I want my laptop? Just thick enough for an ethernet port with no dongle.
- bsg75 6y agoI want it thick enough for that, an externally replacable battery (no glue!) and room for additional RAM sticks. Otherwise I'd buy a tablet.
- dayofthedaleks 6y agoBetter get a Thinkpad x270 before all of the depreciated corporate hand-me-downs dry up! Shame no Thunderbolt though.
- everybodyknows 6y agoCan you recommend a source for used Thinkpad x270s?
- dayofthedaleks 6y agoSorry 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.
- noir_lord 6y agoMy T470P has all of that - following models have at least one dimm soldered which is crap.
- ethagnawl 6y agoWow. 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.
- jlgaddis 6y agoMy 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.)
- noir_lord 6y agoAye, I maxed mine out, 7700HQ 32GB nvme ssd and the 2560x1440. Was 1400 quid, the ZenBook I bought the missus with the Ryzen 4xxx obliterates it. The perf improvement from 3rd to 8th gen intels was marginal. Thank god AMD and M1 is pushing things forwards finally. Buying a machine 4 years later and getting bugger all improvement gets old after a while. Now I’m wfh forever I use my desktop and the laptop sits next to the work MacBook, forlorn and alone.
- Guest42 6y agoCan these run Linux too? If so, I'll buy a few of them.
- diarrhea 6y agoYes of course. People are running Linux on toilets at this rate.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dayofthedaleks 6y agoFor all of Lenovo’s sins on the consumer lines, the Thinkpads have continued to have exemplary driver support under Linux.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- easton 6y agoThey even ship machines with it now (The P Series and X1 Carbon, at least. Fedora.)
- me_me_me 6y agoI dunno, this seems like a sane thing to want AND think that this is what your users might want. And yet repetitively we dont get those products. Like this trend with protruding cameras out of phone's body. Just make the body that bit thicker and slap bigger battery on it. And you can boast in ads that it last 2 days instead 5hrs. Maybe we are wrong? Or there is some kind of nonobvious business logic behind it.
- Normal_gaussian 6y agoProtruding camera and 2 days battery life is pretty common now. 5000mAh and 30W charging for just over £200: https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g9_plus-10432.php https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g9_plus-10432.php There are a couple of dozen now https://www.productchart.co.uk/smartphones/ https://www.productchart.co.uk/smartphones/
- me_me_me 6y agoThats great but almost 7inches I would need a handbag to carry it xD
- Normal_gaussian 6y agoThere are five phones with >=5000mAh and less than 6" screens on the productchart link
- me_me_me 6y agoThat's actually an amazing tool to find a smartphone, thanks!
- sushisource 6y agoI'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.
- elric 6y agoYes 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.
- fomine3 6y agoOTOH 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.
- skavi 6y agoIsn’t it great that there are many options on the market fitting that description? Even from this very company!
- everdrive 6y agoNo, the thin options are bad, and the people who like them should feel bad.
- whatever1 6y agoIt does not even need to host the entire plug. Just the connectors. The rest can be kept in place with a sprung port. Dell is doing it.
- lapinot 6y agoAny experience on how well do these kind of ports age? I never had one but i'd suspect it to be fragile.
- silon42 6y agoYes. Also VGA port. And a 2.5" HDD/SSD.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- arnaudsm 6y agoFoldable full-size ethernet ports do exist https://i.redd.it/jmgamgmhcq201.png https://i.redd.it/jmgamgmhcq201.png
- uncledave 6y agoI'd probably snap that off in two seconds flat.
- scns 6y agoI 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.
- baybal2 6y agoIt's probably still better than https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/XJACK_network_card_in_use.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/XJACK_ne...
- jbay808 6y agoWow, that is beautiful and clever.
- _trampeltier 6y ago
- tgb 6y agoI have ThinkPad's T480s which is basically exactly that.
- diarrhea 6y agoYep, 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.
- teekert 6y agoI 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 ;)
- Symmetry 6y agoI saved a fair bit of money buying the base RAM and SDD configuration and then upgrading myself the last couple of times I bought a T-series Thinkpad.
- orev 6y ago2.5” SATA drives are dead for laptops. Only the really cheap/slow ones still have them, and that’s not the market for this kind of device. 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.
- CivBase 6y ago> 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.
- Bancakes 6y agoAnd an extra half a millimetre for a CPU/GPU socket.
- eT8AZithxooKei6 6y agoI wish someone would go ahead and standardize a mini-ethernet connector.
- moth-fuzz 6y agoPersonally 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.