4 ms·

I just cant get a laptop i feel comfortable working on, they all have that slow feel, where a desktop is just crisp and i can always just switch out anything i

I just cant get a laptop i feel comfortable working on, they all have that slow feel, where a desktop is just crisp and i can always just switch out anything i dont like about the current build..

UberFly 4y ago
Amen brother. It's like driving on a mountain highway with the windows down compared to commuting in a subway.
kalleboo 4y ago
My MacBook Pro with M1 Pro is the first laptop I've had that hasn't had that slight hesitation that laptops have always had. I think this is why people praise Apple Silicon so much even though the benchmark numbers may not always back it up - so many other people are also coming from similarly-hobbled laptops.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  Agree, I’ll probably never buy another Intel laptop as long as AMD and Apple keep killing it with these things. I was hopeful that the Surface laptops would be good with ARM too but they’re not using the latest chips, they went for low/mid-tier performance, and Windows on ARM still sucks / relies too much on emulation to be fast. Some day maybe we’ll get REAL ARM hardware with dozens of cores, tons of memory bandwidth, USB4, and decent freaking GPUs. Sorry, but the idea of spending $2k on a laptop that runs last year’s mid-tier smartphone processor just doesn’t cut it. Maybe that’s fine for a Chromebook for schools or something.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- sph 4y ago
  I have a great desktop, and every day I curse Apple and Tim Cook because I cannot get an iPad Pro that runs full macOS. That would be the ideal device for me when I'm on the go, that I can still use to watch Youtube videos in the bathroom. I do not need a full laptop when I work at home with a $5,000 desktop PC, nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered. It is really sad to have the tech to do something, but it doesn't exist because the bean counters said no.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    > nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered. Meanwhile, the expensive laptops with actual desktop-class components have unacceptably shitty peripherals, so you can't even pay more money for what you want; it simply doesn't exist. This is what upsets me the most about laptops.
    - yafbum 4y ago
      What do you mean by shitty peripherals?
      - LoganDark 4y ago
        Low-DPI screens, bad webcams, keyboards with the wrong arrows/numpad layout, off-center trackpads etc. it's different for each person what they consider "shitty", but laptops are always a total package deal (except for Framework) and it can just so happen that nobody makes powerful laptops that also have the exact right permutation of peripherals. You can find all sorts of beautiful 4K ultrabooks with the perfect keyboard and trackpad layout, and great webcams too—if you don't mind putting up with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM... If you want a really modern and powerful CPU with lots of RAM, you'll be looking at the likes of Clevo and AORUS and etc. that put desktop-class parts in a thick chassis, but... that bodes terribly for the peripherals they end up using. Some of the Clevo machines have individual gimmicks like 300Hz displays, but none of them seem to have all of "high DPI, good keyboard layout, good port arrangement, high performance". And this is true for basically all laptop vendors. OEMs think good peripherals always equate to "thin and light" which results in bad performance, either through bad parts or bad thermals. Maybe Frore Systems' new cooling solution will help slightly with ultrabook thermals, but until that happens, laptops are just suck. You may notice that this only matters because I even care. You may also notice that this is exactly what building a desktop is for. I am building a desktop, but I also have to build a laptop from scratch for the desktop so I can operate it from bed. Which would have been avoidable if I could've found a laptop in the first place. The point anyway isn't to say that there aren't any good laptops out there, but rather that if you want high performance (e.g. you are bothered by slowness), you can only get it as a package deal with the rest of the laptop... obviously. But the package deals all suck. The laptop market is so annoying sometimes.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  Don't worry. Apple will figure out how to put that hesitation back in with a future MacOS upgrade. Probably with yet more phoning-home daemons in the name of security theater. Sorry for the snark. I'm just bitter because Apple is about to ruin Dropbox because they don't allow KEXTs any more. https://tidbits.com/2023/03/10/apples-file-provider-forces-mac-cloud-storage-changes/ https://tidbits.com/2023/03/10/apples-file-provider-forces-m...
- throw6969away 4y ago
  > that slight hesitation that laptops have always had For me just getting a decent low-latency mouse (e.g., wired g203) and correctly configuring 100hz+ monitors has vastly improved my experience on my M1 Air and the shitty Thinkpad I use for work -- to the point where I haven't used my desktop in a long time.
seanp2k2 4y ago
Part of the problem is just raw TDP. There’s only so much horsepower you can squeeze out of 45-65w laptop chips. The brand new Ryzen 9 7945HX is damn fast though, with 16 real cores on a way better node size than Intel is using for their 13th gen parts that, at most, get you 8 real cores plus a 16-core Atom on the same die. Stuff like the Asus Zephyrus Duo have RAID-capable m.2 (and that one has two screens, one of which is a 16:10 with high refresh). Get something with a dedicated GPU as well, as that makes a huge difference even for desktop compositing. Despite what Intel says, integrated graphics continue to be a joke compared to even budget dedicated graphics. These mobile workstations are not going to rival 1kw desktops, but they get within 40% or so. The Intel stuff, 12th and 13th gen in particular also get bad battery life, like 4ish hours. Blame the FAA for their 100wh limit on batteries — not many laptop mfgs want to make something that you can’t technically take on a plane, even if the mall cop TSA agents wouldn’t ever notice.
- Kye 4y ago
  I lucked out with getting one of these on sale just before they went away: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1746503-REG/lenovo_82rf000bus_16_legion_5_pro.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1746503-REG/lenovo_82... The 300W power brick provides enough juice to feed both the CPU and GPU, and the laptop variant of the 3070 ti isn't too much slower than the desktop version in practical terms (I don't feel that 30% less performance). I've never tried it on battery or on the 135W USB-C power limit, but reviews report getting sufficient performance. I don't have room for a desktop, so it's nice to not feel like I'm compromising on power with something that fits. The memory and SSDs are user accessible, too.

I just cant get a laptop i feel comfortable working on, they all have that slow feel, where a desktop is just crisp and i can always just switch out anything i dont like about the current build..

UberFly 4y ago

Amen brother. It's like driving on a mountain highway with the windows down compared to commuting in a subway.

kalleboo 4y ago

My MacBook Pro with M1 Pro is the first laptop I've had that hasn't had that slight hesitation that laptops have always had. I think this is why people praise Apple Silicon so much even though the benchmark numbers may not always back it up - so many other people are also coming from similarly-hobbled laptops.

seanp2k2 4y ago
Agree, I’ll probably never buy another Intel laptop as long as AMD and Apple keep killing it with these things. I was hopeful that the Surface laptops would be good with ARM too but they’re not using the latest chips, they went for low/mid-tier performance, and Windows on ARM still sucks / relies too much on emulation to be fast. Some day maybe we’ll get REAL ARM hardware with dozens of cores, tons of memory bandwidth, USB4, and decent freaking GPUs. Sorry, but the idea of spending $2k on a laptop that runs last year’s mid-tier smartphone processor just doesn’t cut it. Maybe that’s fine for a Chromebook for schools or something.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sph 4y ago
I have a great desktop, and every day I curse Apple and Tim Cook because I cannot get an iPad Pro that runs full macOS. That would be the ideal device for me when I'm on the go, that I can still use to watch Youtube videos in the bathroom. I do not need a full laptop when I work at home with a $5,000 desktop PC, nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered. It is really sad to have the tech to do something, but it doesn't exist because the bean counters said no.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  > nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered. Meanwhile, the expensive laptops with actual desktop-class components have unacceptably shitty peripherals, so you can't even pay more money for what you want; it simply doesn't exist. This is what upsets me the most about laptops.
  - yafbum 4y ago
    What do you mean by shitty peripherals?
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      Low-DPI screens, bad webcams, keyboards with the wrong arrows/numpad layout, off-center trackpads etc. it's different for each person what they consider "shitty", but laptops are always a total package deal (except for Framework) and it can just so happen that nobody makes powerful laptops that also have the exact right permutation of peripherals. You can find all sorts of beautiful 4K ultrabooks with the perfect keyboard and trackpad layout, and great webcams too—if you don't mind putting up with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM... If you want a really modern and powerful CPU with lots of RAM, you'll be looking at the likes of Clevo and AORUS and etc. that put desktop-class parts in a thick chassis, but... that bodes terribly for the peripherals they end up using. Some of the Clevo machines have individual gimmicks like 300Hz displays, but none of them seem to have all of "high DPI, good keyboard layout, good port arrangement, high performance". And this is true for basically all laptop vendors. OEMs think good peripherals always equate to "thin and light" which results in bad performance, either through bad parts or bad thermals. Maybe Frore Systems' new cooling solution will help slightly with ultrabook thermals, but until that happens, laptops are just suck. You may notice that this only matters because I even care. You may also notice that this is exactly what building a desktop is for. I am building a desktop, but I also have to build a laptop from scratch for the desktop so I can operate it from bed. Which would have been avoidable if I could've found a laptop in the first place. The point anyway isn't to say that there aren't any good laptops out there, but rather that if you want high performance (e.g. you are bothered by slowness), you can only get it as a package deal with the rest of the laptop... obviously. But the package deals all suck. The laptop market is so annoying sometimes.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
Don't worry. Apple will figure out how to put that hesitation back in with a future MacOS upgrade. Probably with yet more phoning-home daemons in the name of security theater. Sorry for the snark. I'm just bitter because Apple is about to ruin Dropbox because they don't allow KEXTs any more. https://tidbits.com/2023/03/10/apples-file-provider-forces-mac-cloud-storage-changes/ https://tidbits.com/2023/03/10/apples-file-provider-forces-m...
throw6969away 4y ago
> that slight hesitation that laptops have always had For me just getting a decent low-latency mouse (e.g., wired g203) and correctly configuring 100hz+ monitors has vastly improved my experience on my M1 Air and the shitty Thinkpad I use for work -- to the point where I haven't used my desktop in a long time.

seanp2k2 4y ago

Part of the problem is just raw TDP. There’s only so much horsepower you can squeeze out of 45-65w laptop chips. The brand new Ryzen 9 7945HX is damn fast though, with 16 real cores on a way better node size than Intel is using for their 13th gen parts that, at most, get you 8 real cores plus a 16-core Atom on the same die. Stuff like the Asus Zephyrus Duo have RAID-capable m.2 (and that one has two screens, one of which is a 16:10 with high refresh). Get something with a dedicated GPU as well, as that makes a huge difference even for desktop compositing. Despite what Intel says, integrated graphics continue to be a joke compared to even budget dedicated graphics. These mobile workstations are not going to rival 1kw desktops, but they get within 40% or so. The Intel stuff, 12th and 13th gen in particular also get bad battery life, like 4ish hours. Blame the FAA for their 100wh limit on batteries — not many laptop mfgs want to make something that you can’t technically take on a plane, even if the mall cop TSA agents wouldn’t ever notice.

Kye 4y ago
I lucked out with getting one of these on sale just before they went away: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1746503-REG/lenovo_82rf000bus_16_legion_5_pro.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1746503-REG/lenovo_82... The 300W power brick provides enough juice to feed both the CPU and GPU, and the laptop variant of the 3070 ti isn't too much slower than the desktop version in practical terms (I don't feel that 30% less performance). I've never tried it on battery or on the 135W USB-C power limit, but reviews report getting sufficient performance. I don't have room for a desktop, so it's nice to not feel like I'm compromising on power with something that fits. The memory and SSDs are user accessible, too.