5 ms·

You are seriously overestimating how much computing power people need and underestimating the capabilities of those laptops.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Very few people "need" more than a Pentium 4, but there are a lot of technically sufficient, practically unusable laptops out there. Modern Celerons dance that line of "usable on the web now, but who knows what next year brings" quite delicately. My benchmark is "can this play an HD Youtube video full screen". Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task, but with remote education in the state that it's at, that would make life very hard for its users. I've also seen laptops go from usable to unusable because everyone switched codecs and suddenly the hardware acceleration didn't work anymore. I think an i3 with a modest amount of RAM is a good decision for a baseline. You can get away with less, but you'll have to constantly maintain your laptop to do so, tweaking settings as the computer ages and acceleration support dies out. For most people, the device will just slow down to a crawl. An i3 and 8GB of RAM are technically overspecced today, but in five years time you'll be happy you didn't buy the Celeron.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  11th gen intel processors or higher have AV1 decoding on top of all the other hardware accelerated codecs. This means that watching multimedia for the foreseeable future will be a lag free experience.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Will Google Meet actually utilize that?
- asdajksah2123 3y ago
  A pentium 4 would burn through your battery within minutes (not to mention your skin). Most people absolutely NEED better than a pentium 4.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  A pentium 4 would leave people without any reasonable means to even play modern video codecs
- 15457345234 3y ago
  > Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task There's not a single cheap Windows laptop that will even vaguely 'struggle' at this task given that the video decode is hardware accelerated. Even a RPI can manage that task. I have set-top box PCs with dual core Celeron 1037U processors which are more than ten years old which don't 'struggle' at this task even if you throw them a x265 video which their hardware decode ASIC doesn't support.
thefz 3y ago
8GB of volatile memory will be a swapfest every time a "modern" browser opens. Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.
- deadmutex 3y ago
  Isn't that what the base M1 Air ships with?
  - patrec 3y ago
    Apple's computers appear to have working memory management, whilst Linux doesn't. Anecdotally, an old 8GiB intel mac feels fine, an enormously more powerful 16 GiB linux laptop with Gnome is basically unusable (but runs great once you seriously bump up the RAM).
    - viraptor 3y ago
      As a dev of multiple languages, distro maintainer, general experimenter-with-things and basic ML user - Linux with 8GB works perfectly fine here. Sounds like something else is happening with your system.
      - _Algernon_ 3y ago
        Linux doesn't deal well with OOM situations but those don't really apply here. 10 tabs in FF brings me to 3.5 gigs total system use, which is plenty of buffer to avoid swapping and OOM freezes.
    - walteweiss 3y ago
      So I have an old PC with i5 (Gen. 1, circa 2010 or 2011), and 4x 2 GB of ram. One 2 GB module broke and I hadn’t bothered to replace it for years, living with 6 GB. It runs Fedora Workstation 38, with Gnome. It runs it very well, and I came from more than a decade of MacBooks with 16 GB of ram. It runs it so well I don’t notice it’s just 6 GB in there.
Theodores 3y ago
My three year old Android budget phone has the same specs, more or less. A laptop has to have more.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  It doesn't have to. In fact, your android phone could do all the things it does on a daily basis with far less. I'd love to get stats on how many people are not using their ultra high resolution displays at the maximum resolution and dont even know it, since it's a toggle in the settings to enable it.
mamcx 3y ago
The problem is not what people need but what Js app needs :)
hedora 3y ago
They don't come with reasonable displays. My previous experience with low-end intel hardware has been universally negative, so I assumed the i3's are terrible. Passmark says they are far better than I would have guessed: M1 performance at 4x the wattage. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100 So, either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly. I wonder if suspend / resume works reliably. It did not for the last 4 intel laptops I owned, regardless of OS. That included Windows, MacOS and Linux. Maybe the AMD ones are decent. It's a shame about the screen (and bizarre bios) though.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  My guess is that they throttle a bit. ChromeOS machines tend to sleep and resume really well and sacrifice performance for battery. In a world full of low end garbage windows machines, it actually makes them a pretty nice little niche. Lots of consumers would likely find them much better than a lot of the $1-200 more expensive Windows laptops.
- kcb 3y ago
  That's a desktop processor. These will all likely contain u series processors.
- danans 3y ago
  > They don't come with reasonable displays How do you define "reasonable"? My Asus Chromebook has this display, which I find very reasonable for work: - 14” LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 display - Four-way NanoEdge display with 85% screen-to-body ratio - 4.9mm-thin side bezel and 7mm bottom bezel - Wide 100% sRGB color gamut - 178° wide-view technology
  - tgma 3y ago
    Yours is not the average Chromebook. It probably cost you at least $450 is my guess.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
troupo 3y ago
People need Google Meet. Google Meet will melt your CPU on most laptops. Most of Google's apps will, come to think of it.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Meet has the sorta unique problem of using video encoding that most modern hardware doesn't accelerate, meaning the CPU ends up taking it. Zoom just uses the typical H.264.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Very few people "need" more than a Pentium 4, but there are a lot of technically sufficient, practically unusable laptops out there. Modern Celerons dance that line of "usable on the web now, but who knows what next year brings" quite delicately. My benchmark is "can this play an HD Youtube video full screen". Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task, but with remote education in the state that it's at, that would make life very hard for its users. I've also seen laptops go from usable to unusable because everyone switched codecs and suddenly the hardware acceleration didn't work anymore. I think an i3 with a modest amount of RAM is a good decision for a baseline. You can get away with less, but you'll have to constantly maintain your laptop to do so, tweaking settings as the computer ages and acceleration support dies out. For most people, the device will just slow down to a crawl. An i3 and 8GB of RAM are technically overspecced today, but in five years time you'll be happy you didn't buy the Celeron.

Almondsetat 3y ago
11th gen intel processors or higher have AV1 decoding on top of all the other hardware accelerated codecs. This means that watching multimedia for the foreseeable future will be a lag free experience.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Will Google Meet actually utilize that?
asdajksah2123 3y ago
A pentium 4 would burn through your battery within minutes (not to mention your skin). Most people absolutely NEED better than a pentium 4.
babypuncher 3y ago
A pentium 4 would leave people without any reasonable means to even play modern video codecs
15457345234 3y ago
> Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task There's not a single cheap Windows laptop that will even vaguely 'struggle' at this task given that the video decode is hardware accelerated. Even a RPI can manage that task. I have set-top box PCs with dual core Celeron 1037U processors which are more than ten years old which don't 'struggle' at this task even if you throw them a x265 video which their hardware decode ASIC doesn't support.

thefz 3y ago

8GB of volatile memory will be a swapfest every time a "modern" browser opens. Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.

deadmutex 3y ago
Isn't that what the base M1 Air ships with?
- patrec 3y ago
  Apple's computers appear to have working memory management, whilst Linux doesn't. Anecdotally, an old 8GiB intel mac feels fine, an enormously more powerful 16 GiB linux laptop with Gnome is basically unusable (but runs great once you seriously bump up the RAM).
  - viraptor 3y ago
    As a dev of multiple languages, distro maintainer, general experimenter-with-things and basic ML user - Linux with 8GB works perfectly fine here. Sounds like something else is happening with your system.
    - _Algernon_ 3y ago
      Linux doesn't deal well with OOM situations but those don't really apply here. 10 tabs in FF brings me to 3.5 gigs total system use, which is plenty of buffer to avoid swapping and OOM freezes.
  - walteweiss 3y ago
    So I have an old PC with i5 (Gen. 1, circa 2010 or 2011), and 4x 2 GB of ram. One 2 GB module broke and I hadn’t bothered to replace it for years, living with 6 GB. It runs Fedora Workstation 38, with Gnome. It runs it very well, and I came from more than a decade of MacBooks with 16 GB of ram. It runs it so well I don’t notice it’s just 6 GB in there.

Theodores 3y ago

My three year old Android budget phone has the same specs, more or less. A laptop has to have more.

eptcyka 3y ago
It doesn't have to. In fact, your android phone could do all the things it does on a daily basis with far less. I'd love to get stats on how many people are not using their ultra high resolution displays at the maximum resolution and dont even know it, since it's a toggle in the settings to enable it.

mamcx 3y ago

The problem is not what people need but what Js app needs :)

hedora 3y ago

They don't come with reasonable displays. My previous experience with low-end intel hardware has been universally negative, so I assumed the i3's are terrible. Passmark says they are far better than I would have guessed: M1 performance at 4x the wattage. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100 So, either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly. I wonder if suspend / resume works reliably. It did not for the last 4 intel laptops I owned, regardless of OS. That included Windows, MacOS and Linux. Maybe the AMD ones are decent. It's a shame about the screen (and bizarre bios) though.

_ea1k 3y ago
My guess is that they throttle a bit. ChromeOS machines tend to sleep and resume really well and sacrifice performance for battery. In a world full of low end garbage windows machines, it actually makes them a pretty nice little niche. Lots of consumers would likely find them much better than a lot of the $1-200 more expensive Windows laptops.
kcb 3y ago
That's a desktop processor. These will all likely contain u series processors.
danans 3y ago
> They don't come with reasonable displays How do you define "reasonable"? My Asus Chromebook has this display, which I find very reasonable for work: - 14” LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 display - Four-way NanoEdge display with 85% screen-to-body ratio - 4.9mm-thin side bezel and 7mm bottom bezel - Wide 100% sRGB color gamut - 178° wide-view technology
- tgma 3y ago
  Yours is not the average Chromebook. It probably cost you at least $450 is my guess.
matheusmoreira 3y ago

troupo 3y ago

People need Google Meet. Google Meet will melt your CPU on most laptops. Most of Google's apps will, come to think of it.

hot_gril 3y ago
Meet has the sorta unique problem of using video encoding that most modern hardware doesn't accelerate, meaning the CPU ends up taking it. Zoom just uses the typical H.264.