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> Most PC makers and laptop PC buyers made an unspoken bargain in the early- to mid-2010s, around when the MacBook Air and the Ultrabook stopped being special t

• eviks 3y ago
  Indeed, and you could even make it lighter by removing the DVD burner if you didn't need it (in some models)! Or make it heavier by replacing DVD with an extra hard drive if that was the worthy tradeoff for you
  • fomine3 3y ago
    Or external battery bay, it was a thing.
• inkyoto 3y ago
  Nah, the trend had started some time before, and Intel is complicit due to limiting the maximum amount of RAM at the chipset level. I am not sure whether it was a technological or a marketing constraint. I have a Sony Vaio VGN-Z17 laptop that I purchased in 2008 in a mint condition that now runs Linux. It has 4Gb of RAM, which – I think – is the maximum, and it can't be upgraded any further due to the chipset not allowing such a thing. Everything else (apart from the 32-bit CPU)… is still a marvel: a 1.4 kg masterpiece with a carbon fibre body, 2x GPU's (discrete Intel and NVIDIA chips), a fingerprint scanner, a 1300x900 TNT screen (okay, low res by modern standards), up to 11 hours of the uptime with a swappable large battery, plus other peripherals expected and usual of the era. Everything still works like a charm. Memory can't be upgraded tho. Intel has held laptops vendors hostage for far too long by not supporting more in the chipset. It should not come as a surprise that the laptop vendors have started soldering memory chips on.
  • aurareturn 3y ago
    If the CPU is 32 bit, then the max RAM can only be 4GB.
    • inkyoto 3y ago
      The laptop has an Intel Core CPU that supports 36 bit physical addresses (via larger memory pages), so – practically – it can address up to 64Gb of RAM. The constraint is the Intel chipset.
      • zozbot234 3y ago
        PAE is a hack, you're still not able to use more than 2GB (or 3GB if you're lucky) of address space in a single process. Like it or not, we're at a point where that might not even be enough to browse a single webpage (if that webpage is a horribly bloated SPA). 64bit compute is inevitable.
        • inkyoto 3y ago
          My point did not pertain to aesthetic qualities of PAE but rather to a limitation of Intel CPU chipsets that imposed a maximum memory constraint (either out of marketing microsegmentation or engineering reasons), the practice that has persisted for years onwards and upwards, and was likely the catalyst for the PC laptop vendors to start soldering the memory chips on. Lastly, running 3Gb processes (which Linux supported and Windows did not) on a ultra-portable laptop was not really a thing in 2008, and who was going to win the 64-bit x86 flavour battle (AMD or Intel) had not become clear yet.
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
  • Sakos 3y ago
    Core 2 Duos might have been more limited than they maybe could have been, but the 2006-2008 era was still very much transitional. DDR2 was still extremely common and you weren't going to find any 4GB modules. The next architecture was Arrandale (the first Core i3/5/7 line) where the max was increased to 8GB and the Sandy Bridge (probably the minimum I'd consider for doing anything with modern applications or a modern OS) supported 16-32GB. If they held anything hostage, they certainly didn't do it for long. I also think it's ridiculous to consider this in a vacuum. The few AMD laptops I could find from the same time frame have the same memory limits.
• Milner08 3y ago
  I am really not sure how much of the general population would agree with you. Having a slim laptop that I can drop in my bag and not take up the world of space is great.
  • atoav 3y ago
    I have a laptop that is 25mm in height. It fits my bag perfectly. It could be 30mm and would still fit fine. We are not talking about making laptops not fit into bags. We are talking about not making laptops 9mm thin when they would work better if they were 18mm thin.
    • williamcotton 3y ago
      I can’t help but agree because my 17” MacBook Pro M3 is noticeably thicker than an Air but not an issue for transporting around. I’ll tell you what is noticeable. Typing on an iPhone either worsened or I’m just getting old!
      • lobsterthief 3y ago
        It’s definitely worsened. It’s a well-discussed phenomenon.
  • wiz21c 3y ago
    I want my laptop made of things I can upgrade/replace. Which means stuff that is less optimized for space.
    • tiagod 3y ago
      That's perfectly reasonable, but it's also reasonable to value other things, and most poeple aren't in that camp
      • close04 3y ago
        Some people are focused on a particular parameter out of explicit necessity or personal preference - has to be thin for [reason]. For the others it's a matter of how you frame the question. Do you want a laptop that's super thin (implicitly not upgradable, expensive to repair)? Do you want a laptop for which you can replace anything fast and cheap for upgrades or repairs (implicitly thicker)? I'll bet you the same people might answer "yes" to both because they don't frame the brackets or consequences in their mind, only the immediate benefit. The laptop is thin when they make the choice and only expensive later on if it breaks. But I'd go so far as to say that if all cards were on the table during the decision making process more people would choose to add a few mm if it makes the devices cheaper to buy, to repair, and to upgrade.
• saagarjha 3y ago
  Most laptops of the time were light because they were flimsy; MacBook Air was aluminum. How did yours fare?
  • chx 3y ago
    It was a magnesium alloy and practically indestructible. Alas, I did test it -- it got kicked off a table while open in a very cramped multi story flat during a hackathon -- but it survived with a minor scratch on the lid. Did I mention it was a Panasonic Toughbook?
    • Rediscover 3y ago
      Let's Note series. I've only seen it branded Toughbook in North America. I love that series, especially those from your laptop's era. https://panasonic.jp/pc/p-db/CF-Y5KW8AXR.html https://panasonic.jp/pc/p-db/CF-Y5KW8AXR.html Edit: Let's Note are much more durable than "standard" notebooks.
• threeseed 3y ago
  It's funny how out of touch you are. At CES this year even the gaming laptops have moved away from thicker, boxier designs capable of housing elaborate cooling systems and a full array of ports. And instead resemble traditional thin laptops. The reason is that the majority of people want sleek, thin, usable form factors that isn't out of place in a cafe or library. And it is the priority over all else.
  • lpapez 3y ago
    I agree. If I wanted max power and cooling efficiency, I'd go for a PC anyway. When picking a laptop, my first question is whether I would be able to carelessly carry it around every day. The compromise with bulky gaming laptops is simply not worth IMO - it's not as good of a desktop computer as an actual desktop, and not as good of a laptop as some notebook. It's nice to be ocassionally able to do something more serious while on the go, but that is optimizing for the 10% use-case instead of the 90% use-case.
    • jusssi 3y ago
      There is the case of "home laptop". Something that you rarely or never carry around, but you still don't want a stationary desktop PC for whatever reason.
      • Dalewyn 3y ago
        If you aren't staying somewhere permanently but also aren't moving in the immediate future (eg: college dorm) or your living space is constrained (eg: a trucker or an RVer), it definitely makes sense to have something powerful in a form factor that is "temporary", low-maintenance, and mostly self-contained.
      • andruby 3y ago
        I suppose the market for those is probably too small for the manufacturers to invest in.
      • pmontra 3y ago
        My home laptop is my work laptop, a 30 mm thick ZBook 15 from HP. I move it in several rooms according to the season. Some rooms get too hot in summer, others are OK. Same thing for winter. I could buy a desktop and remote desktop to it from a lighter laptop (maybe with a monitor, mouse and keyboard? too much stuff to move) but sometimes I don't work from home. Not every year now. Thankfully covid took care of nearly all of those days spent at a customer's premises.
• LoganDark 3y ago
  > This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel. Agreed. I'd be fine if there were other laptops in the market but there really are not. If you want a laptop that makes good use of its internal space, and has any internal space to make use of in the first place, you're going to be paying thousands.
  • Someone 3y ago
    I think that’s not an evil conspiracy, but because the demand just isn’t there in sufficient numbers at lower price points. For most people, making good use of available space means leaving as little room as possible inside. At best, you can replace your SSD or RAM with higher capacity ones.
    • LoganDark 3y ago
      I don't think it's an evil conspiracy either, just everyone simultaneously assuming that "thin and light" is the most important trait of all, and must be achieved at all costs (i.e. at the cost of everything else).
• cameronh90 3y ago
  I buy laptops for end-users and the number one thing they all want, developers included, is for the laptop to be light and thin. To the detriment of everything else. They'll complain that they're slow, hot, the battery doesn't last, etc. but when I suggest a thicker laptop instead, they'll turn it down.
  • dangus 3y ago
    Once you know that it’s technically possible to have your cake and eat it too (the Apple M1/M2/M3 chip), this becomes a reasonable demand. The MacBook Air released in 2020 with no fan was managing to match and beat the 2019 Intel 16” MacBook Pro in some benchmarks, and that 16” model was itself thicker than the previous model. A lot of people giving up upgradability to join Apple (this isn’t hyperbole: their marketshare notably increased after the M1 debut) getting double the battery life of their last Intel system are making a very logical and reasonable trade-off. When it comes to traveling and getting work done, whether or not I can upgrade the system might take a back seat to whether or not the system hurts my back. The whole point of a laptop is to make a reasonable trade-off for mobility. Of course, that said, it’s true that Apple could provide us with at least a storage upgrade path without any compromise. Memory is debatable since LPDDR has real efficiency benefits. But someone who wants what you can get out of an M3 Max laptop can’t buy that package anywhere else at any price. What x86 system comes in a 14” portable notebook package with ~20 hours of productivity battery life and on-board graphics only 7% slower than a laptop RTX 4080 that can be configured to address over 100GB of VRAM? Thankfully for consumer choice, Intel’s Core Ultra products finally caught up to the type of performance per watt standard that Apple set.
    • saltcured 3y ago
      Just to give you another data point, an AMD-based Thinkpad P14s Gen 4 gets about halfway to some of your targets. The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U has a pretty nice iGPU. It can be ordered with 64 GB LPDDR5 RAM for ~$1400 USD. Mine, with 32 GB RAM, idles around 4 watts in Linux with Firefox open on WiFi and screen at about 1/3 brightness, which translates to around 13 hrs of battery life.
    • 3y ago
• Aurornis 3y ago
  This is a great example of how Hacker News comment section preferences do not represent the general population’s preferences. If you’ve ever worked in purchasing or IT, you see how much people who travel or move around value thin, small, and light notebooks. If you’ve used modern thin, light notebooks, you’ve seen how little it matters for performance and battery life. A modern Apple laptop is tiny and performs extremely well. Upgradeable RAM is a very niche demand. If your goals are simultaneously to keep a machine forever while minimizing upfront cost, then compromising form to make RAM upgradeable is a reasonable decision. However, most people just want an all-new laptop come upgrade time because CPUs and GPUs are advancing rapidly. People who know they’re going to keep the laptop forever will spend an extra couple hundred on RAM up front. I think HN has also lost sight of how the average laptop user operates. Even I had an 8GB RAM secondary Apple laptop for testing and it worked completely fine for a mix of day to day tasks and coding. I wasn’t going to be doing Chromium compiles in the background while cycling through 100 background tabs in Chrome, but for even moderate usage with Chrome and Electron apps and an IDE it was fine. > I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 which was a 14" 1.5kg laptop and yet it included a DVD burner. It was not thin for sure. This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel. I suspect a lot of these perspectives are anchored to past realities: Laptops from 5-10 years ago where carrying a jumbo laptop did actually have significant advantages. Times have changed and all of the anecdotes from ancient laptops or even 2010-era laptops just don’t apply.
  • chx 3y ago
    > where carrying a jumbo laptop did actually have significant advantages. it's bewildering to call the engineering marvel those Panasonic and Sony laptops me and a few others talk about here "jumbo". It's been more than 17 years and the only physical advantage of the Macbook M3 Pro 14" over the CF-Y5 is the thickness change. That's it. Near two decades of advancement, the laptop is the same weight except it went from 1.3"-1.9" to 0.61" thickness. It's been 3.7 lbs then, 3.4 pounds now with the Max being 3.6 lbs and I bet merely dropping the DVD writer would've been enough bring these to par. Jumbo...? The Dell XPS M2010 was a jumbo, that's not in question but these? > move around value thin, small, and light notebooks. We are on the same page about light. Let me tell you, I was not happy how much heavier my next laptop, the ThinkPad T420 was at 4.9lbs. That's a full third heavier. No, it's the demand for insane thinness that I argue was manufactured artificially. If you want smaller laptops, there were, back then, both from Panasonic and Sony as they used to call them, subnotebooks, at 11" and 12" size with the exact same argument possible.