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In many ways, the market for laptops has collapsed. My latest laptop purchase I view largely as a bonfire where I burned $1200 in effigy, and not from lack of
by trod1234 1y ago
In many ways, the market for laptops has collapsed.
My latest laptop purchase I view largely as a bonfire where I burned $1200 in effigy, and not from lack of marketing, but from lack of real options.
Lenovo has lost a customer in me for life, and it taught me a very important lesson. If the options don't exist anymore at a reasonable price point or reliability you just have to build your own.
For the recent purchase (2 or 3 years ago), here is a running list of failures.
A required Lenovo Advantage firmware update (same day as delivery), bricked default power charging preventing charging and running while plugged in. This forced an RMA when the battery died without any way to power the device on.
The new one received 2 weeks later headphone jack failed. 2 months later and several separate USB PHY ports had failed requiring a USB hub on the remaining functional port. by 6 months, HDMI became intermittent. 7 months the Webcam microphone and video had failed enumeration. Just shy of a year the WIFI, and especially bluetooth became intermittent.
I sought out a business laptop capable of video editing. I got a dumpster fire, and worse it didn't function at all under Linux so I didn't even try; the failures were W10 the entire way.
Anyways, nowadays you just have to build your own cyberdeck using distributed computing principles. The old macs used several chips in parallel, why not RISC?
I know some people have already done it, and the performance they are getting isn't half bad and the work I've seen seems light years beyond where security is today providing peace of mind that people once had with regards to firmware malware/bad state (you could always reset to a known working safe state where it wasn't accessible to the internet).
Imagine the peripherals, basic display, attachments, boot all controlled by an elevated privileged FPGA that you dock to which oversees the other equipment that does the performant work which is offloaded to a distributed backbone.
Most off-the-shelf mainboard chip combos today run ~$500 minimum, for a ton of features that aren't needed, or wanted, and just slapped together. Even a basic case runs at least $100 now with fans that fail. within a month.