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I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most. I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I
by xtracto 7mo ago
I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.
I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).
So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).
Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.
Now, if only Asahi was more complete.
- Matl 7mo agoWhat about something like [1]. 1 - https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/ https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/
- SaltyBackendGuy 7mo agoI might be a dinosaur but I just can't stand laptops that have touch screen...
- achenet 7mo agoI accidentally got a pair of ThinkPads that happened to have touch screens, and I absolutely love the touch screen, often it's easier than the touchpad or keyboard nub.
- itsfine2 7mo agoYou might want to actually click the links and spent a couple of minutes before typing comments. This is not a laptop with a touch screen - it's a tablet with a kickstand and detachable keyboard.
- evilduck 7mo agoThat's just a broken, compromised Windows laptop. A true "master of nothing" device. Windows is a miserable tablet OS and a tablet that uses a kickstand makes it a pain to use in desktop mode.
- Matl 7mo agoWindows is a miserable OS, period. But these devices are rather well supported by Linux.
- carefree-bob 7mo agoI, too, am a dinosaur, but touchscreens on removable screens/tablets are the way to go! My friend, just imagine: Slide screen out of laptop, it's a standalone tablet. Connect some wires to it and you have an oscilloscope. Do some diag. Connect USB buses to it, and read some codes. Carry it around in your garage and take photos of your stuff, the images get recognized by AI and you've updated your garage inventory, it's uploaded to your Homebox running on a mac mini in a shelf somewhere. It has a built in cellular and you can be out in a park taking a picture of a baby owl, mark it with GPS, upload. When you are done roaming the world loading in data and snapping pics, sit back down, connect the tablet to a keyboard, or even a thunderbird cable for your external display and peripherals, and write up some code or a report. Then in the evening, go play some games, all on the same computer. It's awesome!
- Matl 7mo agoTouchscreens can be disabled in software.
- mrheosuper 7mo agoMaybe don't touch the screen eh ?
- jemmyw 7mo agoOne thing Apple seems to do very well compared to other vendors is make all their hardware available in all markets on release. Companies like Dell, Asus, Lenovo, they have a confusingly large array of models, and they never release the best ones worldwide, or it takes so long to get to New Zealand that I already gave up and bought an Apple computer instead.
- delusional 7mo agoWhat are your use-cases for 128gb of RAM? I find it hard to imagine what you could be doing with that, so it must be interesting :)
- macNchz 7mo agoI'm not the person you're replying to, but I do have a 64GB machine that I'd been planning to bump up to 128 right around the time the prices went through the roof. My uses are: - VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents. - Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory. - Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.
- matwood 7mo agoYeah, I have a 64GB M1 Max and can run local models pretty well. I bought it on release and even now it never feels slow. I may upgrade just because I want to move to the 14” since I travel more now.
- 0x457 7mo agoRunning FatLTO on Chrome.
- grogenaut 7mo agoUnreal + blender + ide. Fusion + blender + slicers. Virt machines / docker + dev env iOS Android web development 16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap. My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.
- therouwboat 7mo ago
- nailer 7mo ago> ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop Damn. I was at IBM in the early 2000s and for many decades you used to be able to beat people to death with IBM hardware, including Thinkpad laptops and model M keyboards.
- entropicdrifter 7mo agoThinkpad build quality depends heavily on the model. The flagship T-series are still tough as nails, generally speaking
- reactordev 7mo agoThey built a reputation on that and silently replaced the plastic with crap abs. Thinkpads have been garbage since 2012. Not specs wise but build quality wise. Spec wise it’s always been a beefy machine.
- Eric_WVGG 7mo agoI have so many questions. - Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware? - Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds? - Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?
- mkreis 7mo agoShh... we don't talk about those dark ages any more. Times were different.
- soneil 7mo ago> Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead? I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.
- dragonwriter 7mo agoThe hard part of beating someone to death with a z16 is lifting and swinging a z16; if you can manage that, though...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pie_flavor 7mo agoI am a longtime Windows user and it brings me absolutely no joy to report that the M4 I am forced to use for work runs the Rust compiler a good bit faster than the big fancy gaming PC I just got with a 9800X3D.
- rstat1 7mo agoI'd wager that's more likely due to Windows than the hardware. Like sure the hardware does play a part in that but its not the whole story or even most of it. My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.
- m_mueller 7mo agoAfaik a lot of it is ntfs. It’s just so slow with lots of small files. Compare unzipping moderately large source repos on windows vs. POSIX, it’s day and night.
- p_ing 7mo agoNo, it’s not NTFS, it’s the file system filter architecture of the NT kernel.
- mattbee 7mo agoI had internalised that it was Windows Defender hooking every file operation and checking it against a blacklist? I've had it forced off for years.
- p_ing 7mo agoWindows Defender is a file system filter which you cannot disable. You may have others (but they're fortunately rare, now). All that said, you cannot disable the architecture, i.e. bypass the file system filter code.
- luke5441 7mo agoThis is how opinions differ. IMO plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible, MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot). The metal is more "luxury", though.
- swiftcoder 7mo ago> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon
- luke5441 7mo agoI have an Air. Maybe active cooling prevents it from getting too hot. With the Air, the metal body is kind of the heatsink. I can configure my Snapdragon plastic laptop such that the fan doesn't turn on, so the body being metal isn't a requirement for not turning on the fan...
- p_ing 7mo agoIf the body was a heatsink, it would be extremely hot to the touch. https://hothardware.com/news/make-your-m1-macbook-air-perform-like-macbook-pro https://hothardware.com/news/make-your-m1-macbook-air-perfor...
- nandomrumber 7mo agoFrom your link: Essentially the bottom cover of the MacBook Air becomes one large heatsink Anyway, the author claims: you are the type that likes to work with the MacBook Air on your lap it will be quite a bit more toasty than before. Does toasty mean extremely hot? The Apple M4 CPU is, if I recall correctly, capable of converting 20 watts of electrical energy in to heat, at full throttle. Is that likely to bring the back plate or a MBA above 45 degrees? You’re probably right, with sustained workloads it could. Everything’s a trade off.
- hypercube33 7mo agoASUS ROG G14 is as close as you're going to get on the x86 side of things or that new chonk of a surface with the Ryzen 395+ and 128gb of ram. both are like $2500+
- mrbuttons454 7mo agoI have the chonk. 10/10 would chonk again. I miss the 12" MacBook form factor for an email/web/dumb terminal machine, though. Would love something like that with great Linux support. Bonus points for cellular.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- vrganj 7mo agoThe HP Zbook G1A is what you wanted. It's Strix Halo with up to 128GB of unified RAM and built like a MBP.
- w0m 7mo ago> (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop). Which thinkpad? Typing on a loaded P16s currently; it's not metal like old MBP or even my travel surface pro, but it feels... fine.
- michaelt 7mo ago> I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most. One thing to bear in mind is bezels are a lot thinner than they were a few years ago. ~7 years ago, my daily driver was a Latitude E7270 - a 12.5 inch ultrabook with dimensions of 215.15 mm x 310.5 mm x 18.30 mm, 1.24 kg, 14.8 inch body diagonal Today, an XPS 14 has dimensions 209.71 mm x 309.52 mm x 15.20mm, 1.36 kg, 14.7 body diagonal - and a 14-inch screen. The 12.5 inch segment hasn't disappeared - it's just turned into the 14-inch segment.
- necovek 7mo agoMy Sony Vaio Z from 2009 or 2010 looks at your Dell in contempt: 13.1" FullHD screen at 314mm x 210mm (we'll pretend the thickness does not matter ;)) and 1.36kg. Vaio TT was even smaller footprint. But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.
- joshvm 7mo agoThe same is also true within the Macbook line. The 14" Pro is smaller and nearly 2lbs lighter than the first 13" unibodies. I have my 2009 college laptop on a shelf as a memento and it feels pretty chunky. This hasn't changed much in the M-series though, and the M5 is slightly heavier than the M1. Something I miss from the Windows side is sub-kg machines, at least since Apple discontinued the 12" Macbook. It makes a surprisingly big difference when traveling, especially with Asian carriers that have hard carry-on limits. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a fantastic form factor, though the older Intel chips run incredibly hot. I repurposed that as a garage/workshop Linux machine. Unfortunately, the price differences between Mac/Windows also disappear when you start looking at those higher-end machines.
- necovek 7mo agoYou do have 13" options, though 14" is much wider. If I was going for 13" workstation, I'd go for Asus ProArt PX13 with Ryzen AI Max 395 (if I got that right, there might be a plus somewhere) and 128GiB of RAM. They've got ROG Flow X13 with older hardware or Z13 with same hw as above, but that's a tablet computer instead. At 14", thin-and-light gaming computers like Asus G14 or Razer Blade 14 look decent, or some of the workstation models from Lenovo or HP. Still, for me, at 13/14", portability and battery are most important, so I am going with Thinkpad X1 Carbon atm (next gen should again allow 64GiB of RAM).
- Liftyee 7mo agoWhich Thinkpad do you have? Lenovo have introduced some lines with the name but diminished quality.
- nechuchelo 7mo agoFor a someone looking to switch from a M-series MacBook to a Thinkpad, which one would you recommend? Preferably not of a diminished quality, so I can daily-drive Ubuntu without missing Apple.
- leeman2016 7mo agoP1 comes to mind
- ekianjo 7mo agoDid you check what Framework offers?
- dm319 7mo ago> decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop). Thinkpads don't show off their build materials like Apple does. I've had several over the years, variously made of magnesium alloy and carbon fibre. Screen bending is not a great metric of 'decent build'. My Thinkpads have suffered people stepping on them, being dropped etc, and I think the lid flexibility is partly why it has survived all this time - they often use carbon fibre on the back of the screen.
- mrheosuper 7mo ago>I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials Maybe ROG Flow 13 ? It's more like hybrid laptop, and geared toward "gaming"(because it's usually the gamer market that demand high performance), but nothing prevents you to use it as business machine. It's also top of the line asus laptop, so i expect decent build quality.