I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway

I agree with him. My personal laptop is an m1 MacBook Pro, and 5 years on it’s still a better experience than my work laptop which is a high spec dell with an i9 and 32GB ram. I’m more likely to chuck the dell than upgrade it because whatever combination of stuff it’s doing just doesn’t work.

Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.

In the past I’ve replaced spinning rust with SSDs and that’s given that machine a lease of life but those kinds of upgrades don’t really exist anymore - adding an extra 8GB ram isn’t going to turn my stupid dell machine into something that works.

The assumption here is that the MacBook is better because of soldering components rather than because Apple simply made a better chip and has a better OS than Windows.

Is there a reason to believe that if Apple didn’t solder memory on, it would make the performance/battery worse, as opposed to making the device slightly heavier/bigger?

Apple Silicon is a slightly customized ARM processor soldered onto a main board. That's not the reason for it's better performance.

Microsofts support for these is still kinda bad ime, which is easily the biggest impact on their battery longevity.

Furthermore, Most super intrusive and performance hindering spyware aka antivirus is only deployed on windows, hence it gets double-punched by having subpar processor support and wastage in the processes running in corporate environments. The latter being the biggest performance impact.

These are however all software, not hardware bound issues

There's no reason such a laptop can't be repairable. Sure, it may be harder to do, but that's the tradeoff you choose when buying such a device.

The main obstacles to repairability in such devices are intentional: part serialization, lack of documentation, and so on. Those don't help making the device any more compact or easier to manufacture, it's pure greed.

Address those problems and you can happily have your ultra-slim, tightly integrated laptop. It may be slightly less repairable, but as long as repair isn't intentionally being prevented, life will find a way.

There is such a reason: it isn't modular enough for the economics to favor repair over replacement, what with the economies of scale and that.

Restricting access to documentation, part serialization, or restricting OEMs from selling components directly has nothing to do with laptop form factor though.

Whether repair of such devices is economically viable is one thing and that's up to the market to decide, but making repair intentionally harder is a choice of the manufacturer and has nothing to do with how slim the laptop is.

The reason is simple: corporate control. It's not a good reason.

If only you could take a big old stick and beat the "control freak" tendencies out of all the major corporations out there.

Sorry I wasn't clear, my point is: that reason is completely separate from a laptop's form factor or method of construction.

You can have a somewhat repairable laptop even if it's slim and tightly integrated, and you can also have a completely unrepairable one even if all components are modular and accessible but then use strong cryptography to authenticate to each other.

Form factor is not the primary reason current tech is hard/impossible to repair, though the industry loves that people believe so, since it diverts attention from their intentional efforts to hinder repair.

It's a major reason. Back when TVs were made of tubes, you could expect any tech-savvy guy to be able to learn how to go in there and swap the tubes out.

Nowadays? A techpriest that can take apart Apple's iPhone stacked PCB assemblies, replace large BGA components in there, and then put them back together and have it work is a rare specimen. And "rare" means "expensive".

A hour of labor of someone who does neurosurgery on electronics isn't going to be cheap.

Not that Apple has any good reasons to make it even harder on the madmen who attempt and learn such repairs.

why are Apple (Foxconn) assembly workers paid so little?

Heck most people won’t be upgrading every few years, the m1 Macs are still plenty good today, it sounds like this guy just wants a MacBook Pro that runs highly tuned Unix based OS that is not macOS

> I don’t care one bit about upgradability or customizability. After a year or two, I’m happy to throw it out and buy a new one. It’s not like upgradability is a bad thing, but it usually comes with tradeoffs to weight and power draw, and I’d rather it all be in one solid package glued together. And I don’t like customizability because I like when all the testing and polish work is put into one configuration.

Jesus christ. What a wasteful and selfish way to look at things.

To defend OP somewhat: his throw out should be someone else’s pre-owned and then we are square.

Not in defense: This is a customer who sees itself as an ultra pro user that only wants the best on all dimensions regardless of economics. Nice that there are about a few hundred of these customers in the world. This is a market that doesn’t exist and frankly, give this customer their wish and they only have other or more wishes.

not only does OP imagine a powerful customer base, theyre all aligned enough that one configuration fits all. im doubtful

I think the selfishness here is related to being fine with generating a pile of electronic waste that becomes a problem for everyone else, as long as he can avoid carrying a few ounces extra.

It's hard to recycle electronics, because separating materials that are chemically bonded together is very labor intensive and isn't worth it from the price of aluminum, copper, lithium, etc alone.

It would have to cost more to dispose of a laptop for this to work out financially.

Seeing the latest Valve Steam Machine made me disappointed. No replaceable GPU, soldered memory, no socketed CPU. I really hope Valve isn't going to lead the way for unrepairable gaming PCs.

I think valve want other companies to make the hardware in the long term. They are just trying to prove / jump start demand

> Consumer electronics naming is very simple. Make a good product with a simple name. “iPhone”, “comma”, “Z Fold”. Then every year or two, add one to the number of that product. If it’s a small refresh, you can add a letter after the number. “2 3 3X 4” “4 4s 5 5s 6 …” “2 3 4 5 6 7” Why is this so hard for companies like HP?

Oh man I feel this every time there’s a games console launch. I still have no idea what the latest Xbox is called but Sony gets it right with “Playstation <N>”

Apple loses some points here since every macbook from like 2007 until 2020 was just called “Macbook pro” with no year officially in the name so you have to be really careful when eg looking at used listings for macbooks. But since the M1 it’s been good with M<1-5>

This reminds me of the parody from 20 years ago of what would happen if Microsoft would re-design the iPod packaging - including the name of the product. It seems that nothing has changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

What to expect, when Microsoft decides to do stupid things like renaming .NET Core into .NET 5, thus everyone that doesn't pay attention to Microsoft world keeps thinking .NET is Windows only, as the .NET Framework was always known as plain .NET in most circles.

On the flipside, there were the days of the Power Macintosh 6100, 7500, 8500, 9600, and other models. It’s very easy to look up different models using these names, and there was also logic to the naming scheme, but it was confusing for people new to Macs to figure out, and this was back in the 1990s when there were still large amounts of people in the developed world who never owned a personal computer.

Once Steve Jobs returned, he replaced the product numbering scheme with a quadrant: consumer desktop (iMac), consumer laptop (iBook), high-end desktop (Power Mac), and high-end laptop (PowerBook). The high-end models had a suffix (G3, G4, G5), but it got confusing with all the variants (e.g., Wallsteeet vs Lombard vs Pismo PowerBook G3, various revisions of Titanium and Aluminum PowerBook G4, etc.)

You know as a company that you have gone out of the ability to create something if you come up first with name changes of existing products. Looking at you, Office (or whatever your name is today).

Google Workspace hasn’t changed its name in a few years now. Do you think it’s due for a change or has it finally sobered up?

We could have had Xbox 720, 1080... but no. xbox 1 x one one x triple X amsterdam edition.

And there are two Xbox Ones

Xbox One Kinect, Xbox One non-Kinect, Xbox One S with disc drive, Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, Xbox One X

And then you have the various drive options, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, game bundles, day one edition. We are talking about dozens of variants.

I'm holding out a little bit of hope that Valve puts out a laptop - the Steam Deck has notably good power management for a linux device of its class (and I've even heard of people using them as laptop replacements), though the idle power is still higher than a Macbook. They're going to have made a desktop, gaming handheld, and VR device; why not one more?

What would be the reason for their laptop to exist? People on the move get the steamdeck. Others get the GabeCube. Based on the steam hardware stats / graphics cards, there's very little laptop usage. I'm not sure there's enough market to get them interested.

Maybe they will spend more than five cents and get a decent hinge? I would love to support Valve if the build quality is good and the price is decent.

All I want is a thinner Thinkpad X220 but with upped specs and newer ports. Framework-style upgradable motherboard would be nice but optional. The X220 already has a perfect keyboard, a mousing system that doesn't suck (sorry, I've never been happy with a trackpad: they feel too imprecise), a beautiful form factor for a laptop (if I want a laptop, I want it to be 12-14in for easiest portability), it's practically indestructible and has an array of ports that makes me wonder how people manage with just 3 USB-C ports. Maybe this is just me though.

> "I've never been happy with a trackpad: they feel too imprecise"

Same for me, Apple included; trackpads are just a huge waste of space to me. Have to say that my hand-eye coordination is way above that of the average computer user, and my workflows involving complementary HIDs always focused on trackballs, digtizer pens, as well as gamepads/game controllers for other, non-game related stuff.

I also don't get why people still chase outdated form factors (laptops) by preference as opposed to market realities...

I don’t know what you mean by “market realities”. If the market wanted convertible laptops it would be willing to pay more for them.

For me it’s because my workflow is keyboard driven and I fine touchscreens annoying.

On the laptops I’ve had I generally disable touchscreen because I have no use for it and it gets in the way.

I want a good screen, a decent keyboard and a good trackpad. That’s it.

> "I don’t know what you mean by 'market realities'."

The reality that a certain crowd, I count myself among them, has to/or might have to choose laptops because machines in their preferred form factor either a) implement too many inacceptable but technically entirely avoidable compromises, or b) don't exist at all. That market reality. Like, when you have to settle for a laptop.

I don't understand what you mean by "outdated form factors". Are you saying that the laptop is an outdated form factor? What "market realities" are you noticing? Really interested in your viewpoint and would be grateful for some clarification.

> "Are you saying that the laptop is an outdated form factor?"

Yes, that's the gist of it. Classic laptops gave way to an acceptable interstage, the T-hinge convertible (with many great examples especially from IBM/Lenovo, HP, and Fujitsu), which was then superseded by the best of both worlds: the detachable. The latter chassis design, taken to its logical conclusion, is the best form factor for a modular, ultramobile to mobile general-purpose computing platform, i. e. it can technically be implemented as anything between a UMPC (i. e. a smartphone-sized and -styled slab) to something with a footprint of maximally 14 inches (example: HP's discontinued ZBook X2 G4 mobile workstation). Anything bigger I consider an antithesis to the form factor and therefore would not buy it, but that's obviously in the eye of any beholder.

One possible unrealistic "dream" design for me is, as weird as it sounds, a cross between a Nintendo Switch/Lenovo Legion Go (complete with detachable controller options!) and an improved Panasonic Toughbook G2, reworked as a professional-grade, maintenance-friendly mobile workstation (or a scaled-down, more maintenance-friendly and otherwise improved HP ZBook X2 G4 with ECC memory).

> "What 'market realities' are you noticing?"

Well, the above mentioned design is unrealistic as it would amount to an expensive general-purpose machine that needs a long-term support infrastructure. Not many companies on the market that are in a position to deliver on that promise for at least three continental zones (say, the Americas, the Eurozone and major parts of Asia). Or willing to do so.

Furthermore, the comment was a reflection on what is available on the market for the foreseeable future. I'm eyeing such a small mobile workstation for a) 2D graphics work and b) analysis of historical and archival data. I am even willing to put up with a classic laptop if I could get an ECC-equipped model. But none of these machines are mobile, they're all 16-inch+ brutes. No thanks.

So I have to look for other machines. ECC-machine? Fuck, most likely some mini-PC in addition to something mobile without ECC memory. Keeping that in mind, what are the options that come closest to the above ideal? Essentially only overspecialized, maintenance-averse gaming machines with pathetic battery life and a support quality somewhere between questionable and utterly inacceptable (Lenovo consumer division, OneXPlayer, Asus).

A Panasonic Toughbook G2 10-incher could be an acceptable alternative, but I'm not gonna fork over Panasonic-money for a non-ECC ruggedized machine without a DCI-P3 screen and a digitizer that's even worse than an Apple Pencil (I think they use either Microsoft's Pen Protocol or Wacom's AES tech).

Everything else is locked-down garbage with some sort of Fisher-Price OS, e. g. everything Apple, Samsung's Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro, etc.

Also don't like trackpads. I even use a ThinkPad keyboard on my desktop. The little rubber nub between G and H is just the ideal control for the pointer. And real buttons for clicking.

> I've never been happy with a trackpad: they feel too imprecise

Everything non-Apple is. Apple's trackpad are great and have been for decades. I’ve done professional image editing on the go even with the tiny by today’s standards PowerBook G4s trackpads.

The real tragedy of our industry is that Apple got the basics right a few decades ago but seems determined to make their OS worse for pro user with every release. Yet no one else seems competent or willing to take on the challenge.

I see this comment about how awesome Apple Trackpads are all the time here, and just assumed I was missing out because I'd never used a MacBook. But I got given a MacBook Pro recently for work, and I'm super underwhelmed. The trackpad on it is no better or worse than any other trackpad I've used.

Part of their magic is the integration with the operating system in the form of gestures. Their UI for discovering those used to be stellar; every gesture had a little video preview. Right now I'd describe it as just okay. Check the 'trackpad gestures' section in system settings, or this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102482

The gestures are there in KDE already https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ToucheggKDE

I find it worse, because it's far too big for me... the thinkpad T series one is acceptable.

What I'd want in a hack laptop is a full size TKL keyboard (and full height, or close), with a trackpoint (or 2 -- add one near the arrow keys).

It's not just you; I would also love a modern ThinkPad x220. I have a Framework 13 and I enjoy it, though I wish it had better battery life. The perfect laptop for me would be my Framework 13 with a classic ThinkPad keyboard.

I mostly think of when geohot wanted to make his own RISC-V core and cranked out some basic verilog. It was incomplete and barely commented, and never touched again. I suspect we are going to get a few blog posts of analysis and then he moves on to something else

I think you missed the last paragraph.

The framework model is the reasonable approach to people being finnicky about their laptop specs. You can't sustain "I want it just so" and "it needs to be a cnc-machined glued together brick, engineered to the last gramme" at the same time, without a step change in how we build hardware, but the framework comes pretty close

If linux power management got a bit better, and there was a good arm chip, it would be a great machine. Now it's just pretty good

Maybe soon; https://www.notebookcheck.net/Framework-Laptop-13-gets-ARM-p...

> If linux power management got a bit better

Honestly this is the thing that holds me back from using not a mac. My MacBook is always at the same battery level when I open it as it was when I closed it. My windows laptop regularly decides to do _something_ overnight and is dead when I try to use it, about once a week.

I could agree that Apple’s software is a big trade off but the hardware seems fine.

I don’t think much has changed since the 16” and 14” MacBook Pros came out and both had better hardware than was previously on offer.

IMHO they got the formula right with the 14” and I’m glad they’ve stuck with it.

All I could ask for is maybe faster GPU or TPU and more memory. Possibly the ability to use an eGPU again.

Otherwise it’s fine. I worry much more about macOS and what they’ve done with the UI.

I wonder why ThinkPads are not mentioned. It's not like I recommend them (I mean, I use one, but it's not like I've tried most laptops out there, so who I am to judge), but I was under the impression it's still a de-facto Linux laptop standard.

They used to be genuinely great, now they coasting on brand name and simply not being as bad as most laptops. DIY hardware upgrades are no longer possible, the keyboard is no longer a differentiator, and linux battery life is about 1/4 windows running on the same machine.

From what I remember the last time I bought a laptop, they also have a really annoying pricing model where everything is 30% overpriced but are running constant discounts

The author of the article recently had a “laptop olympics” stream where he compared his laptops. He owns an X1 carbon but doesn’t like it at all, mainly because of the CPU iirc.

Thinkpads are probably fine if that's the price point you're shopping at, but the modern ones are not good value. HP has the best mobile workstation available currently.

On his video channel he shows 4 laptops, including a ThinkPad Carbon, about which he said "it costed way too much considering what it delivered"

How’s the battery life?

The old ones had hot-swappable batteries (a second internal battery - of decent size - kept the device going while you replaced the external one). I used to keep a couple of extra 50 Wh batteries in my backpack and therefore had excellent battery life. The power efficiency wasn't great though.

I now have a Z13 Gen 1 (AMD 6850U) running Fedora and the battery life is passable. It draws 7-8W at idle from a 51 Wh battery.

So the battery life wasn't excellent.

My laptop can go on for days as well as long as I plug it in to a power bank. I just need to lug them around, defeating the purpose.

I get near infinite battery life on mine if I plug it into a wall outlet.

Cannot properly evaluate now. I never really use it without a cable for too long, and by now the battery must have slightly degraded too. Anyway, it never was Macbook-level, I guess, and it's an oldish model, so you should check actual reviews for current models that you are interested in, there always was plenty of them for ThinkPads (at least, the last time when I looked for a new laptop).

the whole pc laptop industry really is an embarrassment right now. It has been 5 years since the M1 Macbook release, and there is no real equivalent. I'm on a thinkpad x9, which might be the closest I've seen, but the cpu performance just isn't as good.

It has always been an embarrassment.

Vizio made a good laptop once and then they just existed the computer industry. They had a vision of high quality approachable laptops, desktops and pro platforms and their first gen was a good attempt, but they just didn’t follow on.

I think it was fine 20 odd years ago. I had a Thinkpad T41p in 2004 and it was a great laptop. Even my Sony Vaio Z was nice in 2008 compared to the competition (although it had serious issues with the screen flexibility causing it to fail multiple times).

Since 2012 I've had 3 Macs, a 2012 Air, a 2020 M1 (this was a massive upgrade and the nicest laptop I ever used, even compared to my relatively new work thinkpad). I just cracked the screen on my M1 so bought a discounted M4 air on black friday. I can't tell the difference other than I like having magsafe back and only miss the touch bar slightly.

Yes! I had a Vizio laptop (the thin one ala a macbook air) and it was absolutely fantastic, probably the best PC laptop I have ever had. It was lightweight, powerful, had a good screen (for the time) plus some things that few other laptops had at the time, like a TPM.

XPS 13 has snapdragon x elite and is very well built. Not sure how good Linux support is, tho. I run Linux on my Intel-based XPS 14 and it's pretty good, apart from the webcam being totally uncalibrated and looking kinda shite, but at least it works.

Maximum 32GB of RAM, which is a bad joke if you want to use it as developer system nowadays.

TL;DR: Waited for a decade for somebody to make a non-shitty notebook, went for macbook as the least bad option when the old one was falling apart.

Also the modern thinkpad keyboards are crap, and the trackpoint is unusable in the low profile style.

I switched to a macbook pro last year after having some contact with apple hardware in a customer project, from a thinkpad x230 with a x220 keyboard I've kept barely alive over the years. Now _some_ non-Apple notebooks (mostly from framework) can take sensible amount of memory, but at the time of purchase that was the only 14" notebook capable of taking a decent amount of RAM. The only other ones that could take RAM were some xeon workstation type builds - big display, shitty battery runtime, and same or more expensive than a fully specced out macbook.

Apple also seems to have put some effort into keyboards - with the current macbook pro keyboard being one of the best notebook keyboards currently out there. Not as good as the classic thinkpad keyboards, but better than anything lenovo made in over a decade. Dell never was that great, and did a massive step back in their latest model. HP is somewhat close, but still noticeable difference.

Starlabs is pretty close IMO

I bought the StarLabs tablet, and it was... Okay.

The tablet itself has been good. The firmware support is good. The charger died, and the keyboard case is on its last legs. I had to solder the pins back on to keep it working. It's an acceptable keyboard case, but the 'a' key doesn't work super well. Still a decent product, particularly for a Linux convertable, but definitely not something I would give my dad.

Have you bought one?

Ryzen AI 370 is a pretty badass mobile x86 chip. Enjoying my gpd win max 2 just fine, apple would have to make a 10" M4 to compete :)

The HP Zbook Ultra G1A is a contender, but it's also the only contender to your point.

Unfortunately it idles at ~8W, which is quite far from the ~3W of the best in class laptops.

> "the whole pc laptop industry really is an embarrassment right now. It has been 5 years since the M1 Macbook release, and there is no real equivalent."

True. I think that's mostly because they model their merchandise after Apple's products. I find Apple's hardware utterly undesirable, tho. The only product of theirs I ever showed any interest in was their Newton line of handhelds; my dream machine is quite far removed from the stuff that's mentioned in the OP's article, let alone anything that maps to Apple's portfolio (and even more importantly, product philosophy).

The industry also didn't keep up with the trackpad, which should be simpler.

Apple trackpads are so good that I prefer that over a full mouse for work

Since I switched to a macbook from a (proper) thinkpad I just carry a trackball with me when I expect to do longer stuff that requires mousing - the track pad isn't bad, but gets annoying over time. That also finalized my switch away from mice - before that I had both a mouse and a trackball on my desk, and while I still have that I can't remember when I last touched the mouse.

I actually looked for a desktop trackpad for my desktop pc that is on par with my macbook trackpad. Didn't find one available.

Apple sells an external trackpad. But AFAIK it requires the computer to have Bluetooth. Not sure how well it works with a non-apple os, though.

I agree about some criticisms of the framework. I think they could do away with the plug modules and just go all in on usb-c. I don't mind the occasional dongle for HDMI. I also would prefer a thinner screen bezel, even if that means it's not swappable either.

But having easy access to internal hardware for upgrades is pretty huge. Rather than blowing 1-2k on a new machine every few years, it's just $200-500 for more RAM and a better CPU (assuming prices go back to normal in a reasonable amount of time)

> I think they could do away with the plug modules and just go all in on usb-c. I don't mind the occasional dongle for HDMI.

Strong agree. After all, their plug modules are really just dongles that are integrated into the body, which makes them worse IMO. More expensive, model-specific, etc.

And a major consumer of space, because they have to accommodate bigger ports even if they're only doing USB-C pass-through.

Of course different strokes for different folks. My favorite laptop at this point is a terminal for my home workstation which is far more powerful than anything mobile. That means I prioritize decent graphical performance, OLED screen, long battery life, and I don't really mind too much using WSL in Windows. All my development doesn't really happen locally any more.

There's plenty of good hardware outside the Apple world. Heck, whenever I get convinced to try Apple hardware or software, its quirks and obvious glitches put me off. Input lag is the topmost issue. It immediately washes off the "quality" impression. But I understand that Apple users are used to that and don't notice such issues.

> Input lag is the topmost issue

What do you mean? I haven't daily driven a Mac in almost five years now. I mainly run Linux and occasionally Windows on regular PCs. Whenever I open a MacBook, the first thing I notice is how reactive it feels. Sure, I could do without the animations, but I think that's a different issue. This impression is all the more pronounced if I'd been using Windows just before, but that's probably because Linux is a pretty bare i3 setup.

What would you recommend?

> input lag is the topmost issue

IME this is a massive problem on windows and android and apple actually gets it right. They occasionally have stupid animations but those animations are responsive and trigger immediately. I don’t experience 3-5 second stalls (seriously the share dialog on android is a disgrace, and the windows start menu has become the least reliable part of the OS), and the input devices track to on screen movements - something I can’t say for win/android.

The naming fails at big cos is simply caused by having internal branding teams that need to justify their existence.

No, it's more like they sell to a bunch of verticals and they have checklist-orientated market segmentation where they can eke out a little extra profit selling a specific line to a specific industry because they need a specific doodad or certification.

the upgradability and interchangibility of parts in the framework ecosystem are needed to sustain a shelling point.

As for the PC ecosystem, there are no good x86 cpus with good power effciciency. Maybe geohot would like https://metacomputing.io/products/metacomputing-arm-aipc ? Framework 13 does not have his specific touchpad complaint

How much would you pay? Seriously.

There is market demand, but at what price? Hardware is a thin margin product.

Is it a few off the shelf parts placed in a custom CNCed block of aluminium or is it engineered, from the ground up, to suit purpose.

Getting an idea of what would people pay for such a product is step one.

5k?

>the trade-off I’d prefer is 0 upgradability or customizability in exchange for less weight and more polish

This mentality is ruining everything. Not just computers, but everything including cars and appliances. It's disappointing - I thought geohot was more of a hacker. If he really wants a glued together, disposable piece of crap, you can't do better than Apple, and then just tolerate the OS and maybe VM Linux.

Dell XPS used to be like this, but unfortunately Dell discontinued them :'(

One model/configuration will never work because developers are awful, picky customers.

You’ll lose 90,000 of your 100,000 with one or more little nitpicks.

Probably 50% right off the bat because you chose a keyboard with or without a numpad.

Another huge chunk because you chose the wrong screen (Retina resolution? Low resolution? Refresh rate?)

Too bad, because I want this. Or at least the version of it I have in my head :)

Apple / macbooks seem to be doing fine

that they're not doing fine software-wise

You missed my point, the original comment is stating that the market for such a device doesn't exist because developers are too finicky and customisation focussed.

As a counter example - look at macbooks which are about as un-customisable as they come, but a large portion of developers use them. Meaning the market exists even if it's currently dominated by Apple (which as you/the post points out is slipping)

Not everybody use/choose macbook though.

Having said that I do believe that many brands have way too mamy SKU and I widh they would be more opinionated on what they believe is better for their customers while maintaining clear and strong ethics (reliability should be #priority)

The reason of course being the awful software, not the hardware options. He makes that abundantly clear in the text.

Different priorities I suppose but I'd absolutely hate using that laptop. I want something designed to last, not be thrown out in a few years. IDK when it became cool to just expect everyone to have the money or care to buy a new <thneed> every few years. I guess it makes more money but since that seems to be the only thing companies with a marketing budget do people have forgotten there's an actual market for well built electronics that will at least survive 5 years

Honestly this describes a product I would want. I want the hardware of a MacBook that runs Linux and not MacOS.

This is a refreshing take in some ways. I'm beyond tired of the usual rose-tinted attitudes towards customizability and after-engineered things.

It was a bit disappointing to see the cold shower not reach the thermals situation however, despite the heavy emphasis on performant parts. Apple's offerings are phone-like, they let them saturate then throttle. The alternative is the ugly gamer laptops with their jet engines. Not sure I can wholeheartedly prefer either.

I’ve been feeling exact way for a while now. Tahoe brought it to a head. I just want a portable machine I truly own and control that doesn’t suck. Why is that so much to ask?

geohot: "I want a laptop with a high-end AMD chip, great Linux power management, good docs, solid build, and a normal name"

My brother in christ, the ThinkPad T14s Gen 5 AMD exists. Zen 5, aluminum chassis, legendary Linux support, actual power state documentation. They been doing this for 30 years. Dude, you're bikeshedding a product that's been sitting in the enterprise aisle this whole time

ThinkPads have been the Linux laptop for decades precisely because of the things he's wishing for. Public ACPI/power management docs, upstream kernel support, and AMD options with sane power profiles. He even admits the ZBook touchpad is fine but fails to acknowledge ThinkPads have had excellent trackpoints + multi-touchpads since forever.

Link to the one that's so great, especially a Macbook contender?

He has a $2000+ Thinkpad X1 and it was basically his least favorite one in his lineup from last week except for the Framework's bad display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96O0Sn1LXA

The snark doesn't seem warranted.

Edit: The laptop you're talking about is also 14" 1920x1200 or am I lost in Lenovo's awful website? A 14" Macbook is 3024x1964. The more I look, the worse it gets, especially after you hyped it like that.

Not sure what laptop you confused it with, but T14s Gen 5 is sold with Intel CPUs only.

I recently replaced my aging X1C7 with a T14s AMD and it has been quite nice!

Is his build even possible today in a laptop?

In a desktop, you would need a top of the line threadripper for that 256GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Consumer grade Zen 5 desktops reach only about 80GB/s in real world testing, with a theoretical max of slightly over 100GB/s.

AMD Strix Halo (a consumer mobile processor) has theoretical support for 256GB/s of memory bandwidth (quad-channel, 8000 MT/s LPDDR5X, must be soldered, supports 128GB at most).

Yes. OneXfly apex. Amd 395+, oled panel.

The memory is shared for the GPU, so you should probably compare with desktop GPU, so 1-2TB/s.

I think the point of him making his own laptop is that he would fix all those software problems.

> - when closing the lid and walking to the coffee shop will the battery be dead before you finish your coffee? probably

Why probably? Going to sleep on lid close is common enough, it's even the default in all OSes/DEs. If you turn off sleep-on-close and drain the battery, that's on you.

> - is the text in your "stunning oled" going to be rendered correctly in linux? probably not

> - will the wifi chip work in linux? maybe

> - will all the ports work/behave? probably not

These seem like odd things to doubt, when Framework has a perfectly working system for Linux and has been doing it for years. No hardware in their systems is unsupported in Linux.

Notably the critique of Framework in the original blog post does not offer these doubts. They are focused instead on the hardware design and tradeoffs between upgradability and uniform bodies. Those are real tradeoffs and Framework cannot solve them all without abandoning the upgradability part.

George is probably too young to remember when we thought OS X was hot shit because it was UNIX compliant. That meant a lot back then.

However over the years they dropped the ball big time. Arch may be the new hotness but BSD was the once (and hopefully future) king.

Having an iBook or a PowerBook with Mac OS X was a big deal at a time when driver support for Linux was less commonplace than it is today. Even today there are driver issues with Linux on some laptops.

Part of the reason I bought a Core Duo MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college was because Apple was the only vendor I knew where I could purchase a fully-supported Unix laptop. It could also run Microsoft Office without having to dual-boot with Windows, though ironically I ended up just using NeoOffice (a Mac fork of OpenOffice), the Apple iWork suite, and LaTeX during my college years.

The bit about HP’s naming scheme is painfully true, about many companies. Utterly dumb marketing strategies.

I feel the same way, but I wouldn't be bold enough to call it dumb. I mean, I assume they know what they are doing. This is very inconvenient for me, as a buyer, but I suppose most companies just aren't Apple, so they throw at us a lot of various stuff hoping that something sticks. And, for that matter, Apple's product line gets more diversified each year too. now it's Air, and Pro, and Max, so I wouldn't bet it won't be G1 Ultra F12b in 10 more years too.

Zbook Ultra G1a 14 makes perfect sense:

Z means workstation

Book for notebook/laptop format, not desktop

Ultra is the line, like Pro in MacBook Pro

G1 is the first generation, that way you don't have to wonder

a for AMD

14 is the screen diagonal

I get the complaint about naming but hp is different then apple. They sell a variety of configurations and one isn't neccesarily better then any other.

A good chunk of (but not all) his requirements would be fulfilled by an ASUS ROG Flow Z13

Your attention is drawn to https://system76.com/

Just from the pictures you can tell it doesn't feel like a MacBook's unibody.

tradeoffs :)

I'd love to hear people compare their system76 laptop to a Macbook, but it's really hard to find recommendations that don't just grade their non-Macbook on a curve just because it's not one.

Edit: Way too many issues on r/system76.

> Not only do they make hardware in the US

Many outside of the US would consider that a con today.

> Just run Linux in a VM on macOS. What exactly is Apple not permitting you to do?

High performance GPU for VMs, for starters. And the amount of crap that even a bare-bones macOS needs to load (and that consequently hog resources like RAM and CPU time) is a goddamn joke.

You cannot uninstall Apple Music. That alone is alienating.

IMO, the benefits of an immutable OS install outweigh being able to uninstall/remove particular apps.

do the benefits of a closed-source OS outweigh being able to do whatever you want?

That setting was removed[0].

[0] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253315335?sortBy=rank

The author wants to buy a whole new computer every year or two max, instead of upgrading components

That’s an impressive, so to speak, level of consumerism, reminds me of a self-professed minimalist that made the rounds here years ago, he practiced detachment from worldly possessions by throwing away his clothes after use and buying new ones, instead of washing them

I remember that story. I want to say it was the Soylent drink founder, but Google is steering me astray. Who was it?

Read the article.

I'm unsure if this is a joke or if you really didn't read the article

> I’m typing this blog on a HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14. Question to HP, who names this crap? Why do these companies insist on having the most confusing product lineups and names.

The reason is that they are not serious companies, this is why anything other than a real macbook and with a real macOS is not worth having spent time on.