Realistically with the new apple M-series stuff this is just not the case. The battery life is absolutely nuts. Especially compared to high end Linux laptops.
The new Snapdragon laptops are getting 15h+ of battery life, which is a couple of hours less than the new Macs (macs have bigger batteries) in the same benchmarks. The next gen Ryzen AI 300 Omnibook is said to have 20h+… but why do people want so much out of their battery? I’ve only used laptops for work and I can’t remember being more than a couple of hours at a time outside a dock.
What terminals don’t have power outlets easily available? I think even many planes do, although I haven’t paid attention to that because I’ve never needed it.
I’ve been in plenty of terminals w/o power outlets, or where the outlets are all taken. People seem to flock to them like crazy, and not having to deal with that is nice.
Do any of the Snapdragon laptops not suck? I haven’t used any of them, but I’m looking for:
high quality keyboard - I love my ThinkPad E495’s keyboard (which is a bit worse than my old T440), but everything seems to use really short travel keys these days (and my 2019 Macbook Pro for work absolutely sucks in the keyboard dept)
physical mouse buttons - I love my ThinkPad’s TrackPoint + middle mouse combo, it’s great for scrolling through documents
comfortable keyboard layout - I like the position of page up/down, home, end, etc on my ThinkPad, but most laptops suck with key placement
I’m excited to get a new Macbook Pro next year (our company has a 4-year replacement cycle), mostly for better CPU performance (my coworker’s M1 runs our tests in 1/4 the time vs my Intel Macbook Pro) and battery life (mine frequently dies in meetings), but there’s no way I’m buying one for myself. So I’m looking for an alternative.
I’d really like a Framework, but it doesn’t have physical mouse buttons (very strong preference) or a TrackPoint (I can budge here), and the keyboard layout looks kind of crappy. The best so far seems to be the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, but I’m really trying to get away from ThinkPad due to their horrendous Motorola bootloader unlock policy (i.e. you agree to never resell your device, and your warranty is void), and if that’s the direction their company is going, I would prefer to avoid them, and it’s kind of expensive (starts at $1275). The rest that I’ve seen seem to have crappy keyboards and no mouse buttons.
I wouldn’t pay the premium to be a beta tester for Qualcomm for the new Snapdragons. They’ll be cheaper, have better drivers and more laptops to choose from in a couple of years.
Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for. I can probably wait a year or two before needing a replacement, and it would be extra cool if Framework releases one with ARM.
the battery life of machines with hot swapable batteries is arguably better considering you can hot swap them forever. And with more modern hardware, they’re a lot more power efficient so you could get a ton of work done on a handful of batts
well i mean aside from the part where the intel laptops were engineered like shit and didn’t work because they couldn’t cool themselves, yeah. And the part where they tried to make the butterfly keyboard, and the part where the accidentally made the display cable too short, and still haven’t put out a repair tab for that one yet.
And the part where they accidentally put the gnd next to 51v causing it to immediately short and kill the entire device if even so much as a little bit of water showed up. The part where they only put USB C on their laptops and never put USB C on their phones, even though the whole point of using USB C was that it’s “one cable”
or the part where the release the ipad pro as a laptop replacement and it’s still not a laptop replacement because they refuse to make the OS anything more usable than a tablet, or the part where the new macbooks are shipped with 8GB of ram at all, for some reason. I don’t what the point of that is. Just ship with 16 minimum.
And the part where the also fucked up hardware crypto so bad they had to disable it permanently killing their crypto speeds, but hey, they’re new to the game, they havent been making their own hardware since… Oh about 2010. Or like that one iphone 6 release they did, where it was a little bendy.
but yeah no it seems like they finally figured out how to make a laptop. I can certainly give them that.
Yeah, it sucks. To be fair, I hated their keyboards before and after the butterfly keyboard nonsense, I much prefer the deeper keyboard travel of my Thinkpad.
accidentally made the display cable too short
Eh, I think that’s overblown. I have a 2019 Intel Mac for work, and nobody in my office has had that problem, and we’ve all had our laptops for 3-4 years. Our company replacement cycle is 4 years, and it’s looking like I’m not going to have that problem at all.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m just saying that I haven’t experienced it in our work setting. I certainly wouldn’t buy one for my personal computer because I expect more than 4 years of life from it (I’m typing this on my E495 from 5 years ago, and I plan to keep it for a couple more years).
USB C on their phones
What does that have to do with their laptops? Same with the iPad.
My coworkers have M-series laptops for work, and they’re way nicer than my Intel mac in terms of performance (>4x faster running our test suite and building Docker containers), battery life, and other features (they have the magnetic power port again). I’d never buy one because it doesn’t run Linux properly and I hate the Apple ecosystem, but the M-series chips are quite nice.
Yeah, it sucks. To be fair, I hated their keyboards before and after the butterfly keyboard nonsense, I much prefer the deeper keyboard travel of my Thinkpad.
yeah, the thinkpad keyboards are some of the best in the industry.
Eh, I think that’s overblown. I have a 2019 Intel Mac for work, and nobody in my office has had that problem, and we’ve all had our laptops for 3-4 years. Our company replacement cycle is 4 years, and it’s looking like I’m not going to have that problem at all.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m just saying that I haven’t experienced it in our work setting. I certainly wouldn’t buy one for my personal computer because I expect more than 4 years of life from it (I’m typing this on my E495 from 5 years ago, and I plan to keep it for a couple more years).
apple themselves even made the cable longer in future revisions. They just never updated it in the older released models. Which they really should’ve done.
What does that have to do with their laptops? Same with the iPad.
apples entire gimmick is the “ecosystem” and they spent MANY years trying to make the ecosystem blatantly worse for no reason other than “why change lightning” even though the dongle life had already been started by that point, why not just go full into USB C at that point and make the ecosystem complete? Apple fans are even questioning this decision.
My coworkers have M-series laptops for work, and they’re way nicer than my Intel mac in terms of performance (>4x faster running our test suite and building Docker containers), battery life, and other features (they have the magnetic power port again). I’d never buy one because it doesn’t run Linux properly and I hate the Apple ecosystem, but the M-series chips are quite nice.
i’d say the primary reason this is true is that apple does selective engineering, going from the last intel mac to the first m series mac this is super apparent, it had a real chassis that was properly thick, and a real selection of IO ports, i believe this has waned with the newer models, which is stupid IMO. But they did make a good laptop that one time at least. It’s not even like apple was super restricted by cooling in their intel macs they literally just didn’t try. In one of their recent air models they dont even have an active heatsink cooling the CPU. It’s a passive heatsink that gets passive airflow from a fan somewhere else in the machine.
The chips are nice, but only in the selective vision that they function under. If they were open and more modular, i would be a lot more supportive of it, but apple being apple ruins just about everything they touch unfortunately.
Absolutely agreed. I’ve seen plenty of videos by Louis Rossmann about it, so I absolutely know it’s an issue. However, he made the claim that it still isn’t fixed in later models, so I’m going on the assumption that mine is affected, I just haven’t triggered it (probably because we don’t open and close the laptop lid very often).
“ecosystem”
I thought the “ecosystem” was the software suite, not hardware. So things like iMessage and iCloud working seamlessly between devices.
Apple fans are even questioning this decision.
Honestly, being a “fan” of any company is stupid. I can’t really think of a single company that I’d protect bad decisions from, except maybe Valve because they have such a long track-record of not sucking, and they’re pretty much the only company that directly makes my life better on my Linux systems.
Absolutely agreed. I’ve seen plenty of videos by Louis Rossmann about it, so I absolutely know it’s an issue. However, he made the claim that it still isn’t fixed in later models, so I’m going on the assumption that mine is affected, I just haven’t triggered it (probably because we don’t open and close the laptop lid very often).
yeah, the specific mode of failure would be repeated opening and closing, and especially opening all the way. It’s still really scummy that they never did an official repair recall for it, or at least a free repair service for that specific issue, since it cant be super common.
I thought the “ecosystem” was the software suite, not hardware. So things like iMessage and iCloud working seamlessly between devices.
yeah, and apple moved to use entirely USB C on their macbooks for a similar reason, i don’t see why that shouldnt be an ecosystem problem considering the one place where it’s not USB C is the phone, which is also in the ecosystem. It’s one cable, except for the legacy lightning connector that your phone in the equivalent ecosystem also has to use. Which means you have to carry at least two cables, maybe three, because your iphones charging cable is probably USB A not C. Though they recently moved most of their charging over to USB C so that’s alleviated at least/
Honestly, being a “fan” of any company is stupid. I can’t really think of a single company that I’d protect bad decisions from, except maybe Valve because they have such a long track-record of not sucking, and they’re pretty much the only company that directly makes my life better on my Linux systems.
yeah, i certainly wouldn’t either. I bought intel 12th gen after buying AMD for my workstation (cheap and high IPC/clock chip) though i’m not buying intel 13th or 14th gen lmao.
As for valve, im not really sure they’ve ever had a bad decision, more like bad maintenance of something like TF2. Outside of that maybe, but they’re very receptive to the market on account of gaben being the way he is.
My understanding is that they committed to 10 years of support for the lightning connector, which was released before USB-C became a thing. I can’t find a source for that, but it lines up pretty well with the timing of things (introduced in 2012, replaced around 2023), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a deal like that.
Realistically with the new apple M-series stuff this is just not the case. The battery life is absolutely nuts. Especially compared to high end Linux laptops.
Source: forced to use apple for work
The new Snapdragon laptops are getting 15h+ of battery life, which is a couple of hours less than the new Macs (macs have bigger batteries) in the same benchmarks. The next gen Ryzen AI 300 Omnibook is said to have 20h+… but why do people want so much out of their battery? I’ve only used laptops for work and I can’t remember being more than a couple of hours at a time outside a dock.
Ultra long haul flight, plus time spent at the terminal?
What terminals don’t have power outlets easily available? I think even many planes do, although I haven’t paid attention to that because I’ve never needed it.
You’re probably right, that’s just the only use case for twenty hours of battery life I could think of.
I’ve been in plenty of terminals w/o power outlets, or where the outlets are all taken. People seem to flock to them like crazy, and not having to deal with that is nice.
Do any of the Snapdragon laptops not suck? I haven’t used any of them, but I’m looking for:
I’m excited to get a new Macbook Pro next year (our company has a 4-year replacement cycle), mostly for better CPU performance (my coworker’s M1 runs our tests in 1/4 the time vs my Intel Macbook Pro) and battery life (mine frequently dies in meetings), but there’s no way I’m buying one for myself. So I’m looking for an alternative.
I’d really like a Framework, but it doesn’t have physical mouse buttons (very strong preference) or a TrackPoint (I can budge here), and the keyboard layout looks kind of crappy. The best so far seems to be the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, but I’m really trying to get away from ThinkPad due to their horrendous Motorola bootloader unlock policy (i.e. you agree to never resell your device, and your warranty is void), and if that’s the direction their company is going, I would prefer to avoid them, and it’s kind of expensive (starts at $1275). The rest that I’ve seen seem to have crappy keyboards and no mouse buttons.
I wouldn’t pay the premium to be a beta tester for Qualcomm for the new Snapdragons. They’ll be cheaper, have better drivers and more laptops to choose from in a couple of years.
Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for. I can probably wait a year or two before needing a replacement, and it would be extra cool if Framework releases one with ARM.
the battery life of machines with hot swapable batteries is arguably better considering you can hot swap them forever. And with more modern hardware, they’re a lot more power efficient so you could get a ton of work done on a handful of batts
source: i understand how hardware works.
Yeah, but you have to carry batteries around.
I’m not a fan of Apple either, but you have to admit they’ve got the ultra portable laptop figured out.
well i mean aside from the part where the intel laptops were engineered like shit and didn’t work because they couldn’t cool themselves, yeah. And the part where they tried to make the butterfly keyboard, and the part where the accidentally made the display cable too short, and still haven’t put out a repair tab for that one yet.
And the part where they accidentally put the gnd next to 51v causing it to immediately short and kill the entire device if even so much as a little bit of water showed up. The part where they only put USB C on their laptops and never put USB C on their phones, even though the whole point of using USB C was that it’s “one cable”
or the part where the release the ipad pro as a laptop replacement and it’s still not a laptop replacement because they refuse to make the OS anything more usable than a tablet, or the part where the new macbooks are shipped with 8GB of ram at all, for some reason. I don’t what the point of that is. Just ship with 16 minimum.
And the part where the also fucked up hardware crypto so bad they had to disable it permanently killing their crypto speeds, but hey, they’re new to the game, they havent been making their own hardware since… Oh about 2010. Or like that one iphone 6 release they did, where it was a little bendy.
but yeah no it seems like they finally figured out how to make a laptop. I can certainly give them that.
Yeah, it sucks. To be fair, I hated their keyboards before and after the butterfly keyboard nonsense, I much prefer the deeper keyboard travel of my Thinkpad.
Eh, I think that’s overblown. I have a 2019 Intel Mac for work, and nobody in my office has had that problem, and we’ve all had our laptops for 3-4 years. Our company replacement cycle is 4 years, and it’s looking like I’m not going to have that problem at all.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m just saying that I haven’t experienced it in our work setting. I certainly wouldn’t buy one for my personal computer because I expect more than 4 years of life from it (I’m typing this on my E495 from 5 years ago, and I plan to keep it for a couple more years).
What does that have to do with their laptops? Same with the iPad.
My coworkers have M-series laptops for work, and they’re way nicer than my Intel mac in terms of performance (>4x faster running our test suite and building Docker containers), battery life, and other features (they have the magnetic power port again). I’d never buy one because it doesn’t run Linux properly and I hate the Apple ecosystem, but the M-series chips are quite nice.
yeah, the thinkpad keyboards are some of the best in the industry.
apple themselves even made the cable longer in future revisions. They just never updated it in the older released models. Which they really should’ve done.
apples entire gimmick is the “ecosystem” and they spent MANY years trying to make the ecosystem blatantly worse for no reason other than “why change lightning” even though the dongle life had already been started by that point, why not just go full into USB C at that point and make the ecosystem complete? Apple fans are even questioning this decision.
i’d say the primary reason this is true is that apple does selective engineering, going from the last intel mac to the first m series mac this is super apparent, it had a real chassis that was properly thick, and a real selection of IO ports, i believe this has waned with the newer models, which is stupid IMO. But they did make a good laptop that one time at least. It’s not even like apple was super restricted by cooling in their intel macs they literally just didn’t try. In one of their recent air models they dont even have an active heatsink cooling the CPU. It’s a passive heatsink that gets passive airflow from a fan somewhere else in the machine.
The chips are nice, but only in the selective vision that they function under. If they were open and more modular, i would be a lot more supportive of it, but apple being apple ruins just about everything they touch unfortunately.
Absolutely agreed. I’ve seen plenty of videos by Louis Rossmann about it, so I absolutely know it’s an issue. However, he made the claim that it still isn’t fixed in later models, so I’m going on the assumption that mine is affected, I just haven’t triggered it (probably because we don’t open and close the laptop lid very often).
I thought the “ecosystem” was the software suite, not hardware. So things like iMessage and iCloud working seamlessly between devices.
Honestly, being a “fan” of any company is stupid. I can’t really think of a single company that I’d protect bad decisions from, except maybe Valve because they have such a long track-record of not sucking, and they’re pretty much the only company that directly makes my life better on my Linux systems.
yeah, the specific mode of failure would be repeated opening and closing, and especially opening all the way. It’s still really scummy that they never did an official repair recall for it, or at least a free repair service for that specific issue, since it cant be super common.
yeah, and apple moved to use entirely USB C on their macbooks for a similar reason, i don’t see why that shouldnt be an ecosystem problem considering the one place where it’s not USB C is the phone, which is also in the ecosystem. It’s one cable, except for the legacy lightning connector that your phone in the equivalent ecosystem also has to use. Which means you have to carry at least two cables, maybe three, because your iphones charging cable is probably USB A not C. Though they recently moved most of their charging over to USB C so that’s alleviated at least/
yeah, i certainly wouldn’t either. I bought intel 12th gen after buying AMD for my workstation (cheap and high IPC/clock chip) though i’m not buying intel 13th or 14th gen lmao.
As for valve, im not really sure they’ve ever had a bad decision, more like bad maintenance of something like TF2. Outside of that maybe, but they’re very receptive to the market on account of gaben being the way he is.
My understanding is that they committed to 10 years of support for the lightning connector, which was released before USB-C became a thing. I can’t find a source for that, but it lines up pretty well with the timing of things (introduced in 2012, replaced around 2023), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a deal like that.
It’s insane. I really want one for that reason, but ThinkPad with a ugreen 145 Watt battery bank gives me 16 hours of use. That’s all waking hours.
It’s hard to justify spending 3x as much on a single laptop just for that kind of battery life.
It’s pretty easy to justify when work is footing the bill.