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Postedabout 1 month ago
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But still, failing in a couple of years is really unacceptable. I was thinking 5 years for the battery and another 5 years for everything else. If you and me have to spend some $2,000 every 3-4 years it sounds more like a subscription service.
The other issue is that price point does not guarantee quality for any non-Apple boxes.
With the on-site option, they come to your home or business next day and fit any required parts.
The best experiences I've had with Dell hardware have been mid though... worse with HP, won'y buy their stuff at all any more.
I've had mixed to very good experiences with Lenovo... Even their cheaper IdeaPad options. My SO had an IdeaPad that lasted about 7 years, and she was pretty rough on it. Just replaced with another a few months ago. For what it's work, runs PopOS like a dream. On the down side are soldered ram, and shorter vnme drives that have apparently had higher failure rates, already have a replacement ready on a shelf.
My personal laptop is an M1 Air 16gb... it's been a pretty great little box, though with my vision what it is, has been very hard to actually use for much.
I think Apple is winning but not to the extent of being the only game in town.
lenovos remain good if you get a high spec thinkpad. maybe get a few year old high spec thinkpad new/refurb off ebay with a three year service contract (search "p1 gen 6" on ebay)? i think you can always re-up the service contract on new ones as well.
I'll check with Dell and Thinkpad if I can buy extended service contracts. AFAIK Dell tops out at 4 years but maybe I can extend that later. I wouldn't mind if I have to pay half of the laptop price to get a 8-10 year contract because new laptops break up way too soon - and every time it is something small but critical, like the charging port thing that many people had to get a new motherboard from Dell.
the thinkpad and dell stuff is more upgradable, but is largely aimed at business markets where they plan on refreshing every 3-4 years.
i think maybe you get the most longevity (and possible warranty) out of thinkpad, but sadly none of this stuff is really designed to last that long.
e-waste sucks. unfortunately, our current dominant system of production doesn't really reward design for longevity. refreshing technology on the regular makes for a pleasant consumer experience, i wish it were less environmentally damaging.
framework has an angle on this, but i think in practice they're somewhat equivalent to thinkpads in terms of extendability. i also wonder how much you actually save when you start replacing everything over the long run.
-display quality
-sharp edges
I might mixed up System76 with Framework, I need to double check the subreddit
It's not copying Apple. It's that every port does everything, including charging. It is standards-compliant.
As just one example, you no longer need to lug a laptop charger with you; there are no longer "computer chargers" and "phone chargers", but one charger that can charge everything, often simultaneously via multiple ports. When you combine this with a docking station, one cable truly does all.
It is wonderful. Embrace it.
And what is worse? New laptops have less ports than the older ones. That 5550 only has 3 ports and 1 is for charging. If I want to mount an external hard drive, I need to bring a hub.
What again, looks like everyone is doing that, so yeah, better embrace it.
Imagine having 4 USB-C ports, but 2 of them are USB 2.0 only. Like that but more complicated because it's a feature on a separate controller. Video out, which requires additional connections to the GPU. Power input, done through a USB-PD controller. PCI-E tunneling, taking up PCI-E lanes from the CPU.
Even looking at the Framework Laptop: https://frame.work/laptop16?tab=specs , only the Nvidia GPU USB-C port supports charging while the AMD one doesn't. Look at the section on the "6x user-selectable Expansion Cards" where they list the capabilities of the individual ports. I think different specs for those USB-C ports are less egregious because the idea is to install an expansion card, but giving 6 different USB-C ports like that to a regular user sounds like a bad idea.
To be fair, that's already how PC laptops are - they have USB-A ports with random colors and symbols on them that you need to figure out which is the good one, so I don't see why they aren't doing the same with USB-C.
That's not the case with the other features I've mentioned.
I love having a dock, it means I get to hide all the wires behind the desk, and plug the laptop into power, two screens and all the other peripherals with a single cable.
I'm starting to accept that if I want a development workstation class machine, I need to build a tower from components.
The sad thing is that plastic should be the best material to make laptops from. It's lighter, and it gives when dropped. Think about the cases everybody puts on their phones. They're not made of solid metal, for good reason.
The old Thinkpads had it right, they used a magnesium frame surrounded by high quality plastic.
My MacBook Pro is well made, but it's also a pound heavier than it needs to be.
Why? It works and it is very lightweight.
Also aluminum is quite good at heat transfer.
Wait....
But that means spending ~$1600-2000 (though, about how much my MBP cost).
It seems to take some good research or a clutch recommendation to spend less than that while getting what I want. And I don't understand how 1080p is still such a common resolution.
In my opinion Dell laptops have never been good. But I never bought another one since that happened, so maybe I've missed out.
I might eventually go down this route, if I can't find a reasonable good one. I use VMWare in Windows to access Linux on my 5550, so it's not a far stretch to switch the host.
However, whenever in the past 20 years I bought a laptop, for a given amount of money there were always laptops with better quality than any Apple model.
Moreover, while the Apple computers are fine for the general population, there are also users like myself, for whom the Apple products lack adequate computational performance. My laptops typically used Intel Xeon/NVIDIA Quadro combos that were much faster than anything sold by Apple and 4k screens and very good keyboards. Apple has a poor reputation for keyboards.
If I bought a laptop right now I would probably choose something with Ryzen 395, which easily beats any Apple CPU for the things in which I am interested, like computations with big integers and FP64 array operations. The very good single-thread GeekBench results of the Apple CPUs are not at all representative of the CPU performance in other kinds of workloads, where the Intel/AMD ISA still provides features not yet available in the Arm-based CPUs.
Why many comments in this thread indicate that at least the consumer laptops made by Dell have a poor quality nowadays, I still have a rather old Dell Precision mobile workstation (sold with Linux) with excellent quality that no Apple laptop ever approached. Of course, such a mobile workstation has poor battery lifetime, incomparable with that of an Apple laptop, but for my needs this is a really minor inconvenient in comparison with its advantages.
The problem today is -- even with a similar price point (like top tier Dell mobile workstation does cost 3,000+ CAD), I'm not sure how long it lasts. It could be 5 years, it could be 5 months, I have no confidence in it.
The default warranty on at least the Optiplex line is one year of next business day service and upgrading to three years is cheap. I've never had a situation where same day service was worth the extra cost but it is an option.
I'm not dealing with the scale other people are in here. We should take the ancedotes of personal laptops with a grain of salt. Anyone pushing the scale that Dell does will have incidents where service runs totally off the rails. I don't know how they stack up at scale but I'm reading this thread with interest. When I'm due for a laptop upgrade Dell will still be in the running but right now Framework might be the one to get my business.
No power issues and such either, but I don't run Windows on it. Only problem I notice is audible whine coming from the speakers when charging and doing GPU work, like scrolling.
Not great, not terrible?
There's also the software/hardware integration side.
Power management on Macbooks is unbeatable in my experience, both Windows and Linux have really serious issues dealing with sleep and low power modes.
On the Lenovo side, the only one I'm still reasonably happy with is my Thinkpad, but it pales compared to a Macbook (Air, Pro or whatever).
I've been dealing with this recently. Linux won't hibernate if you have Secure Boot enabled, even if your swap is encrypted. So I either have to leave my laptop plugged in all the time or remember to shut it down before unplugging it so it doesn't completely drain its battery while sleeping.
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/kernel_lockdown.7.html
That's why it works for you. Enable secure boot and you lose hibernate.
> The Linux kernel disables the possibility of hibernation when Secure Boot is in use because it cannot guarantee that the swap file is unchanged. "Unencrypted hibernation/suspend to swap are disallowed as the kernel image is saved to a medium that can then be accessed."
I've also looked at and really like Framework, but for the times I am using the screen, I require touch, so that's a non-starter.
It's got a middling display (the 2-in-1 display is better) and a somewhat dated Hawk Point SoC, but it's fine for running to a client's site for imaging or network troubleshooting or what have you. I still don't think it's going to last very long, but it's a nice complement to the MacBook I use for client dev work and it didn't break the bank.
They just didn't have a 15" metal case in the price range so I got a plastic 16". Overall performance is lower than comparably spec'd HP Z-Book Fireflys I was using, when this Thinkpad T16 G4 hits the upper limits of RAM, it feels like it's using swap on a slow platter drive. Even on lower-spec HP Pro & EliteBooks, they slow down at max RAM but don't just freeze. Our staff thrashes the shit out of gear, so finding decently-priced lower-spec metal-bodied laptops is essential.
Even on latest HP laptops I am able to replace RAM, batteries, SSDs without dealing with epoxied sockets. Haven't had to often, but displays and keyboards could be swapped if absolutely needed last time we had to several years ago. That said, the performance of onboard HP Bluetooth sucks compared to others I've used and their stock bloatware is terrible.
Specific to Lenovo, when I was shopping for a bunch of laptops about 3 years ago there were weird gotchas like "I can get every spec I need EXCEPT backlit keyboard, which kicks me up to the next model, at least $300 more/unit" and "Gee, they solder in a low amount of RAM on this one to make you...yup, spend at least $300 more/unit"...
MSPs will push whatever hardware and software they can get preferential deals on (and sometimes kickbacks), so its up to the customer to vote with their dollars. The challenge is: does that decision rest with the CTO or the CFO?
I think I'll eventually go for the more expensive route if I want another laptop. Either an Apple refurbed Macbook or some other Linux laptop.
Coming to my previous laptop which I still have with me, I bought a Thinkpad L480 in 2018. It was then a dirt cheap version of a Thinkpad. But it did the job with no complaints. I had to replace the battery after 4 years but that wasn’t an issue. It did everything a daily driver is supposed to do, reliable and never threw a fit. I only had to change it as I felt I needed a better screen and performance. The Intel processor was showing its age.
I have only minor complaints running Thinkpad with Ubuntu. But if you start moving away from popular distros, then you have to accept you will occasionally have to tinker to get things work.
I'll check out the T14s. One of my concerns is: it seems to be more difficult to replace batteries for modern laptops. I tried to remove the battery of the Dell 5550 last night and found it more difficult than the older models. How about the T14s?
In my L480, I opened the laptop to change the battery and also install more RAM. Even for a hardware neophyte such as myself , this was straightforward.
Thinkpads are modular, you can easily get the components such as a battery etc. My T14s comes with a 3-year warranty as well.
the firmware and OS integration is fairly smooth and it generally runs faster than i'd have assumed for a laptop that old.
i have money to spend these days and can afford a thinkpad or mac so i'll probably lean that direction but i would consider another system76 too
AMD and Intel support Linux as a first class platform, and everything CPU and GPU from them will work perfectly. Nvidia is on track to match them, albeit on proprietary drivers, if you use the most recent hardware, kernel and drivers. Qualcomm is still basically unusable and so is Apple.
The vast majority of popular and modern wireless chipsets have at least basic drivers in tree. Webcams, touchscreens and pens mostly work. Fingerprint sensors mostly don't work.
System76 has its place. You'll avoid hassle and you'll get the full feature set. You won't have to deal with bizarre edge cases around sleep, multi-gpu, or power saving features.
But truth be told, if you buy a new x86 laptop from any major brand, chances are that everything essential will work instantly or with a bit of tinkering under Linux.
I'm also currently upgrading a refurbed Lenovo X270 for my granddaughter who's starting high school, and I am thoroughly impressed. Newer Lenovos are slimmer and slicker, but this thing will still be trucking after the cockroach apocalypse.
For some reason, the MOBO was dying slowly after a year. My other coworkers also reported similar problems.
Lenovo-wise:
My personal Thinkpad X1 Extreme was a champ for 7+ years, and a few P series I've used over the years since 2021 were also great.
This, and literally all of them have paint chipping off the chassis at the slightest provocation. I have like 50 at work.
edit: we have now a mix of MacBook Airs/Pros (most of workforce), Frameworks (specialized tech roles running Linux and resource-intensive software) and HP ProBooks (run-of-the-mill Windows machines, or just where you don't need anything special at all).
What are the specs?
Blowing the dust out does run into the problem of some laptops being designed to only open with use of a chainsaw. I've ruined a couple laptops that way.
On top of that, the gan chargers are made as small as possible and overheat all the time. Modern, sleek, enshitified - just like our software!
I used to have issues with the oldeer micro-usb ports, but since USB C came along I don't think I've had a single failure.
2. I have a usb-c right here, and the weight of the cable is absolutely distorting the port. It will need to be replaced soon just based on its own self-damage. The cable is not even that heavy. I see all kinds of used devices advertised with the caveat - one usb-c not working. It is very common.
I did break multiple micro-USB ports though, as did ham-fisted family members. USB C made that all go away.
I have friends with kids (with tech) who don't seem to have a ton of broken devices either. Clearly we have very different experiences.
And even in that case, USB-C chargers and cables are available everywhere, unlike proprietary laptop chargers, If the ports are dying on you though, I don't know what to tell you. They seem fine on phones, so I can't see what the problem would be on laptops, unless there are specific models that just have horrible ports.
usb chargers and devices have many different voltages and power, and they don't always work very well together. It helps to have one format, but it doesn't mean no charger bloat. Cables are even worse, with wildly different specs, all looking exactly the same. They should require colored shapes or something on the cables to indicate their properties.
Everything USB should still take normal 5 volts, which any charger should provide without needing negotiation, and anything larger that actually needs more juice also should have the appropriate electronics to handle that (i.e. it's a phone or a laptop or a tablet or similarly expensive device). If you have devices that don't fall into either of those categories, so they don't take normal 5 volts, or they need more juice but are picky about USB, I'd consider them faulty from the get-go, as it's clear they haven't actually implemented USB-PD in any meaningful way. And if your charger doesn't provide 5 volts without asking, it too is faulty.
It's hard to go wrong with charging cables when it comes to USB-C. I agree there's a mess on the data side, but the USB Forum can't even get its head straight with what it should even be called, so it's no wonder nobody there has the balls to mandate colour coding or something similarly helpful.
I've had to replace a few cables, but have never had issues with USB-C sockets.
The build quality is nicer than my T530. The bottom cover doesn't have access panels anymore, but it's got just a few captive(!!) screws and the whole bottom comes off. Everything is neatly exposed and you don't need to access the top of the board at all. The bottom cover has plastic clips along with the screws, but they're spring loaded! They aren't simply molded in and cannot snap off. It's some incredible attention to detail.
I've noticed that most recent laptops have the vent behind the screen hinge where it's completely blocked if the screen is closed. Thinkpad has the vent fully exposed. In fact, it exposes more vent when the screen is closed.
Too bad the CPU is a lemon. One of the new AMD chips with a built in NPU. The NPU is slower than the integrated graphics for inference. Not a discrete card, just the GPU baked into the chip.
In contrast, I got a hand-me-down Dell XPS-something from 2020 when I first started this job. It idles IDLES! at 100°C. I tried to re-paste the CPU, but the heat pipes were so small and thin that I crushed one between my fingers. Even with massive airflow through the case from external fans, it never drops below 100C. Absolutely inexcusable.
Looks to me like Lenovo still has it. At least if you're paying real money for a professional level machine. This new Thinkpad is now my #1 most repairable and maintainable machine. T530 is a close second. Absolutely every other laptop I've ever used is tied for last place in the garbage.
It'd be pretty cool for sure, but you'd be absolutely strangled by memory bandwidth, I'd expect. LLM sure the chipset would not at all enjoy trying to route all that RAM to three processors at once.
1. Put the tokenizers or other lower-performance parts on the NPU.
2. Pipelining that moves things through different models or layers on different hardware.
3. If multiple layers, put most of them on the fastest part with a small number on the others. Like with hardware clocking, the ratio is decided to ensure the slower ones don't drag down overall performance.
In things like game or real-time AI's, esp multimodal, there's even more potential as some parts could be on different chips.
Yeah, that's expected. On consumer devices, the NPUs are not optimizing for speed and they're not meant to out-perform the GPU. They are optimizing for low power consumption. They want to be able to run simple AI tasks without turning your laptop into a frying pan, so that is where the NPU comes in.
Quoting wikipedia:
> On consumer devices, the NPU is intended to be small, power-efficient, but reasonably fast when used to run small models.
My G11 carbon is tolerable, but I did have a motherboard replacement in mine mid cycle. Known issue with charging just giving up. I like my carbon, but its a lot of money.
I have a gen 1 carbon, a gen 7 carbon and a gen 11. I still think the G1 was best in a lot of silos. The keyboard especially.
The G11 is performing better than the G7 overall, the G7 had the shittiest case so far.
Recently did an analysis on price/performance across Dell, Lenovo and Surface for a customer, and the Lenovos came out at best quality but not price competitive. This was before EOFY however and vendor pricing might have turned over. I also got the impression that both Dell and Lenovo were halfway through launching new product lines, and certain features were only available in either new or old, not both.
The Dell Pro line of laptops seems quite bad, having deployed several. Seems like they are trying to take Latitude and split it into Bad and Worse categories. Cant praise a single thing on it, case feels worse, screens worse, everything just got soggier. But it has an Ultra sticker on it so YMMV.
My first G1 carbon traveled several hundred thousand kilometers with me, getting bashed around in airport security etc.
My G7 keyboard keys were falling off, having rarely left my office.
Brands arent as consistent as we would like them to be. Make sure any reviews you turn up are for the specific product you purchase.
But, sadly, next generations went deep shit instead.
Nowadays, I have a very hard time selecting a laptop that would fit my needs, even disregarding the price. One of the worst feature in term of offender is the keyboard: Manufacturers are going on with this totally stupid unergonomic trend of having "half size" enter keys, removing page-up/page-down keys, and hiding directional arrows behind over keys needing to use the "FN+other_key" to be able to use the arrow.
OK we probably have different preferences, but I really hate:
1. Arrow keys have different sizes
2. page up/down right up arrow keys (very easy to touch those accidentally)
So far I really love the Macbook Pro layout. I wonder why no one tried to copy it, considering they tried to copy everything else.
I started buying 4x4 mini PCs. They're exactly what you describe. For $600 I got an 8 core AMD Ryzen 7 8745H with 96GB of RAM from Minisforum. The graphics aren't half bad and the overall system has been really good. It's even got better thermal performance than the Intel 4x4 I had previously and generally runs 10C cooler for the same workloads.
If you don't absolutely need a "backpack portable" computer I can only highly recommend them.
I'll check out those mini PCs. The Steam one also looks interesting.
I had one issue where I needed to ship it back: it would reset and then it was running off the battery, and no matter what port I plugged a charger/docking station into it wouldn't charge until I powered it off and back on again. I got them to do a replacement under warranty a couple years ago.
Around a month ago it was doing the reset fairly frequently and then wouldn't power on sometimes, and I noticed the wrist rest was a little bowed. I replaced the battery pack (kind of a pain, but not the worst I've done), and it was good for around a month, but now it has that "won't charge the battery" issue again. I believe when they did the previous repair they replaced the motherboard, but now I'm out of warranty.
For my next laptop I kind of want a Framework, so I can replace the mobo if I need to. My work likes us to replace hardware no more frequently than every 5-6 years, but we get a warranty for way less than that (my laptop I pushed to get a 4 year).
Meanwhile my previous Thinkpad T470s is still going strong, though the screen just developed a line through it. That's ~10 year old now.
My personal 4 year old Macbook has been a real workhorse, never had any hardware issues with it. My son's macbook has been another story, he's had that in for service 4-5 times in the 3 years he's had it. But, I suspect that is more him than the hardware. I don't baby my MBP, but he is just terrible with things. He's lucky if a pair of glasses can last 6 months, ditto with a phone (usually broken screens), so I'm not sure I can blame the MB Air...
And yeah my 470S is still pretty strong. I started to use it again for my side projects.
I kinda wish I could find a contracting job, so that I can buy an expensive laptop and expense it as cost, and my wife won't cast an angry look towards me, lol.
The touchpad sucks and routinely breaks requiring restarts, constantly having driver issues (and you have to deal with the capital-N Nightmare that is SupportAssist for drivers), graphics card is busted and makes the display driver crash once a month.
Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly turn on when it's in my bag and rev up to ten thousand degrees. Laptop will randomly, when on full battery and closed, decide to hard-shutoff leading to a windows recovery boot.
Decides to do BIOS updates when it's at 3% battery in the middle of the night, then when I wake up for work the next morning it has to go through a ten-minute recovery sequence.
Battery is swelling after only a couple years of use, which sometimes causes keys on the keyboard to stop working. In the middle of a slack convo I've had to type "Sorrymyspacebarstoppedworkinggottarestartmycomputer".
BSODs, hard drive corruption, you name it. Never buy Dell. Not that there's many good options out there unless you're willing to drop two week's pay on a Framework - but anything is better than Dell.
EDIT: Another I thought of - sound card is busted and sounds like it has a low pass filter on it. I know it's not a speaker issue because on occasion it magically fixes itself until the next restart.
Very happy with my framework when I switched jobs. And my asus zenbook was also great.
If it was in sleep - Dell themselves recommend completely switching off a laptop before putting it inside a backpack:
https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/faq-mode...
For somebody who has used MacBooks the last 18 years, this is insane.
I have stopped using Apple laptops more than 15 years ago and since then I have used only Linux laptops.
I have no idea whether hibernate worked on my laptops, because this is a feature for which I have never felt any need.
I always take care to optimize the boot time on my computers with custom built kernels and carefully selected daemons (and I do not use systemd). For decades, the boot time on my laptops had been of perhaps twenty seconds at most and the biggest delay in starting to use the computers after being powered off is entering a password to unlock them, not the start-up of the OS. Using something like hibernation instead of complete power off would speed up negligibly the process of beginning to work on the computer.
Dell, however is absolute trash now from what I’ve seen.
Meanwhile my M2 MacBook pro is still going strong
There seems to be a lot of profit in buying brands with a reputation for high quality and then replacing it with lower quality and reaping the profits.
It shouldn't be legal if you ask me, it has elements of fraud, the brand should be consistent, Apple implies quality for example, if Apple where to release a cheap badly made product at an expensive price, they would be breaking the brand-contract.
It still hold its charge but then I mostly work on it plugged either via RDP from my personal workstation at home or from the docking station in my office at the campus. So it has less than 50 charge cycles.
edit: to lenovo/dell question I'd say the quality varies by model - lower end thinkpads are better while expensive one got worse. But there are still a lot of differences between a small business series and enterprise. USB-C perfect as a connector, but if it is not replaceble it is a nightmare.
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