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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.