I wish there would still be a left company making laptops for professionals.
I would throw decent money to anyone not subscribing to the current form over function trend. I want thick, sturdy, long battery live, proper palm rest, good old LAN port. Is that too much to ask for a modern laptop?
No AMD and no matte screen is a showstopper for me on the framework. Especially the processor - AMD thermals are in another class. It makes no sense to buy Intel laptops right now.
I bought a Framework laptop hoping to get macOS running on it, and it "works." Other users on the Framework Community forums and myself have found that you can get macOS booting, but all the things one might expect to have from a laptop just don't work [0][1].
Primarily, graphics acceleration doesn't work. Since Apple has never made a computer that uses Intel 11th Gen CPUs, the integrated graphics are borked. I suppose a tremendous effort to reverse engineer and inject a working driver /could/ work, it's probably not feasible.
With the move to ARM, I feel the time has come and gone for hackintoshes. The x86 versions will die, and then what use is a laptop with swappable components if I end up having to emulate ARM code in a VM?
I would love for companies to spend money on desktops and permanent work spaces - at home and / or at the office.
But they don't want to do that, because leaving hardware at the office translates to much higher insurance costs and makes them a bigger target for theft.
But like, 32 core, 64-128GB workstation with all the ports and storage you'll ever need is very possible and attainable on a fixed workspace, along with 4K 120Hz matte color-calibrated displays and the best keyboards money can buy.
Laptops are an unfortunate compromise. I get it, and I can work with it, but I'd rather have a desktop.
I get where you're coming from. But my company issues laptops because that's what developers want. I personally like being able to pick up my laptop and go work in a common area, or a cafe, or take the thing home with me and work from home whenever I want.
> because leaving hardware at the office translates to much higher insurance costs and makes them a bigger target for theft.
Not sure I buy that. Laptop loss and thefts resulting from being out in public must be way higher than the incidence of thieves breaking into locked and alarmed commercial office buildings just to steal computers.
actually, any half decent gaming laptops nowadays, matches the old standard for "professional laptop", usually required ports and bays, decent battery life (4-6 hours for 13-14' models even with nvidia), superb displays (not that big in brightness / nits maybe - 300 at least - but 120 mhz is almost a standard).
Most gaming laptops nowadays also, sport a sober look (full black gaming laptops ala Thinkpad are usual), not the previously common "RGB-everywhere".
The lost upgradability in Thinkpads is even fully available in many gaming laptops, even some 14' ones have one-two RAM slots available.
The performance required for a professional laptop is fully there too, fast processors, lots of ram, several internal storage devices (in 15' gaming laptop is quite common one -upgradable - SSD plus a 2.5 bay sporting a much bigger HDD, accouting for several TBs in internal storage, almost unthinkable in most current "professional" laptops, specially if you want NOT to pay U$S 2000+).
And the guarantees usually span 2 years.
I think my future work laptop will be one of those amazing machines.
Are there any gaming laptop manufacturers that you could recommend?
My only concerns would be:
1. Paying the "gamer" tax. I assume these are going to be higher priced because they're targeting a culture big on edgy aesthetics and with plenty of disposable income.
2. Do the GPUs on these come on discrete cards that can be removed? I have no need for a gaming GPU... On my current laptop, I removed the nVidia GPU it came with and just run the laptop on the integrated Intel graphics. Zero problems with it ever.
(another disposable account), I see a lot of MSI and Asus gaming laptops with good specs and reasonable pricing. The Asus TUF series has some of those cheap but good laptops. Also, Gigabyte gaming laptops have good specs, pricing.
Regarding the discrete GPU, I actually don't know if you can remove it from budget gaming laptops, I'd think you usually can't, but there are some expensive Alienware gaming laptops which I think could allow this.
As it was mentioned, the brightness could be a pain point, I'd double check about it in notebookcheck (the site).
The lack of brightness is a problem for me personally. I had a G15 Zephyrus for a bit, and its screen was great (1440p 144hz IPS) except its brightness was low, which made it less than pleasant to use in a well-naturally-lit room even with the light being indirect. I ended up returning that laptop for other reasons (mainly, finicky GPU driver behavior and its nosiness compared to a desktop), but its screen’s brightness didn’t help matters.
My X1 Nano and M1 Pro MBP are vastly better in those departments, hitting 450 and 500 nits brightness (with the larger going all the way to 1600nits for HDR content) which is usable in a much better range of environments. You’d have to be sitting in direct noon sunlight to really have a problem.
I wish the minimum bar for screen brightness would increase, 200-300 nits really just doesn’t cut it with fewer of us working in artificially lit offices with almost no sunlight.
I am also looking for a similar robust laptop with Lan Port, headphone jack, good battery life and decently competitive CPU.
I have been using multiple Macbooks from past 10-12 years and have seen the machine degrade over time both in term of software and hardware (with the exception of latest M1 series)
I don't really understand the fuss about lan port. If you are using a cable, you are probably not anymore in a mobile situation and most of the time you connected the laptop to a usb-c docking station as you also want to plug a screen, keyboard, external pointer, etc.
A lot of ethernet port use is diagnosing/configuring devices in the field - servers, networking equipment, etc or just plugging in occasionally when you have to download a big file.
I wouldn't call that "a lot". It is more niche use nowadays and for these kind of use one usually prefer a dedicated tool. Nowadays the datacenter guys would favor a mini laptop like the GPD Micro PC (which also comes with serial port by the way) for example, people working in the field would rather use Panasonic Toughbook lines that also kept serial ports and ethernet. It would be nice if Lenovo still had one or two sturdiers models available with similar I/Os but it makes no sense to have them on all models.
For us occasionnal users just having one of those 5 in 1 adapters in the laptop bag is enough. The thinner/lighter form factor is more comfortable most of the time and said adapter can be shared accross different devices. If I do the count I have 5 laptops in my own, 2 personnal, 1 professionnal, the other 2 are used by my partner and kids. I am very unlikely to need to hook a RJ45 cable on all these laptops at the same time.
I'm currently firmly in the same club as you. I have a 13' work laptop with two USB 3.0, plus one USB-C, but the thing weight is just about 2 pounds (1 kg). Booting SSD + not so much ram, but the thing flies even starting from hibernation.
Sometimes I miss having the damn LAN port, but you're right, for datacenter and field work, heavy hardware is a no go. I do know a number of people in the field using macbooks air for the work.
What’s funny is that you’re describing the latest MacBook Pro models aside from the LAN port.
It’s thicker than the previous generation with more ports, with batshit crazy 20 hour battery life.
Or, if you’re my cable installer, you can still buy Panasonic Toughbook and similar jobsite laptops that have those features, but they’re a niche.
What do you need a physical LAN port for? In my experience that need is incredibly occasional, especially when compared to the need to actually go somewhere (these are laptops after all).
Modern Wi-Fi speeds are so fast and reliable there truly isn’t a need to use a wired connection regularly even if you are “professional.”
You want long battery life and a dedicated LAN port but why do you need long battery life if you’re just gonna sit connected to the wall?
We used to lug around laptops that had empty space inside just in case you wanted to pop in a PCMCIA card, which seems pretty insane when you think about it from a modern perspective. Empty space in a portable device for the chance that you might want to add an expansion card. Obviously, USB has long since decimated the need for something so, dare I say, crazy!
I think what you want is to go back in time for nostalgia’s sake. These old school features are gone because they’ve been supplanted, not because some big bad evil laptop OEM removed it to save a buck.
The biggest issue for me (and many others) is that it's not an x86 machine. This is fine if your entire workflow revolves around delivering web experiences or performing platform-agnostic media-encoding, but the moment you step into things like Docker management, cross-compilation, 32-bit library support... the premise just falls apart entirely. Apple is doing their own thing now, and I think it's fine if they want to segregate their market so they can focus on what they do well, but I frankly fail to see how an M1 Mac would do anything but bring more headache to my current position where I deploy to and maintain x86 machines.
I would throw decent money to anyone not subscribing to the current form over function trend. I want thick, sturdy, long battery live, proper palm rest, good old LAN port. Is that too much to ask for a modern laptop?