I recently discovered Hacker Public Radio and I really like listening to the podcasts people have made. One podcast was just a bloke talking about what he wanted from a laptop. It struck me I had gone through I similar exercise lately so I decided to leave a comment.
The podcast I was responding to
The comments system wouldn’t accept my comment - it gave me a 412 Precondition not met (which wasn’t great) so I’m pasting my comment here as it took me a bit of time to write (though you wouldn’t believe it when you read it)… There’s a word limit in the comments field on that site and I kept reaching it and having to re-write it, of course I had a lot more to say but this is what I ended up with:
I left my perm job and had to hand in my macbook... I had grown a tired of Apple, the quality of their products has really dropped, their prices have increased. in my search I listed almost the same requirements as you - a regurgitation of the best features I'd read about.I got a Surface Book 2 which I instantly loved and hated at the same time. Beautiful machine: using the keyboard and the screen with the MS pen is very sleek and comfortable. Windows: through the setup I found myself in a tech giant war between MS, Apple and Google… MS OS on an MS machine - It had to go.
I ended up re-evaluating my requirements. I’ve ended up with a machine I love, it happens to be second hand off eBay and quite a few years old. Questions I asked myself:
- Do you need a quad core processor? Laptops haven’t been quad core for the smaller laptops up until the 8th gen so do you need a quad core 8th gen or will older i7 do?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors#Mobile_processors
- https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmark-List.2436.0.html
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Do you need 16GB ram? I run numerous virtual machines and do some complex compiling - it’s fine for me (in fact my macbook had 8GB and that was OK usually too). I bought 8GB machine and haven’t had any issues, I can always upgrade the ram if I need to.
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Screen - I don’t understand QHD on laptops: FHD (1920x1080) is perfect and laptops over the past 8 years or so sport these… even my TV at 32" that I watch HD bluray films on is this resolution so it’s going to be really good on a 14" screen! - QHD screen is silly (unless you’re a video production editor).
How about one of your best choices but slightly older models? I see very good machines with warranty on eBay for £200 - £500 … i7, 8GB, fhd eg. 3rd gen X1. Or if you do want high spec look on eBay for T480 or E490 for under £1k. if you don’t like it sell it again. Also reusing older machines much better for environment! :-)