My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.
My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.
"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."
Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.
I use a T480 as my daily driver and recently upgraded to a 72wh battery after the old 24wh pack died. I bought a Lenovo-branded Total Micro battery off of CDW to ensure I was actually getting what I paid for, as the last battery was a cheap knockoff that barely lasted a year. The 72wh battery was about a $10 difference to the 48wh battery and will easily last 10 hours but could last 14 hours with conservative use.
The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?
IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.
My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.
Yeah I just remote access my agent via cloud relay. There is no need in my experience for the laptop to have any oomph at all.
My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.
"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."
Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.
I use a T480 as my daily driver and recently upgraded to a 72wh battery after the old 24wh pack died. I bought a Lenovo-branded Total Micro battery off of CDW to ensure I was actually getting what I paid for, as the last battery was a cheap knockoff that barely lasted a year. The 72wh battery was about a $10 difference to the 48wh battery and will easily last 10 hours but could last 14 hours with conservative use.
This is the specific battery I bought: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...
The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?
IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
The HP Fury 16 has buttons below the touchpad. Maybe there are no other new laptops with buttons in that position.
The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.
Two-finger tap acts as the right-click. Also clicking and holding the bottom-right corner.
But I don’t pretend that any of these gestures make trackpads usable.
Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.
ThinkPads seem to still have physical buttons for clicking:
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
My X1 Carbon Gen13 has physical mouse buttons - I totally love them.
They're enshittified now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92bdOcsBVpQ
The ThinkPad is still the only recent-ish laptop you can actually buy with a trackpoint and a full-size ethernet port.
I thought i was crazy looking for mouse buttons in laptops, seems like the cool thing to do is leave them out.
Everyone trying to make a laptop that looks like Apple but doesn't work like one.
Nipple .