weldum wrote:

to me the worst compromise is heat dissipation (particularly in apple computers)

It's not just Apple, a lot of manufacturers cram the biggest CPU's into the thinnest cases for marketing reasons.

My Thinkpad L390 Yoga is an amazing device - replaceable SSD, up to 64GB of replaceable RAM, Wacom tablet...but I will never understand why Lenovo put in a CPU with a boost limit of 4.6 GHz. It can boost for one second before it heavily throttles and without adjustments, it's worse when rendering videos than my old X230T from 2013.

The cooling system does only tolerate up to 3GHz without throttling and that still makes it a blazingly fast device, so there really is no reason for putting such an overpowered processor into it.

I will never go the Apple route, though. Their problems are even more massive under the hood than all of the Windows machines I had to deal with over the last few years. I work in an advertising agency and it's a very Apple-infested place, so to speak. I am the only one that refuses to use one of these, because I had to work on and with them for half a year and I still have to support the machines of my colleagues.

- Their build quality is atrocious. Just watch some videos from Louis Rossmann. Heatsinks and fans that go nowhere, short display cables that rip, keyboard problems, bad motherboard design that sends 52 volts into your CPU ...and more. Apple machines are very overpriced! For items with their luxury brand image I expect more than the typical quality of a 500$ notebook.

- Their software quality is even worse! For storage I've decided to setup a NextCloud for all of our files and that made me peek under the hood of their Finder software a little bit. It creates .DS_Store files in every folder. On a Mac you can't see them because they just get hidden and you'd expect that all of these junk files are not copied to a network drive. Well tough shit, they are. Have fun cleaning up your network drive after using this - that is, if you can even copy your files in a reasonable amount of time because the Finder makes thousands of requests on every file transfer and easily brings your server down. It even looks for kernel image files on the network drive with every request - WHY?

Then there's Apple Mail, where you have to go into the command line and hack some stuff in to keep it from automatically trying to make thumbnails out of your mail attachments every time...this stuff is the absolute worst.

Maybe their browser is better - Safari is based on Webkit, just like Chrome...that must be good, right? Nope, they've decided in their infinite wisdom to not put in the full HTML5 fields support into the desktop version. So you want to build a website with a date field and a date picker? Looks good on an iPhone, but not on a Mac. Your users will ask why it doesn't work - well of course, it's Apple's fault! They won't believe you...have fun explaining that to them.

Can they even do a calendar? I mean...it's just a calendar, right? My boss uses the iCloud calendar for all of our business appointments. On Windows, you can use the web version...which doesn't let you edit an appointment because there's always an "unknown error". It has been like that for at least half a year and every time I want to edit a minor detail, I have to delete an appointment and completely recreate it again. So tedious.

I really hope Apple dies sooner than later, but I know it won't happen. The masses don't care about these things. They're just users. They don't have to administrate these machines, a Macbook "just works" and "looks so good". Ugh. I'm really sick of it, if you can't tell by now. 🤣

schmatzler wrote:

I really hope Apple dies sooner than later, but I know it won't happen.

I see the sarcasm, but I honestly hope Google and Android dies sooner than later. I can't stand Google's bad practices and Android's terrible operating system. I have nothing against Microsoft, except I seriously hate with all my anger the Windows 10 release and its automatic update feature as well as the garbage that comes preinstalled with it. It makes me want to go back to Windows 7.

I'm an Apple mac user since late 2009 (iPhone user since 2007) and I will stay with them while iOS and macOS is amazingly good to use. I just installed macOS Catalina and iOS 13, so far so good as always. I never use Windows for anything except for only one racing simulator game.

The day Android is killed, I'll be a happy man for the second time. The first was the day Internet Explorer was killed for good...

EDIT:

Ironically, Safari DOES HAVE good support for HTML5 form fields. I just did exactly a datepicker today at work for a Moodle local plugin. Nothing fancy, but works as intended. Most of your rant towards Apple is made of misinformed thoughts.

.DS_Store creation can be mostly fixed with a terminal command (techrepublic has it covered). network storage services, or repositories, can be fixed with something like git has (the gitignore files).

And we're down to the Apple vs everyone else fanboy wars. 😀

dr_st wrote:

And we're down to the Apple vs everyone else fanboy wars. 😀

Indeed. Its almost like 1991 again. Isn't Apple dumping those stupid butterfly keyboard switches. We are up to version three now aren't we? When are they going to admit it's just a shitty design? I like to watch Louis Rossmann and iPad Rehab videos from time to time. I'm surprised at the poor build quality/design and the stupidness of Apples repair arrangement. A weeks turn around for a screen replacement or power socket replacement if the "genius bar staff" is not "qualified" to do it. Took less than half an hour for my wifes small Galaxy tablet. Must be some more class action law suites on the way.

My wifes two Galaxys are far superior than the iPads I've seen. She manages to get around Andriod no problem at all. I'm having fun with the smaller one and I don't like tablets in general.

This cheap HP laptop thingy my wife bought a year or so ago I use daily. Only complaint is windows 10 pretends it's doing something when it really isn't. Oh another is if I remove some programs I have to reboot the system. On my Linux box I don't. Non of the extra software supplied with this laptop is from Microsoft. Basicaly a fresh install with freely available to download applications that are easy to source. Probably why it was cheap. No extra MS licencing fees. Thanks HP. Enough ports to most tasks as well as an optical drive. And it handles liquid spills, doesn't scorch me when I touch the base either and is constructed from what seems to be fairly sturdy plastic like my 33 year old Zenith laptop. Oh and I almost forgot no dongle searching when I need to attach an accessory. Did I mention lots of ports?

Goodness I almost forgot my EeePC. What a wonderful little device. I like the concept of the Mac Mini but don't like the lastest incarnation wih little upgradeabilty compared to older models and I believe slower.. Whilst in town going through Cash Converters I saw this we black thing hidden behind a model that was about twice the thickness. Asked the staff if I could have a gander. He mentioned the antenna was missing and I mentioned I had a ton of pci wifi cards I could steal one off. "Really" he said. "Yip" I said "Go get the rest of the gear that goes with it please. " About 10 minutes later he comes out with the power adapter and cords."YES!!" I thought. Paid the dosh and walk away a happy chappy. For a wopping $NZ40 I had gotten a rather wonderful wee device. Once home I fitted an antenna then powered it up with usb keyboard and mouse attached. It had XP installed but needed a password to get to the desk top with networking enabled. Instantly I hooked up usb optical drive and ethernet cable then inserted my Debian 8 net install CD, rebooted changing the bios setting to boot from usb and started the Debian 8 install. Detected every thing and stated I need to get a non-free wifi driver for the internal wifi to work. Got that which took less than 5 minutes. Put it on a usb stick from this Win10 laptop. Put the usb drive in the the EeePC. The install routine picked it up straight away, installed the driver, confirmed it was working and continued the installation process. Once completed I remove the CD when prompted and then rebooted. It booted up fine checking hardware in the process. Wifi working ok. At the logon prompt entered user name and password and the xfce desktop comes up. GREAT. Tested a few things, entered wifi credentials and tested that. How many other OSs only need one reboot to install from scratch? Apart from Dos that is...

Well, my 2016 MBP has been serviced 5 times so far (three keyboard failures, one battery replacement program and one logic board replacement program). Every time Apple replaced everything except the bottom cover and the display. To their credit, they did it free of charge (even though the laptop is 2 years out of warranty now), but in total I spent about 2 months without the laptop (which is thankfully not the primary device for me, otherwise I’d be very pissed). I’m not going to buy another Apple laptop until they at least get rid of that stupid butterfly keyboard.

Before this disaster of a laptop, I never had a single problem with my iBooks / MacBooks between 2004 and 2016.

and now with all the issues people are having with catalina...

For a long time my "best" laptop was a Thinkpad A20, which is from 2000. I remember it was advertised as "thin" back then, which would be comical to anyone looking at it today, but I have no problem with it's dimensions. It still works, it's just hard to use a P3 anymore.
Besides that, I have an old Pentium 75MHz Toshiba that I sometimes use for datalogging an ECM in an old car. It's perfect for that, because it's built way tougher than modern laptops, and indeed also tougher than the above Thinkpad (they're about 5 years apart).

=====
Late last year I finally decided I wanted a new laptop that I could use with modern applications and even semi-recent games. I'm really a desktop guy, but I live in a state that can't provide electricity when it's windy, or for the subsequent 2-5 days after. In those situations a low power machine with a local battery is more practical.

After becoming aware of the cooling problems and throttling suffered by "convertible" (and all thin) laptops, I settled on something very conventional. I've never understood the fascination with super thin laptops anyway, it's just an incidental thing you run into with most models, not something I wanted. I feel like ultra-thinness is just a way for manufacturers to show off without any purpose, and apparently, a big downside.

I think most manufacturers have some fairly conventional models available, or at least did a year ago. The one I bought was an Acer E15 w/ i3-8130U when Amazon put a sale on it.
What's unusual about it is that it has a DVD drive, gigabit ethernet, VGA+HDMI ports, USB2+USB3+USB-C (or whatever it's called), and unofficially it can be made to run Windows 7.
The knock on it per Amazon reviews was it's standard hard drive, which is a bigger hindrance on Win10 than on Win7, but it was easy to add an SSD anyway.

The VGA port is handy, since that's what hangs off most of my monitors' unused secondary inputs.
Gigabit ethernet is surprisingly hard to find. Some laptops still have ethernet but only 10/100! I'm surprised there's any economy in using 10/100 anymore instead of GbE, but that's what manufacturers are frequently doing. You have to be careful not to get caught by this.
Keyboard sucks, monitor is a cheap 1080p. Somebody on Amazon posted info on compatible screens it can be upgraded to (supposedly IPS, I'm guessing e-IPS), but I haven't done that upgrade.

The DVD drive is a rare find. It's strange on a Windows 10 laptop, but becomes useful when Windows 7 is hacked onto it. It allows it to run older games that the Intel graphics are actually good at running. Win10 won't work with disc based games in general, due to it's breakage of common disc based copy protection. Win10 basically requires digital distribution.
I tried Win10 for a few days but didn't care for it, and IMO Windows 7 hits the sweet spot for maximum compatibility with everything I want to be able to do, both old and new.
I'm not somebody who needs Win10's nanny control (and I don't see that it's helped the virus-prone people in my family anyway), so it has nothing to offer that I want, other than the immediate convenience that it came preinstalled.

The hardest part of installing Win7 was the Intel graphics driver. It's a hack job getting an Intel video driver to install for a 7th or 8th-gen CPU under Win7. NVidia graphics would have been preferable as they have official Win7 drivers, but the NVidia option added too much to the price.
Everything else had drivers out there that just needed to be found. Video driver was the only real headache, and if I'd been willing to pay for NVidia that could have been avoided.

UEFI tries to make things difficult, but fortunately it was still possible to disable.
I feel like I got the last laptop that can barely be made to run Windows 7, so I'm glad I bought it when I did.

I'm worried about the battery. Based on numbers I saw in a Linux tray app, I think they push the voltage range between charge/discharge too far to get the battery life advertised. I don't like that it's not readily replaceable, but it looks like it wouldn't actually be hard to replace.
I understand that some laptops have an option in their BIOS/Setup/Whatever to narrow the range between charge/discharge, such that the battery will have a longer overall life but won't hold as much charge per cycle. Unfortunately that's not common. I think Sony and Lenovo offer this.

shamino wrote:

For a long time my "best" laptop was a Thinkpad A20, which is from 2000. I remember it was advertised as "thin" back then, which would be comical to anyone looking at it today

Tell me about it. I once stumbled upon this review: http://www.thg.ru/mobile/20020306/a31p-05.html

As for the A31p's dimensions, it is 13 inches wide by 10.7 inches deep and 1.8 inches thick. The thinness of the unit really surprised us;

1.8 inches thick
thinness

A31p
thinness

After reading that, my friend started calling my A31p "the ultra-thin" laptop. Now it cannot go by any other name.

shamino wrote:

The one I bought was an Acer E15 w/ i3-8130U when Amazon put a sale on it.
What's unusual about it is that it has a DVD drive, gigabit ethernet, VGA+HDMI ports, USB2+USB3+USB-C (or whatever it's called), and unofficially it can be made to run Windows 7.

That's indeed a pretty cool combination of ports.

shamino wrote:

Gigabit ethernet is surprisingly hard to find. Some laptops still have ethernet but only 10/100! I'm surprised there's any economy in using 10/100 anymore instead of GbE, but that's what manufacturers are frequently doing.

Indeed. On business laptops (Thinkpads etc.) GbE has been standard for a decade and a half.

shamino wrote:

Win10 won't work with disc based games in general, due to it's breakage of common disc based copy protection. Win10 basically requires digital distribution.

Or no-CD cracks. But I think modern games, even if you buy them on CD/DVD, no longer use any of the old copy protection schemes - they just require online key validation the same as digital downloads.

Still, if you have a library of DVD movies, you can play them on Win10 just the same.

oeuvre wrote:

and now with all the issues people are having with catalina...

Well, I’ve installed it. So far zero issues. And I am loving it. I am also going to use a patcher to be able to install it with an older unsupported iMac 2009 which also happens to be running High Sierra unsupported but perfectly fine.

So far Microsoft hasn’t come with a solution to stop automatic updates. I have done all I could to stop this €£¥#%^! Windows 10 stop them.

bfcastello wrote:

So far Microsoft hasn’t come with a solution to stop automatic updates.

You mean Apple has? The company that invented unblockable automatic updates which pop out of nowhere and, unlike Windows, once installed cannot ever be uninstalled, has come up with a solution? Wow.

Microsoft doesn't come up with a solution because they don't see it as a problem. They want everyone to automatically update. Still, with Win10 Pro a single registry key / Group Policy entry prevents any updates from being installed without your consent.

You really have to stop biting at these obvious baits people leave for you.

I heard the Catalina update broke Homebrew.

Catalina doesn't support 32-bit programs... let alone 16-bit.

If an OS can't run 16 bit programs it shouldn't exist.

oeuvre wrote:

and now with all the issues people are having with catalina...

I don’t have any issues with Catalina because I’m smart enough to wait until .2 release before installing a new major version of the OS 🤣

When I hear Catalina I think of World War two flying boats.

bfcastello wrote:

And I am loving it.

Are you doing advertising for McDonalds now, too? 🤣

dr_st wrote:

Tell me about it. I once stumbled upon this review: http://www.thg.ru/mobile/20020306/a31p-05.html

I had an A31p years ago and I regret selling it. It's one of the craziest machines ever made. The screen looks really awesome and it's not even IPS, it's a technology they call "FlexView" that produces insane viewing angles - the screen still looks crystal clear when you look at it diagonally.

I had upgraded my machine to a 2.6GHZ Pentium 4 processor and it ran massively hot, the case is so thick that it was still able to handle it, though. Only the two coils that sit right in front of the exhaust fan melted a little bit.

The A31p can even handle 720p H.264 videos. I really don't know why I sold it. I have tried to get another one of them but all I have for now is a board with graphical glitches when it gets warm (probably a bad BGA solder joint) and an A31 (no "p") in pristine condition. One day I will get a rework station and fix this thing up.

keenmaster486 wrote:

I heard the Catalina update broke Homebrew.

My homebrew is fine too, I just updated it right after installing Catalina.

oeuvre wrote:

Catalina doesn't support 32-bit programs... let alone 16-bit.

If an OS can't run 16 bit programs it shouldn't exist.

Windows 10 shouldn’t exist either, it doesn’t run them natively 😁

I have nothing against Microsoft only against Windows 10. Worst version ever. Can’t stop automatic updates (I don’t care if Microsoft wants it that way, I don’t want) while on Linux distros and MacOS I can opt out them easily.

Even after editing the registry and changing settings it can’t even stop bitching about the Firewall being disabled even though I don’t want to enable it. Stupid Win10

bfcastello wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Catalina doesn't support 32-bit programs... let alone 16-bit.

If an OS can't run 16 bit programs it shouldn't exist.

Windows 10 shouldn’t exist either, it doesn’t run them natively 😁

Actually the 32 bit version does. Do try to be more accurate next time will you. All this cock fighting is just silliness so now can we please get on topic.

Oh and don't use Windows if automatic updates bother you.

Caluser2000 wrote:

bfcastello wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Catalina doesn't support 32-bit programs... let alone 16-bit.

If an OS can't run 16 bit programs it shouldn't exist.

Windows 10 shouldn’t exist either, it doesn’t run them natively 😁

Actually the 32 bit version does. Do try to be more accurate next time will you. All this cock fighting is just silliness so now can we please get on topic.

Oh and don't use Windows if automatic updates bother you.

Oh if you were giving more attention, the comment I replied to was about 16-bit programs not 32-bit programs. GOTCHA!!! I put a bold on it for you

Anyway, I wasn't the one that started this "flame war". Be my guest to bring it back on topic.

bfcastello wrote:

Oh if you were giving more attention, the comment I replied to was about 16-bit programs not 32-bit programs. GOTCHA!!! I put a bold on it for you

Anyway, I wasn't the one that started this "flame war". Be my guest to bring it back on topic.

Be the bigger man and get over it already. You remind me of my grandson. No Forget that my goldfish.