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And there’s the soldered RAM and storage, and glued-in or screwed-in battery…
As someone who daily drives a laptop for work and does field work on server facilities, finding a modern replacement that has both a RJ45 port and square USB (USB-A?) ports available on both sides, has been a pain in the hassle.
And I’m not even crying over the loss of VGA any longer. That one I can live without.
Thinkpad is still the answer. But i dislike that they started to solder in at least one RAM and took away the 2.5" bay.
Recommend framework
gpd pocket is the best field work laptop series I know of right now.
8.8 inches (22 cm for civilized folks)
would have to basically “chinese man squinting meme” at any serious work
no function key row
no physical navigation keys
not even the physical keys for braces
Fam, thanks but am looking for daily driving some sort of laptop, not a glorified smartphone.
I accept your take fully. Here’s why I still love it:
I have docks in any location where I plan to work for an extended period of time. “The smallest device which can run x86/x64 code” is what I look for in the handheld device I carry around with me that isn’t company issued.
You’re right about one thing, though. It and the surface go 2 before it are items I targeted when I saw the use that others were getting out of their iOS and Android tablets. I wanted a device that still gives me access to calibre for e-book sorting and the time waste-y low resource usage portion of my steam library even if I’m on an airplane. The pocket, as well as a charger, a slim bluetooth mouse, and an e-reader all fit in a pouch not much larger than a case for a study bible. I can pull that out of my travel backpack and tuck it in the pocket of the seat in front of me, then I don’t have to fight with any of my carry-on luggage during the flight. I take a bluetooth controller or two with me if I’m going to be somewhere for more than a few days, and then when I’m back at the hotel I can hook this same tiny device up to the TV in the hotel room and play emulated games or resource friendly steam games.
I’ve been using laptops my whole life, and it seems like whenever I’m using the built in display, it’s already a poor environment for productivity. Portability gets my attention in its stead.
The 2nd from top has two lightning sparks. To charge the laptop, I have to connect them to the two holes in my outlet, right?
Yes, they should totally bring back the firewire port!
I believe that the topmost (M1?) MacBook still has a headphone Jack on the other (right-hand) side.
PS: by no means am I an apple fanboy, but I inherited an old Retina MacBook Pro that I installed Linux on and now use as my daily driver. It still holds up extremely well considering it’s 11 years old. The only ports it’s really missing is an RJ45 and (nowadays) USB-C.
I believe post intel macs can’t run linux. Practically useless
Asahi Linux. Fedora has a distro based off of it
Man I always forget about asahi linux. Thanks for reminding me.
I actually prefer the standardization here. Sick of having 2 boxes of different cords.
Problem: This is what happens when you pick Apple.
Not Lenovo, my ThinkPad P1 has lots of nice ports
I’m okay with USB-C and a headphone jack on my laptop. The other shit is for the birds.
Not all. If I dont get 2 USB-A ports, I ain’t buying. Fortunately thinkpads still have them
well… the new one has gained some ports back, also usb c is absolutely OP (if you have the money for the Accessories lel)
Dude, those two little UBS-C ports do 50x what the ports on the bottom laptop could do
They can’t do anything if you don’t have a usb c device to connect to it. Ethernet? Hdmi? A simple fucking memory stick?
I just wish they would give us more than two ports, one of them is the power port anyway so technically they’re only giving you one port, which I think is about three ports too few.
It’s not like the power port is power only, or even only power or accessory. It can do both at the same time.
It cannot do both at the same time. That is demonstrably untrue. It’s either a power port or it’s a data port and if it’s been a power port then it is by definition not a data port.
$$$$$$$$$
I’m glad I can plug in one port and have a dual display setup, all peripherals, speakers, ethernet, charging, etc connected at my desk in one go.
If I want to leave, unplug one thing and I’m good to go.
Yup, and that’s fantastic if you’re working at a consistent desk or something. I have a USB-C hub at home and a USB-C monitor at work, which is pretty nice.
However, what’s not nice is connecting ad-hoc. Let’s say I go to an unfamiliar meeting room, HDMI is the way to go. Or if I’m going to plug in to my TV at a rental property or something. Or I’m at a friend’s house and I want to transfer a bunch of data and they have a USB-A drive. I’m not going to bring a hub around with me everywhere I go, I’d prefer to just plug in whatever I need into the laptop directly.
USB-C is great, not having other options as well isn’t great. Give me 2-3 USB-C ports that can all do charging, display out, and data, and also give me a handful of other ports (HDMI, USB-A, RJ-45, headphone jack, etc). It’s very rare to find a laptop too thin to support it, most “thin” laptops are merely curved at the edge to make it look thin, when really it’s plenty thick to support even full-fat RJ-45 (which it doesn’t even need to, I’ve seen thin laptops with a flip-down port).
Outside the Apple world, a dock connector has been the norm way before USB C was invented.
I miss actual dock connectors. Cramming everything into a single USB-C connection has always been problematic for me. I have a lot of stuff.
My work laptop has a USB-C dock where I have Ethernet (1000mbps), three display port displays, mouse, keyboard, wireless headset dongle, and a dual head USB to displayport adapter.
That’s a lot of bandwidth.
I frequently have little problems keeping everything working correctly.
Luckily, I don’t push high bandwidth video though any display for work, so generally I don’t see many bandwidth problems.
To be fair, USB-C, especially with Thunderbolt, is much more universal. There are adapters for pretty much every “legacy” port out there so if you really need FireWire you can have it, but it’s clear why FireWire isn’t built into the laptop itself anymore.
The top MacBook Pro is also the 2016+ pre Apple Silicon chassis (that was also used with M chips, but sort of as a leftover), while the newer MacBook Pro chassis at least brought back HDMI and an SD card reader (and MagSafe as a dedicated charging port, although USB-C still works fine for that).
Considering modern “docking” solutions only need a single USB-C/Thunderbolt cable for everything, these additional ports only matter when on the go. HDMI comes in handy for presentations for example.
I’d love to see at least a single USB-A port on the MacBook Pro, but that’s likely never coming back. USB-C to A adapters exist though, so it’s not a huge deal. Ethernet can be handy as well, but most use cases for that are docked anyway.
I like the Framework concept the most, also “only” 4 ports (on the 13" at least, plus a built-in combo jack), but using adapter cards you can configure it to whatever you need at that point in time and the cards slide into the chassis instead of sticking out like dongles would. I usually go for one USB-C/Thunderbolt on either side (so charging works on either side), a single USB-A and video out in the form of DisplayPort or HDMI. Sometimes I swap the video out (that also works via USB-C obviously) for Ethernet, even though the Ethernet card sticks out. For a (retro) LAN party, I used 1 USB-C, USB-A (with a 4-port hub for wired peripherals), DisplayPort and Ethernet.
It’s your fault if you buy it
