It is very nice move from the Dell [0], and also now Lenovo to bring 16:10 display in laptops. It was always for me strange decision, when laptop manufactures decided to use 16:9 displays for all, even for pricey, high-end models. I am highly enthusiastic to see 16:10 displays back after ten years, when numerous notebooks had 15.4" display.
Also, I would venture a guess - a lot of us are not laptop-gamers and as such, do not look forward to those '>=120Hz' display-panel technologies companies are dedicating so much resources into. A significant part of the reason I'm about to buy an external monitor is the 16:9 ratio vertically challenged little screen on my laptop. This new trend ought to catch on.
>= 120Hz is great for everything, not just games. Moving your mouse (or scrolling) on a 60Hz monitor after you've used something higher is like looking at a slide show.
For example, on a 60Hz monitoring, try panning around a Google Map and reading the labels. They just become a mushy blur. On a higher refresh-rate display, you can read the labels as they move. (I always found this to be an interesting demo: https://testufo.com/persistence)
Nice website, thanks for linking it. But, it looks like I'm in the minority here - having always worked on 60Hz screen computers and never finding myself wishing for higher refresh rate than a better screen ratio. Perhaps, personally speaking, my priorities are different.
ThinkPad T61 models changed from 1400x1050 (SXGA+) to 1440x900 (WXGA+) when they went widescreen.
They literally just lopped off 150 vertical pixels. There wasn’t some corresponding gain in horizontal space. You could fit the same number of xterms side-by-side on either laptop.
Yea, seriously. When did the whole taller windows are for productivity vs wider for media folks, decide this as obvious and undeniable?
It's just a preference!
The most workflow obessesed tiling window manager people tend to expect a two column, (one with a tall window, with a 2 or 3 rows in the other) approach by default. Often 3 columns.
Wider (and, crucially: shorter) displays were foisted on us by the majority of computer users being heavy media consumers the desire to consolidate supply chains.
The efficacy of a 16:10 (or 5:2) screen is undeniable.
I’ve been looking for a good 16:10 screen to replace my aging Dell U2412M’s for over 5 years at this point.
The 3840x2400 16:10 on the new XPS 17" is very nice. It was a substantial increase from the older 15" i9 mac I use for work. Well worth the extra $400 for it over the 1900x1200 version for me.
I just updated my personal laptop with the dell xps 17 largely because it has a glorious 16:10 screen. My only complaints with the machine is the tiny torx screws on back are very fragile - got an M.2 drive waiting to go in it so I can do my linux install. Lovely screen, decent keyboard and trackpad. All in all, pretty happy with it.
I stripped a couple of screws on my XPS 13 and was about to break the bottom panel out of anger & frustration.
Instead I bought a new, quality set of screwdrivers and managed to open it, then replaced torx screws with phillips head M2x3 screws. Highly recommend.
Weird. I bought a torx screwdriver to open my new XPS 13, and the screwdriver stripped. I bought a better screwdriver, and didn't have any problems with the screws or screwdriver after that.
(Stripped screwdriver was Husky brand from Home Depot, better screwdriver was a less-expensive, higher-quality one from Harbor Freight.)
The label is on the back. The front is a clear lid which shows the flexible extension, a straight extension, the screwdriver (black and green), then four rows of bits.
It's a pretty decent set. It's kind of funny though, the warning label on the back says to wear "heavy duty work gloves during use."
To add to this, Phillips screws are designed to cause the screwdriver to cam out. This is done so you can’t over torque the screw hole. This also makes them really annoying sometimes.
(A bit off topic) Two months ago, on reddit there was interesting finding and discussion about low quality screws in Dell laptops [0]. Also, if you look for "screw" phrase in r/Dell you will might find that problem is more common than occasional and touches many models, especially noticeable in XPSes.
Working on most laptops is relatively easy but you still need couple relatively inexpensive tools.
If you ever venture into disassembling a laptop I would highly suggest some protection against static electricity. Most damage from static discharge on induced current is not immediately apparent but may manifest itself in crashes, slowdowns and other ways.
Oh c'mon, many laptops in last decade had 1366x768 display and many people still downscale theirs 1920x1080 into 1600x900 or 1440x810, because they have problems to comfortable see and read text from screen :)
Dell D-series are at least twelve years old [0] (example model with 16:10 display [1]).
Edit: I would love to have same resolution (1680x 1050) available from linked D830 (2007) in mine HP Probook 4340s (2012), which I used at university and Unity3D course. It had scrumpy 1366x768.
It kills me when I see people downscale their displays to be able to read their text. But I blame the OS developers for this: the display settings should allow you to scale the graphical elements according to your preference.
Yeah... exactly. If I remember there were two drivers. One was entertainment (movies look good on 16:9 although I prefer to have the black bar for subtitles) and another was keyboard. Wider screen meant more space for keyboard with full sized keys which meant smaller laptops possible at the same diagonal.
Also worth mentioning that shallower screen at the same diagonal has less area.
16:9 is popular because its cheaper for the same amount of inches (which people put in ads), because the area is smaller. Also, production numbers are higher because TV screens are also 16:9.
I've just bought a Lenovo laptop on a rush because my XPS 13 died (as usual, it works fine again now that I have a new laptop to replace it :)
It's nice and all, but it has a 3cm wide useless black bezel below the screen that screams "I should have a 16:10 display!!!". At least this one has 3 USB ports, a full size HDMI port and a camera cover...
I have a new Dell XPS15, and the "ultra narrow bezel" kind of drives me crazy. I tend to do a lot of terminal based work, in full screen mode, and my fingers block the lower several lines of the screen when I'm using the on-laptop keyboard. It's a great laptop otherwise, and most of the day I'm using it at a desk with external keyboard so it doesn't matter.
(full disclosure, It's my first non-thinkpad laptop in decades, and I didn't pay for it, my job did).
3:2 is the best. The Microsoft Surface line used 3:2 a lot (always?), and the Google Pixelbook. 16:10 is still better than 16:9, but I want more things to be 3:2.
Meta but why is it called 16:10 instead of 8:5? Ratios should be brought down to the lowest common denominator, just like every other standard aspect ratio, no?
Probably for an easier direct comparison with 16:9, which has been the de-facto standard for years. Without having to do any math, you immediately know that the screen is proportionally taller than a 16:9 screen would be, which makes for easier marketing.
> I stated in my last post that the industry is going to go through yet another display ratio change over the next year or so.
> For years we've had 4:3 “square” displays. These have all but disappeared from the market as the current standard is 16:10 “wide.”
> The industry is about to move yet again to true 16:9 wide. This means that the ratio of your PC display will match that of your HDTV. This change won't happen overnight, but will phase in gradually. In fact, it's already started. Many of the newest consumer notebooks, especially in the 15″ class now sport the more rectangular 16:9 display.
> Again, we can thank the LCD manufacturers for this change. By cutting everything in the same aspect ratio, they have less waste per large sheet of glass. Since these manufacturers make more selling TV displays than laptop displays, the PC vendors have almost zero say in this change. We simply have to adapt. As much as I would like it to be so, 4:3 is not coming back.
> For readers of this blog, yes, I had our team run the math. In order to provide a high end IPS display option, we'd need well over 15,000 confirmed orders to make it even worth considering. This is due to minimum order quantities, creating models, stocking replacement parts for years to come, etc. If someone enterprising wants to create a database of (legitimate) credit card numbers of confirmed, non-cancellable orders, I'm sure that it would get some attention around here. (For you legal types, this does not constitute an offer to sell.)
I'm glad to see a resurgence of 16:10 screens. I'm waiting to see bezels shrink to the point I'll have a nearly 15" 16:10 screen in a 14" laptop body, not to have a number pad.
I am so glad that there's been a 16:9 backlash. It makes no sense on smaller screens the you have to work from. It's ok for phones, since you need to hold them in your hand in portrait so some narrowness makes sense, and for smaller tablets that are designed just for watching video. But I love that iPads are still (mostly) 4:3, and 16:10 is an ok balance for laptops and desktop monitors (though I'd probably prefer 4:3 there as well).
As a programmer I would really like to have more choices of 3:2 or even 4:3 aspect ratio laptops (because of the added vertical space, which is really much more valuable when working mostly with text on fairly small displays). For 3:2 I'm only aware of the MS Surface and Huaewei MateBook laptops, and Thinkpads were probably the last 4:3 laptops(?).
The MateBook really is a nice looking laptop. The folks I've known that have purchased them have all run into reliability issues within a year (non-booting machines, spacebar stops working, other weird things) I looked into them before I bought my Thinkpad X1C. I still like that screen though.
Sometimes I feel like the only one who likes bezels. They provide a nice, distraction-free buffer between the screen and the background. You can also pick up sturdier laptops by the bezel, without worrying about getting fingerprints on the screen.
Of course, I also like more screen space, so it's a wash in the end. And I prefer small bezels in multi-monitor setups. So I guess I understand why they're going out of style.
I have a Huawei matebook x pro, which is 3:2 and has a 91% STB ratio in a 14" form factor. Unless you want the bezels to disappear completely, I don't see things getting much better.
"the new model is even smaller and lighter, with a weight of less than 1 kg. To achieve this, Lenovo uses a slightly smaller 48 Wh battery and also slashes most ports that are present on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon"
Sounds like the X1 Nano is marginally better than a Macbook (the super small one, not Air or Pro).
I'm on my second X1 Carbon gen-5 (third X1C overall), and it already has nearly the fewest ports I prefer in a laptop. While I could do without the headphone jack (controversial I know) and Ethernet port (proprietary? I lost the OEM adapter long ago), I think two each of USB-C and USB-A is minimal enough.
USB-C for power
USB-A for yubikey nano
One of each for expansion
It's too bad there aren't more high-res (2k+) laptops in the slim form factor that Intel used to call "ultrabooks". I was really hoping the Purism Librem 14 would have that as an option.
edit: ...and I'm unwilling to give up anymore battery life as long as it's used for video conferencing
If a challenger doesn't appear soon, I may have to look into stitching together my Chromebook Plus display (12.3" 2400x1600, 3:2, with Touch Screen) to some new AMD laptop body.
I disagree, many people use laptops as replacement desktop these days so having expansion ports is important. My new job gave me an X1 Carbon with only two USB type A ports and this is my workstation now. If I want to use any accessories like a mouse or external keyboard (set the laptop on a stand so it's level with an external monitor), I immediately run into an issue with having enough expansion room.
If you're doing nothing but sitting in meetings and taking notes, the battery life will follow due to the light use. But for many people, a laptop is as much of a computer as they'll ever use, so having the ability to expand is crucial.
USB-C hubs nicely solve the problem of plugging USB devices, a monitor and a charger into a laptop. Like the docking stations in old laptops, but far cheaper. If you have multiple 4K screens or very high speed I/O devices you may need Thunderbolt, but for most people USB-C is fine.
When can we get 3:2 aspect ratio laptops with zero (>95% screen to body ratio) bezels? So far the Surfaces have one part of this, and the XPSes have the second part.
My daily driver is a Huawei Matebook Pro, with exactly those specs... But a horribly placed camera and I think nowadays you can't even buy them in the US anymore.
Yes the Matebook does have 3:2 and no bezels, but it's Huawei, it's only 13 inches, and the processors are the 15 watt versions rather than the 45 watt ones. I'm thinking more of an LG Gram 17 inch or at least 15 inch with these specs.
I agree about the screen size. I'm really looking forward to next year's XPS 15, once they deal with the usual 'first model' issues.
That said, I haven't found a situation where the processor has been a problem, but that's probably a matter of workload. For software development, it has never been an issue. If you are re-encoding video for a living or doing CAD, maybe it could be an issue.
Clarity on resolution/DPI is important for me as I continue to use bitmap fonts in Linux which don't scale well with HiDPI. I think the resolution+DPI on the Microsoft Surface Laptop is perfect but I would prefer to go with Lenovo.
When Apple first eliminated all but two (or four) USB-C ports, there was a ton of vitriol towards Apple on HN. In the years since Apple’s move, both Dell and IBM have adopted Apple’s playbook and are in the process of eliminating ports, and there are no comments on how everyone will need dongles to connect peripherals or get their work done.
- What has changed in our use of laptops over the last 12-months that dongles are no longer a pain point?
- Did Apple make the right and, dare I say it, bold call by removing a whole host of ports in lieu of standardizing on USB-C?
Dongles are still hell, I regularly still use USB-A and HDMI on my notebook.
My Toshiba Portegé X-30-D is coveted in our company as it has:
1x Full-Size USB3
1x Full-Size HDMI
2x Thunderbolt USB-C (Displayport Support on both)
Micro-SD Slot
Headphone Jack
32GB of Socketed DDR4 Ram
1TB NVMe SSD
Matté Full-HD Touchscreen
Windows Hello Face&Fingerprint Recognition
and weighs only 1,05 kg
The only bottleneck is the i7-7500U Dual-Core CPU that I got because I couldn't wait another generation and now I just don't know what to upgrade to. I hope once USB4 becomes available there will be a Ryzen 4800U successor powered notebook available that just MATCHES the rest of the specs of my current one.
What's nice about the way Lenovo is doing it is that they give a ton of different options for what you want and need. My X1 Extreme, for example, has a ton of different ports, 64GB of RAM, it's bigger, HDMI port, etc. The X1 Nano focuses on being lightweight and portable. If that's what I prefer and I don't mind it only having two USB-C ports, that's what I would go for. And I might! I'd be curious to see how much battery life it actually gets, and it has 5G.
What's dumb is that my "Pro" MacBook only has 4 Thunderbolt ports.
As one of those people who loves all the ports, I'll admit that the adapter situation has gotten a bit better. People/offices have adapted to the situation, where it has become standard to have a set of adapters attached to any display cable. And if not, usually someone has an adapter somewhere. I still find it frustrating that the costs of Apple's decision (followed by others) has effectively been subsidized by everyone else though.
Then in the lockdown, it has been months since I've found myself in that frustrating situation where I travel to someone else's office or a conference, they only have an HDMI input, I forgot my adapter, and nobody can seem to find someone who has the right adapter. I'm likely in the market for a laptop over the next 6-12 months, and 6 months ago I would have said for sure that my next laptop would have to have HDMI or bust, but now those pain points are definitely not top of mind.
I read that the X1 was developed with Intel, and thus they can't use AMD CPUs in that lineup. I don't know if it's true or not. It was a random reddit comment.
Time. I saw the HP Envy on Linus' Tech-tips review and the battery life on AMD CPUs is ridiculous. 14 hours on battery. For most people, you might be able to bring your laptop to work WITHOUT a power brick.
I'm personally not a fan of HP laptops, but i'm looking forward to AMD CPUs on thinkpad and Dell XPS laptops. There is no way there isn't going to be a X1 type laptop with an AMD CPU. Lenovo can't leave that kind of battery performance on the table without losing market share to Dell and HP.
14 hours compared to 13h for a similar intel based laptop. Not really that impressive. Correct me if I’m wrong, but most of the power consumption comes from the screen anyways.
It's impressive for AMD - they have had a not so stellar history with overheating, battery killing laptop CPUs. Also that's with 8C/16T as opposed to 4C/8T on Intel.
This is likely a product of Project Athena. Intel is spending a lot of money codeveloping flagship laptops with OEMs. That, of course, comes with CPU exclusivity.
I doubt it, but the nano is over 20% lighter, it's in a different class, a class that amd hasn't competed in until now.
I'm guessing amd will be in these kinds of ultra portables soon. Their cpus are flying off shelves, they're probably focused on the more lucrative server market for now.
Are the USB ports on both sides? One of the nice things about the 15" MBP is being able to charge it from either side. Also, having >= 3 ports allows me to keep a yubikey installed semi-permanently and still charge from either side. Nice to see more laptop manufacturers adopting less wide screens.
I would much rather someone made a laptop with a keyboard with sculptured keys and reasonably full key travel. I would be glad to lose a pound of lightness for that.
a) where does it say this? it says the machine will have 16 GB of ram, nothing about possible bonus upgrades one might be able to get (though maybe you followed some links in the article)
b) even if 16 GB is max: whoever it is that "needs" more than 16 GB probably won't go for an ultra light weight (< 1 kg = < 2.2 pounds) 13 inch machine for their use case. Seems like "mobility" is priority number one, not having some multi-tasking maverick
It's not my use case but I know developers commuting with 13" laptops (weight and size) and connecting them to a large monitor in their office and working with VMs and containers. 16 GB is the minimum, 32 GB is the best option.
Wouldn't you want something more powerful for that? Combining 15W cpu, ultralight, small form factor (constrained thermals) with 32GB for VMs and containers seems like a bad fit.
It's fine for running Kubernetes locally and IntelliJ. Chrome tends to be the HUGE offender in my setup. It can chew through so many Gigs just due to open tabs. The processor rarely is my roadblock. It's always memory.
You don't need a strong processor for VMs, just a lot of cores. And AMDs U processors can have upto 8 cores and upto 16 threads on their 15W ULV parts.
I just got an xps 13 and decided to go to with 32 gb
I may not desperately need it now but figured to future proof it for the nominal upgrade price. this laptop is going to last quite a while for me so might as well make it worth it.
Even 32 is starting to feel cramped nowadays, especially with all those Electron apps, VMs, containers and Intelij incarnations. My next laptop will have 64!
There are FPGA synthesis tools that recommend 32GB (Depending on the chip you are targeting). If you have to keep jumping between an office desk and an R&D lab then an ultrabook is convenient.
Arguably you can schedule an FPGA synthesis or bitstream generation job on a build server rather than locally but I am just saying this an example of a use-case.
Not really. It's a matter of which variable do you optimize for? There was a lot of Hackernews moaning on the thread for the blog post where the guy laments Kubernetes and its effect on etcd -- about how modern software is too complex and this and that.
But simplicity is not what they're optimizing for. They're optimizing for productivity -- specifically, how fast a typical corporate webdev shop can go from zero to working app. That's really the only thing that matters, because there's no room for something like Qt in today's move-fast-break-things environment. Qt means developing, compiling, testing, and supporting across multiple platforms which a modern webdev shop may not even be able to do if they had the budget for it (which they don't). Hell, there's barely room for any language besides JavaScript.
So hence, we get Electron and we get memory bloat. And it's perfectly reasonable, given the right perspective.
> But simplicity is not what they're optimizing for. They're optimizing for productivity
it's not only simplicity we're leaving on the table but efficiancy (resource usage) as well. this is not sustainable industry practice (see climate crisis, rare earth depletion).
the need for ever more hastly crafted apps is compareable to the need for cheap plastic toys from the 1-dollar store i.e highly questionable.
I'm using a 6/7 year old ASUS with 8gb of RAM. It has no problems running 20 Chrome tabs, Slack, Spotify, VSCode all at once. Are these programs really pushing people's laptops that hard, or is my laptop some kind of weird mega-performer?
I'm always confused why my experience never matches that of others in this arena. I run bare i3 and NeoVim. When I add Slack, Chrome and Spotify, I often see 12 Gigs of usage after a couple of days. Most of the time it comes down to Chrome's tabs... and Slack appearing to be leaky. I've recently started using an extension for Chrome which puts my tabs to sleep and frees the memory they were using. But still, I'm sitting at 8.33 Gigs of RAM used.
Chrome is bad with memory if you’re a tab hoarder, and some extensions can also be problematic. They have an update in the pipeline which will dramatically decrease memory use for background tabs.
I haven’t really seen the memory problems with slack, but we use the free slack without extensions. Maybe it has a similar problem with extensions?
Just curious, how many extensions do you have? I'm trying not to bloat my browser too much with them, but have 3-4 privacy related extensions and a couple of utility ones. Right now I have 22 tabs and Firefox uses 5-6 GB of RAM.
Restart decreases RAM usage, but Firefox slowly eats RAM again.
I remember recently I freed 10GB of RAM just by restarting Firefox. I literally looked at Ubuntu's System Monitor. And I keep everything updated.
Tried to play with settings in about:config, made even worse and reset.
I just checked mine my slack because I thought 300mb was too low for slack, mine is using 68mb, it used to chew like 1gb... Did they optimize it or something.
No optimisations here: Slack is using VIRT: 24.868g, RSS: 1.919g, SHR: 526924
Next highest single process is Firefox with 1G RSS and 5G Virt. I have 113 tabs open at the moment, although there's about 4G of RSS in "Web Content" processes which are firefox related.
Some of the software I write must work on various different Linux releases (with different kernels), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Haiku and Windows. This is realistically only possible because I have all these running in different VMs.
I'd like to add macOS to the mix but it's something of a pain to virtualize. I'm aware of hackintoshes but there seem to be a bunch of gotchas and it seems you can never upgrade them.
I also have some VMs where I need decent security guarantees and confinement, such as running different web services.
i think 1366x768 resolution on 15.6 inch screen is perfect in terms of UI elements size. like its a sweet spot between to small and too large with enought horizontal area.
physical width of such 15.6 inch screen is 34.53 cm so it gives you 0,025285037 cm per pixel.
so my "perfect" laptop would have 15.6 inch screen and 16:10 aspect ratio.
i would double the resolution in order to avoid fractional scaling and use 200% scaling so final resolution would be 2732x1708 - anyone can recommend something close to that on the market?
> Ultra-narrow bezel | 85% STB
It is very nice move from the Dell [0], and also now Lenovo to bring 16:10 display in laptops. It was always for me strange decision, when laptop manufactures decided to use 16:9 displays for all, even for pricey, high-end models. I am highly enthusiastic to see 16:10 displays back after ten years, when numerous notebooks had 15.4" display.
[0]: For example Dell Precision 5550 - https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...