The high end of the PC laptop spectrum has been neglected for years. I guess the market is just too small to care about. I have no idea where they're taking their profits if they're pushing down on the low-end prices too.
I've been looking for a new laptop for over 2 years, and nobody's been selling anything worthy of replacing what I'm already using, which was built in 2010. For a few brief months that year, HP made a wonderful MBP clone (magnesium alloy case, 1600x900 14" screen with edge-to-edge glass, SSD, etc). Soon after, that product line turned into the same plastic 1366x768 crap everyone else was selling, and that's been what's filled store shelves ever since. Meanwhile, my 2010 laptop is starting to fall apart, with dead pixels, an overheating GPU and lost battery capacity.
I am looking forward to buying an ASUS UX301 this November to replace it. That's the first and only Ultrabook-class laptop I've seen since 2010 that'll actually be an "upgrade" without buying some thick "gaming" monstrosity. It'll have a Haswell i7-4558U, which comes with the Intel HD 5100 graphics, the first Intel integrated graphics chip to outmatch the 3-year-old Radeon in my current laptop. Plus 8GB RAM, 512GB of RAID-0 SSD, an all metal and glass case and up to 9 hours of battery life. Assuming this PC in that configuration actually makes it to market.
What's amazing to me is that this many months after Haswell parts started showing up in stores, that one ASUS laptop is still the only announced product by any name-brand manufacturer with the i7-4558U/HD 5100 parts. Every other new/"refreshed" laptop that'll be in stores this holiday season will either have an integrated GPU incapable of playing games well on the higher resolution screens they ship with, or give up its thickness and battery life for a discrete GPU.
Just getting something above "don't suck" seems extremely hard. I have a Dell Vostro 1510, it was basically the cheapest Dell laptop with available discrete graphics at the time I bought it, haven't had any problems. My wife used it to do CAD stuff, and it was fully worth the $700 or so we paid for it. While not "extreme gaming level", the modern version of this doesn't even appear on the dell website anymore from a quick glance.
I agree with you 100%. If you're not a Mac guy there seems to be a lack of premium options. When it becomes available I'm going to opt for the UX302 which should have a 2560x1440 screen and a GeForce GT 730M GPU.
UX302 is 1920x1080 with 6GB RAM. UX301 is the one with the 2560x1440 screen. It's a weird pair; they gave the discrete GPU to the one with the lower res screen.
Presumably they're assuming most people going for a 2560x1440 screen are buying it for productivity software / readability where most of the software does not need all that much graphics performance.
Hahaha. You should try it and come back apologize for your ignorance.
Installing Linux with all the customized hardware inside, just get an X screen/GUI is non-trivial, even on old Macs. Check out the Bumblebee Project to get an idea of how painful it is to just leverage the two graphics cards properly. This is not to mention even on Debian Wheezy (stable), you will load without the proper HW-interfacing components to spin up the fan. You can see how that is dangerous for an amateur, and you will know three hours later while configuring when your thighs turn bright red. Not that it happened to me though.
This is just one small thing, go to any Linux distro wiki, how about Debian for example[1] if you cannot tell my bias, and read the MacBook page, then read all the personal blog posts, for old and new Macs and see the pain it takes. Even though it is annoying, I will give them credit as properly the only laptop popular enough to force even barely useable UEFI support. But Macs also half-ass that too.
Seriously, if you are a Mac fan, but like Linux, you will end up in the end saying fuck Apple for all the unintentional pain they inflict on you. But hey, at least they invented cups, so how much can I complain?
Because MBP hardware is not good enough. I have had to use a rMBP since April, and it just hate it. I don't care if it's extremely thin if it's running _that_ hot. I have to stick with it as I need to use OSX (what I also dislike), otherwise I'd buy a Dell Venue Pro 11 with an external dock or something like that.
Apple's emphasis on how it looks over function has always been a double edge sword. The lack of docking station, from both the hardware and software side, was the second most constant push back I received when asking about swapping the Dells out.
With TB ports and the like it could have been worked out to one cable instead of an edge connector, yet they seem to have zero interest in the business.
I have run Windows 7 even as primary at times but in the end went back to a Dell for work put an iMac back on my home desktop.
I have a third party dock for my late 2011 MBP and OS X always gets confused when I dock and undock when it's sleeping. It doesn't always detect my monitors (DVI and USB), sometimes the keyboard doesn't wake it up, sometimes it just crashes a black screen. So while the dock itself works pretty well, OS X doesn't feel like it's well tested in that type of scenario.
Isn't that the idea behind the word "premium"? This seems to be very similar to the "we can't find any programmers to hire" chant of Big Business -- nobody can find a decent laptop at the price they're willing to pay. Because the price they're willing to pay is ridiculous and below-cost, especially when all the other laptops are loss-leaders and the premium models make up the difference.
My point was that, if you don't like the operating system and are going to use a different one, why pay a premium for the hardware when you can get substantially better performance for the same price from any of a number of providers? Because the Macbook is sexy and that's worth paying the premium?
Don't get me wrong, the MBP does look nice. And plenty of people are clearly willing to throw lots of money at Apple for both the real and perceived benefits of the premium price. But if performance per dollar is my concern --and I'm forgoing the operating system, one of the "real" benefits IMHO-- numerous other competitors blow Apple out of the water.
"Performance per dollar" is a strange qualifier for a laptop. If you want something small, portable, and powerful, maybe one of those Mac Pro cylinders might suit you when they come out. If you don't (much) care about portability at all, just build something in a mini-ITX case with a handle, and throw it in the boot of your car.
The point of a laptop is good, light, sturdy industrial design, long battery life, and quality interaction features (solid keyboard, responsive touchpad, good webcam, flat SPL curve on speakers, etc.), while optimizing performance given that. That's what you're paying the Apple premium for, not the OS. Those qualities remain when you run Windows on the hardware.
You can get a $2,500 MBP, work on it for 3 years, and resell it for $700 or so after. So, that's $1,800 for 3 years, or about $12/week. So the price is reasonable if its something you use to make money or use all the time. Plus, with MBP you get OSX out of the box, plus it runs Linux and Windows, or all 3. Even if OSX is not your cup of tea, it's nice to have OSX available if you like to play with iOS development.
I have a friend who keeps bugging me about how expensive MBPs are. I asked him to find a better laptop for the money. I care about the following, in order: quality of screen, quality of keyboard, tough case, light wight, long betters life, fast hd, fast CPU, good gfx card. So far no results :) I actually kind of wish there was more choice in the high end market. I have seen a few nice ultrabooks, but they cost as much as a Mac, if not more, so what's the point?
The price of everything is reasonable if instead of comparing it against alternatives, you compare it against not buying anything.
For example, $1000 shoes that last 1 year are reasonable when compared to going without shoes - only $3 a day, and you'll save money that you would have to pay to repair damage to your bare feet.
Could you find a better pair of shoes for less than $1000? Where's the gold leaf, and why do they lace up the front rather than snap up the sides? I think not.
My argument is that you can not find a laptop with a nicer screen and keyboard, with good battery life, durable case, light frame, and amazingly fast HD for less money then an rMBP would cost you. And given that's its only $12/week, why not choose the best tool for the job, especially if your job is working on your laptop.
Of course, same arguments can be applied to almost anything, but this thread was about premium laptops. You can't have a premium laptop that's also very cheep.
Add to that a 250GB SSD and drop the ram to 8GB (for fair comparison) and the price is $1,430. Similar MacBook Air is $1,550. So, for extra $120 you get better screen, much nicer touchpad, light up keyboard, an OPTION to run OSX, and way nicer design.
The X1 Carbon is kind of nice. But same thing applies. Low res screen is a letdown, and by the time you load it up to be comparable to say, rMBP, it's about the same price.
Well, I have observed that boosting your RAM to 16G gives you much better performance because you almost never swap to disk. To get 16GB on a MacBook, you are looking north of $2000.
I've been shopping for a decent replacement for my Lenovo x220. Best I've found so far is the System76 Galago. It looks pretty nice with an i7-4750HQ, Intel Iris Pro 5200 GPU, 16G RAM, etc.
The 5200 GPU and 90W AC adapter were good hints for what a search turned up -- a 4 hour or less battery life despite a big, heavy 52WH battery (compared to 8 hours for a 5100 and smaller battery). This is one of those "gaming monstrosities" I mentioned. For a couple percent speed bump over a 3-year-old 2nd-gen computer, and relatively unappealing styling, I agree with the reviews which seem to be "avoid". I can only imagine how hot it gets that it needs venting around both sides and the entire rear of the case.
I have one. Doesn't get hot. CPU clocks down a lot when on battery, so "gaming monstrosity" only more or less valid when on AC. Battery perf in general not great, 3-4 hours in my experience. As a mobile workstation pretty good, only real bummer is that the keyboard is crap - not a good option if you plan to type tons on it (but you might get used to it; I for one just use an external ergonomic keyboard).
Well that's a drag. Guess I'll hold my breath that Lenovo doesn't completely gut their line and comes out with something decent. Though reading a few reviews, that Asus doesn't look to bad.
Lenovo just released the Ideapad Yoga 2 Pro, for the $1,149 model you get a 13" 3200 x 1800 touch screen display, core i5 haswell, 256Gb SSD and 8Gb of RAM.
They will also release a Thinkpad Yoga in november, with less attractive specs unfortunately - it'll be a 12.5" 1920 x 1080 display. (Which is unfortunate for me since I can't live without a Trackpoint on a laptop and only the Thinkpad model offers it)
I don't understand systems like this -- much like most of what's been in stores since 2011. It's got a nice, high resolution screen, and the absolute slowest integrated graphics they can match with it. An HD 4400 can barely keep up with its own panel and a small external monitor let alone run a 5-year-old game on it.
For just a little more money they could've put at least an HD 5100 part in it. While the TDP would be higher, the higher-TDP Haswell parts still idle at very low wattages, so when you're not using the extra power they get similar battery life, but it's there when you want it.
The performance difference between the 4400 and 5100 is huge. It's on par with an older discrete Radeon/GeForce chip.
Thing is their IdeaPad Yoga isn't an X220 replacement. X220 offers two full-speed cores (2x3.2 GHz) with higher TDP, 16GByte RAM, ExpressCard 54 slot, optional WWAN, matte display, TrackPoint, ThinkVantage system update, replaceable batteries up to 95Wh, yada yada yada.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the X240 to not become an Ultrabook. So far it looks like a downgrade, or at most like Lenovo managed to put in FullHD over a course of two years.
The Asus UX301 is a beautiful machine, but I disagree that the last few years have been barren for the high-end market. My problem is that everybody has just been making copycat machines that look just like Macs.
I've had i think 3 versions of the same. It's always tried to break the mould in design. They tried funky designer covers in the past. Lately they've been going with the metallic finish of macbooks on the outside(but better in my opinion). On the inside its the black soft touch finish(which feels so much more warm than an MBP). I also own an MBP btw.
The one thing that PC laptops are getting wrong is the battery. The MBP battery outperforms the dell by atleast 2-3 times. But for me that's not an issue, since i work plugged in most of the time.
Also the first thing i do is remove windows and install Linux. The machine boots in like 3 seconds flat. I've not had any issues with drivers or anything.
I have the same problem with MBP, but anyways i usually sit with the light source in front of me, not behind. It's a good idea to do that anyway(although sometimes you may not have a choice i suppose)
Not working under fluorescent lighting helps. I've never noticed lights reflecting at me from my glossy screens, but I am usually working from home, not in an office building with office lighting.
The whole PC market has been a disaster. It's been like 6 years and PC makers still can't come up with a decent Mac Mini clone! When they do, it's more expensive, and then is discontinued in 18 months.
I think all those years of churning out bland clones made them lose their expertise. They can't execute on something like a Mac Mini or a high end laptop. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it appears that these are difficult problems that take competence.
It's not clear there's enough of a market for a Mac Mini clone unless - like Apple - you can control the entire market to make sure there are no competing desktop machines, SFF or otherwise.
Those boxes are small, but not exactly good looking. There's a plethora of companies releasing these compact form factor PCs. They also all look practically identical.
All of these "mac mini" style machines target the low end market. They all have low end processors & video cards. I have yet to see a premium machine like the mac mini that is available in a small form factor.
Ditto. I'm waiting for the Haswell machines to come out. I'm considering the Thinkpad T440 or T440s (whichever falls within my budget). It's been previewed, but not available yet. No pricing info. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t440/
>Configure your T440 with an HD+ (1600 x 900 resolution) LCD display with high brightness and enjoy a premium visual experience. For enhanced navigation configure your T440 with 10-point multitouch.
Desktops are neglected as well. My i2600K@5GHz is still best CPU I can put into desktop. Other components are stagnating, some are even increasing their value.
I will have to buy server hardware on my next upgrade.
The 5100 and 5200 integrated GPUs are as fast or faster than some discrete GPUs in previous generations' high-end laptops, which themselves are plenty to play many games at medium-high settings. They're a leap ahead of the old Intel HD 4xxx stuff.
Plus, it looks goofy. I'm not 17 and don't want to carry around a laptop that glows neon green at tech conferences or coffee shops.
Asus sold a 1080p ultrabook last year that had a dedicated graphics chip. It was an amazing machine, that almost no one knew about.
One thing to remember is that you are replacing a MBP with an ultrabook, a more fair comparison is to look at the specs in the Macbook Air, to which many ultrabooks compete in terms of thickness and weight.
It's not something I look for, that's how manufacturers are starting to sell large SSDs in laptops. They're soldered to the motherboard, and doubled up in hardware RAID. It's about wear levelling so that they last, not performance. The failure modes of an SSD aren't the same as spinning disks; RAID 0 is less risky, not more risky AFAIK.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that SSDs are just a series of flash memory chips that add up to the capacity you're sold, plus some extra to use when cells go bad.
If you buy a 256GB SSD, you're probably buying 8 32GB chips and a controller.
Here, you're buying 16 instead of 8 chips, but two controllers. So they call it "two drives in RAID-0", but it's very little different from one SSD.
It's not 16 times more likely to fail; I think the annual SSD failure rate is about 30% that of a spinning disk. Even if the double controllers means a double failure rate, it's still statistically more reliable than a single new spinning disk.
This is a bad thing for the industry. Every time someone buys a junky $300 laptop filled with bloatware from HP, Dell, eMachines, etc. they are going to have a mediocre experience at best. Then they buy a $200 tablet from Amazon or Google, a $300 iPad Mini or a $500 iPad that while all of those devices should be less powerful, they deliver a MUCH BETTER end user experience.
HP, Dell, Lenovo need to stop selling the bottom of the barrel hardware with bottom of the barrel Windows experiences. The end business result is they are working really hard to sell a zero margin product only to watch Intel and Microsoft turn a tidy profit.
If HP, Dell, and Lenovo want to stay in the game long term, they need to stop catering to the low end.
I got an HP Chromebook, and it was amazing. Smooth interface. Slim. Light. Fast. It was only $300. Only thing preloaded was a 100gb Google Drives offer, which isn't bad.
Great as a side-laptop for personal reading / email.
Will it be? Screens in low end laptops are not changing so far. It's the same abysmal resolution for quite a while now. The higher end (> $800) are getting better now finally.
Well it opens up the opportunity with supplying school systems with a far cheaper solution. I have seen far too many stories where systems wanted to or did go out and buy the Apple products at far greater prices. The story is always the same, the software was more mature, greater emphasis on education.
Well if open source supporters ever wanted the perfect market its education. Books are going to be gone, it will be an education system of tablets and the like, where are the big projects to put down an open source solution? (admittedly I haven't found any that stood out but I may be looking in the wrong places)
I'm sure it's a bad data point, but I bought an HP 2000-240CA in 2011 and it's been the best laptop I've ever had. It's been apart and back together a few times for regular maintenance (wore the keyboard out and just recently the fan was caked with dust). I like that it's a beater and goes with me everywhere.
Simple and cheap at $340 new in 2011.
I use it for web development and playing older or indie games.
You wore out the keyboard in only two years, and you're willing to call it the best laptop you've ever had? You must have quite the collection of laptop repair horror stories.
Hah! What I meant was that it's a beater laptop that I've banged around and carried everywhere with me. And it's always worked. It's so low cost that I didn't give replacing the keyboard and taking it apart to dust the fan a second thought.
It's the difference between driving a Ferrari and worrying about a minor scratch and driving a station wagon through a muddy road.
Since it said Haswell-based with touchscreens, they're almost definitely talking about Windows. Android/ChromeOS tablets don't need that kind of power (and they won't pay Intel's premium where it'd be wasted). The "Ultrabook" moniker is also controlled by Intel which requires a touchscreen to use that label.
Pretty much all the major PC makers have new laptops they announced at trade shows in July/Aug/Sept that they've been holding back until November. They'll be shipping with Windows 8.1 which they couldn't do if they put them on shelves in the summer.
> Android/ChromeOS tablets don't need that kind of power (and they won't pay Intel's premium where it'd be wasted).
Wouldn't be so sure. Acer has a Haswell Chromebook out already, and if Intel really wants to stave off ARM, they'll come down...
And while Chromebooks work with low powered CPUs, they're better with a faster CPU. WebGL is getting real, Google already has Nacl in the browser (examples are 'From Dust', 'Bastion'), and as web apps become more 'native-like', the extra power will be appreciated.
I said this here a while ago. Intel had only 2 options, and they are both bad for them:
1) keep going up market, and be disrupted in the most classical way possible
2) compete with ARM on price, which is unsustainable for a company like Intel
Not only is Intel used to high margins on its chips, but it's also a very small player in the mobile world, and the PC world is shrinking continuously, so "making it up" in the PC market won't cut it.
Also, if they're promoting "$300 Haswell notebooks", virtually nobody will buy $700-$1000 notebooks in the future, and Intel will never be able to raise prices, and their profits, again.
Whether Intel will die like Blackberry and Nokia (yes, I consider the acquisition as dying, since it was a move out of bankruptcy desperation) or will survive as a tiny shadow of what they used to be, I'm unsure.
I suppose it's possible for them to survive as a company that is 1/10 of what they used to be, if they really compete on price, and make radical changes within the company (end all unprofitable/low volume divisions and fire execs or engineers that are too expensive). But that really depends on how willing they are to make those hard decisions.
> Not only is Intel used to high margins on its chips, but it's also a very small player in the mobile world, and the PC world is shrinking continuously, so "making it up" in the PC market won't cut it.
They are also fab leaders, at 22nm while everyone else is at 32nm. So, e.g. they could manufacture ARMs, and command a premium (say, for apple, leapfrogging them 2 years ahead of the competition).
The striking thing is that, per Hz, x86 is still far more powerful than ARM (like, integer factors, I've heard x5). If they can get the power consumption low enough and/or more performance is needed in phones/tablets, they could possibly win (though it seems unlikely).
Their best bet is to lead the next disruptive category - watches or glasses or whatever it is - but unfortunately their bias towards performance over power consumption doesn't bode well for them.
The cheapie Bay Trail convertibles seem like, potentially, the much more awesome--lighter, more touch-tastic and fun--revenge of the netbook. The 'problem,' such as it is, is that lots of the target audience already has tablets or faster small laptops, sort of squeezing the convertibles from either side. That and that Win8 can't seem to catch a break.
It's time for Linux on the Bay Trail :) Seriously, this could be a good alternative to Windows 8, especially with the increasing amount of games with Steam for Linux.
In my experience battery life is half in Linux (ubuntu to be fair) what I get in Windows. I don't know why this is but I don't tend to recommend Linux to laptop users because of this.
Have you tried recently ? In the latest kernels the situation is not as bad as it used to be. I am not sure, however, how well the Bay Trail will be supported in that regard.
$99 tablets have been a reality for a long time at various sizes, or up to quad core CPUs for 7" tablets. In fact, ~$49 tablets (mostly 7") have been around for a while.
Just not with Intel CPUs.
Expect prices to drop again and specs to be revised up in the run up to christmas, which means Intel is still on the trailing edge in the low end of the tablet market.
At the $99 price point, price differences matter less , and if Intel can some how offer a more compelling product (maybe by using windows) , it could be interesting.
I really really miss my 5 year old old Lenovo T61p! 1400*1050 is the perfect screensize for me and the Core 2 Duo would still be fast enough for most applications. Perhaps I will buy one on ebay for 220 Euro...
A small, light notebook with a good battery for $300 is pushing into impulse buy territory for me, with the condition that it's not an enormous pain to install linux on. I will be watching closely.
I'd buy something similar: a convertable made from SONY that can run GNU / Linux / *BSD, except with much more RAM and SSD. For: $199- since we get taxed heavily for shipping here. I'll need to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 1121 soon.
What's even more intriguing is that you can now flush the firmware on the 2012 model and it becomes just a regular PC that you can install windows/osx/linux in the regular way with no faffing about. Hopefully the same will be done for these new models.
Arch on an HP Chromebook 14" sounds for $299 sounds awesome to me.
This would not be an unheard of tactic for Intel (go for cheap) but it seems ill advised against ARM. I get the 'Quark' but I don't get trying to sell a Haswell CPU at Cortex A9 prices. That seems like it would be jumping the gun. Of course the issues at 14nm may be worse than we thought and Intel needs this for cashflow but still, I'm guessing ZDNet hype.
I'd say it's a mistake that's common enough to be forgivable when made by the general public, but I doubt you'll find any grammatically reputable source that says it's not a mistake. The article gets it right elsewhere.
(We're talking about "it could be bad timing for Amazon and it's new Kindle Fire HDX tablet", right?)
> it could be bad timing for Amazon and it's new Kindle Fire HDX tablet
Is it valid here? If so, why? I've always been taught that "it's" was only a valid contraction of "it is" or rarely "it has", neither of which fit here.
Yes, I am entirely serious. Up until early 1800s possessive it's was the grammatical norm. Today it's obsolete, but people who moan about the issue typically have no clue.
Any hope for some of these to be running Ubuntu pre-loaded? Potentially they can be cheaper due to lack of Windows licensing. The only alternative today is Chrome OS (and there are quite a few new ones released already) and Windows 8 (oh the horror)
A bought a Dell with Ubuntu once. I recall calling tech support asking how does one update the firmware. If memory serves, support wasn't sure how to deal with it not being Windows. Since then, I'd just bought Dell laptops with Windows and either dual boot Ubuntu or replace Windows entirely. The Ubuntu Dell was lousy spec wise. It's easy to update firmware with a FreeDOS boot disk.
For my next laptop, might get a System76.
Slightly OT, but had money to burn for a work desktop and went with a Supermicro workstation. Very nice hardware. More expensive but much better than Dell/HP/Lenovo workstations. Ironically, still cheaper than a Mac Pro desktop. Also better -- Mac Pro RAID was a poorly thought through overpriced garbage, last time I worked with it up a couple of years ago.
I wish they stopped forcing touchscreens on their users. I would so buy a Haswell-based follow-up to the Asus Zenbook UX51VZ as a developer machine, but having fingerprints on a glossy display is a showstopper for me.
I've been looking for a new laptop for over 2 years, and nobody's been selling anything worthy of replacing what I'm already using, which was built in 2010. For a few brief months that year, HP made a wonderful MBP clone (magnesium alloy case, 1600x900 14" screen with edge-to-edge glass, SSD, etc). Soon after, that product line turned into the same plastic 1366x768 crap everyone else was selling, and that's been what's filled store shelves ever since. Meanwhile, my 2010 laptop is starting to fall apart, with dead pixels, an overheating GPU and lost battery capacity.
I am looking forward to buying an ASUS UX301 this November to replace it. That's the first and only Ultrabook-class laptop I've seen since 2010 that'll actually be an "upgrade" without buying some thick "gaming" monstrosity. It'll have a Haswell i7-4558U, which comes with the Intel HD 5100 graphics, the first Intel integrated graphics chip to outmatch the 3-year-old Radeon in my current laptop. Plus 8GB RAM, 512GB of RAID-0 SSD, an all metal and glass case and up to 9 hours of battery life. Assuming this PC in that configuration actually makes it to market.
What's amazing to me is that this many months after Haswell parts started showing up in stores, that one ASUS laptop is still the only announced product by any name-brand manufacturer with the i7-4558U/HD 5100 parts. Every other new/"refreshed" laptop that'll be in stores this holiday season will either have an integrated GPU incapable of playing games well on the higher resolution screens they ship with, or give up its thickness and battery life for a discrete GPU.