Love it or hate it these PCs took risks, from new RAM shapes to big, bendy OLED.
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Don’t call it a refresh: The 6 most adventurous laptop designs of 2022
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The Dell CAMM migration has been a fiasco where I work (1000+ employee company). There have been massive delays in obtaining upgraded memory components (a simple upgrade from 16GB to 32GB in a 7670 has taken months) - And our IT folks have had to deal with supporting an entirely new form factor. I can order and receive a Dell Inspirion in 2 weeks, but a Precision 7670 has taken forever...(yes, I'm bitter because I should have had my new shiny Dell before Christmas).
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Why so few 3:2 aspect ratio laptops? A 14" 3:2 ratio has the same useful vertical space for productivity as a 17" 16:9. Apart from some Huaweis that are hard to source in the US due to sanctions, there are few options.
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Does anybody really think smartphones with foldable displays have “taken off”?
Coincidentally, I just saw my first one in the wild yesterday — after, how long have they been out? I won’t be holding my breath until the next sighting.
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Are we seriously at the point where we’re removing headphone jacks from laptops to “save space”? Why the disdain for wired audio?
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I imagine the real reason is not so much the jack but the DAC and all the audio circuitry to power it and keep it free from EMI.
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No, I disagree. Headphone jacks have fit in thin and powerful laptops just fine before. The Macbook air logic board is tiny, and they still manage to fit a headphone jack. The XPS 13+ is an expensive "premium" laptop, it should not be missing features the model below it has.
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If a laptop has speakers - it already has a DAC. Speakers are analog devices and as such require a converter and an amplifier. In nearly all laptops, the speaker and headphone DACs are the same components. As far as EMI interference big enough to cause audio issues is considered - it is only an issue in very poorly designed internals - in which case there are bigger issues than an audio jack with more than a little white noise. So…I don’t think there is any valid reason whatsoever in removing headphone jack, especially in something as big as a laptop.
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Mr.Mumbles
Ars Centurion
I definitely like what Framework is doing, but I'd really wish they'd also offer AMD options. =/
Generally speaking, I find the lack of AMD options in laptops quite baffling especially since they more often than not should be able to provide all-around better performance/efficiency than their Intel counterparts.
Generally speaking, I find the lack of AMD options in laptops quite baffling especially since they more often than not should be able to provide all-around better performance/efficiency than their Intel counterparts.
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CAMM honestly sounds like a dead man walking. Not standardizing on the card size ensures that Dell, Lenovo and HP will end up with different and incompatible modules if they don't just solder down memory to the mainboard to avoid the whole mess.
The royalty aspect is just icing on the cake.
It's like Dell looked at Rambus and the RDRAM fiasco and decided to treat that as inspiration rather than as a warning
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I read about CAMM ram sometime ago.
The fact that upgrading ram will involve discarding all the perfectly working lower capacity ram has sort of put me off the whole idea. It will probably end up producing more waste unless you can get someone else who needs the lower capacity ram.
I tend to buy systems with spare ram slots and add extra ram to increase the capacity in the future, if I need it. I may end up with 24GB or other uncommon amount of ram later down the road, but nothing has been wasted. (yes, am aware adding more then 2 dimms may increase latency / drop the ram speed, but most people need more ram then faster ram, when the speed difference is at most 5% in benchmarks usually).
I assume if it gets into JEDEC the sizes will eventually be standardised.
The fact that upgrading ram will involve discarding all the perfectly working lower capacity ram has sort of put me off the whole idea. It will probably end up producing more waste unless you can get someone else who needs the lower capacity ram.
I tend to buy systems with spare ram slots and add extra ram to increase the capacity in the future, if I need it. I may end up with 24GB or other uncommon amount of ram later down the road, but nothing has been wasted. (yes, am aware adding more then 2 dimms may increase latency / drop the ram speed, but most people need more ram then faster ram, when the speed difference is at most 5% in benchmarks usually).
I assume if it gets into JEDEC the sizes will eventually be standardised.
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My friend has had a samsung one for ~2 years that he drops all the time , and while the USBC port is broken(wireless charging only), the screen is still completely undamaged.
I'm not sure they've 'taken off' in terms of popularity, but they do seem to be at the point where they aren't fragile novelties.
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The only laptop adventure I seek is saving money. The laptop feature that pleases me most is a sense of quiet, cool expectation.
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Yes. Once Framework starts to offer AMD CPUS, I'll be interested. Intel is just horribly inefficient at the moment for laptops.
Today the ThinkPad line of laptops are the only ones to offer AMD variants across almost the entire lineup. And I know there's a lot of fear here for Chinese designed laptops, but so far the ThinkPad lineup has been solid from a security standpoint.
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About the Dell ram module, if they did not dictate for it to be accessible directly from the bottom, isn't it could have the same issue as sodimm that was mentioned in he article? Like needing to lift the keyboard to access it.
Interesting that asus use Bluetooth. Usually manufacturers prefers to use proprietary 2.4ghz wireless.
I wonder, does the keyboard also supports quick Bluetooth pairing profiles switch.
Interesting that asus use Bluetooth. Usually manufacturers prefers to use proprietary 2.4ghz wireless.
I wonder, does the keyboard also supports quick Bluetooth pairing profiles switch.
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Yes, they have. They are, however, still a premium device so it's no surprise that you don't see many of them yet.
My next phone will be a foldable, my aging eyes will appreciate the larger screen.
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We've switched recent orders back to SO-DIMM. We are a small shop, so I've been ordering them with 8GB and buying the 64GB Micron kit from Amazon to save $. Dell wanted $750/per 64GB RAM upgrade after discounts, and I didn't want to spend that much. Started speccing the OLED screen with the money saved, and users seem to like it, atleast I haven't heard any complaints yet.
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I have one, granted I spent all my disposable income last year on it. I'm not disappointed. I've never owned a tablet because keeping a second device for mobile content consumption never appealed to me. I also didn't use my phone much apart from phone things and keeping up with weather, maps and such. Now with the foldable I'm using it more and more for reading pdf's, articles, news etc. It really changed my phone use. Also, I'm a very clumsy person but so far not even a dent. It's surprisingly durable. If you don't like lugging around a tablet but comfortably read on the go I recommend it. I'm planning to give my kindle to my mother and transfer my book collection over to it as well. (I keep forgetting to lug my kindle around so it goes mostly unused, this way I'm hoping I'll read more often like I used to)
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Phones had headphone jacks until recently and they are a helluva lot smaller than laptops.
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The headphone jacks are usually not powerful enough. Ifi has a new DAC/headphone amp dongle that fits into a USB-C port and which will decode a digital signal and amplify it and gives you a 3.5mm jack as well.
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From what available port? Most laptops have two (or one!) USB-C ports, despite using them for power, display output, and peripheral connections. It seems like the expectation is to carry around a docking station.
It doesn't need to have a good audio jack, just something. My laptops are used for years and passed down, usually to kids who don't do well with dongles. An inability to connect to anything but wireless audio devices is a very annoying limitation.
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Not everyone needs vertical space to be productive. For what I do, horizontal space is key because I'm doing a lot of work in Excel documents with a many columns and doing a lot of other work where being able to put up several windows side-by-side is important. Because of my specific workflow I don't feel fully productive on anything less than a 21:9 ultrawide monitor.
To be fair, I do prefer QHD resolution to get some extra vertical space, but that is more of a function of resolution than screen size.
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A lot of it depends on how the laptop is put together, though. I've had Thinkpads where removing the keyboard takes no time at all, while other laptops require moving a lot of screws to remove the bottom cover because they've moved away from RAM hatches.
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Once an iteration of the zenbook fold comes out with a higher resolution and higher refresh rate screen, I'll definitely buy it. I love the design, they've done an excellent job, but the display is just not quite good enough yet.
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Of course it is. They already do that with their chargers. Not because of upgrades, but so that when you lose your charger, the only place you can get a replacement is from Dell, where they sell a $20 charger for $90. And if you didn't lose it but just left it at home? You can't charge your laptop at all.
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My brother in law's had one for close to 2 years, afaik his isn't broken at all. He went with the one that's normal phone size when open but folds into a square. At least with men's pants I've never really seen the benefit to that configuration, it seems like it'd be a better fit for women whose pants often have really shallow pockets because the designers are concerned with how it looks on a maniquin not actually being useful.
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That's why it is a bad idea to buy a laptop that doesn't use USB-C for charging, unless it has a dedicate GPU and just is too power hungry for USB-C. Even on my Surface which has a proprietary Microsoft charger, I can still use USB-C when I'm travelling or when I'm plugged in to my monitor.
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It's not like laptop manufacturers are removing the jack en masse - this XPS model is notable precisely because it's an outlier. Tons of people use headphones or external speakers with laptops because laptop speakers usually suck. Bluetooth audio is also unusable for anything latency-sensitive like producing music or gaming.
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Dude, you are missing six nopes. Otherwise the manufacturers will think you are ok with F9 to F12, ESC and delete being capacitive...
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
For low latency you can use alternative wireless radio frequency protocols:
https://steelseries.com/gaming-headsets/arctis-nova-pro-wireless
2.4GHz radio + BT, 18 hour run time with BT, 44 hours without BT and using the hot swap battery system
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
Even though hmdi audio is a thing, and usb audio has been a thing for longer than the iPhone 6, I still want a jack. Bt audio on laptops suck, esp for voice, unless you have a mac.
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