Buying laptops under capitalism 😠
Buying laptops under capitalism 😠
The hunt for a perfect laptop continues
Abridged version
This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
Seven product lines (or is it eight; there’s an extra one in the sidebar not shown in the main view) and 330 distinct models! How can a normal person who isn’t a laptop enthusiast find anything in here? Even my eyes glaze over when I’m trying to distinguish the differences between the models and product lines.
HP further complicates things by having separate sites for consumer laptops and business laptops.
You might think that this level of choice should provide anything one could want, but that’s not true. Most of the models differ by like 1% and make all the same mistakes, copy-pasted across the while product line. Maintaining so many product lines at a reasonable level of development and quality is impossible, even for companies of their size with billions of dollars to throw at the problem.
These companies are clearly trying to micro-target specific market segments to match prices to buyers’ budgets, but offering so much choice is foolish. Most buyers — even big commercial buyers — are not informed enough to be able to pick the perfect device from among a massive blob of options presented at the same level, causing choice paralysis and lost sales, disappointing purchases that reduce brand loyalty, and expensive returns.
There has to be a better way!
The author is a high level contributor to KDE (read: nerd), and even they can't figure this shit out. Honestly the laptop market is getting more shit by the day with every company taking a leaf out of apple's book (no upgradeability, repairability, glossy design) but they don't have the credentials to back it up. You end up in a market where everyone's chasing the macbook pedestal but are shipping hot, plastic devices with no ports and soldered components.
Fuck I feel that. Buying tech at all now is honestly a nightmare, I dread it so much and try to keep my current devices for as long as possible
I bought a refurbished max spec macbook air m1 for $750 after taxes and shipping (the retail price for it was $1650, like fuck me I guess). Its a really nice machine, everything opens instantly thanks to the unified memory and M1 cpu and you can run GNU/Linux on it on bare metal.
It has no fan for cooling, so it can throttle on high load, but that also means its completely silent. Its also the only apple silicon series to not support the shitty camera notch so that's a bonus (wow everything is iPhone!)
Its mind boggling that we've gotten to a point where apple machines are just as repairable as big box OEMs and the framework is still priced out of midtier budgets.