It's neat that you can program logic on most any computer that boots nowadays. Maybe not crazy UI libraries, but wrap properly factored middleware logic in a console interface or just write some unit tests and you can get a lot done without much compute at all.

What's important in a working laptop?

I used to look for stuff like replaceable batteries, but with USB-C power packs, that's not an issue if it has a USB-C port that allows power. Now my list is, give or take...

1. Power & input in, video out via one port
2. Expandable RAM
3. Replaceable M.2 SSD
4. Fingerprint reader (so I'm not typing PINs and passwords in public)
5. Fits in my laptop bag (a nebulous requirement for the reader, I realize)
6. A backlight for the keyboard (any color is fine)

Nice to haves:

• A good keyboard (usually I'm plugged to a dock, but sometimes laptops on the lap (or coffeeshop table) are nice)
• Better than 1920x1080 screen
• Enough nits to see the screen outside
• A TrackPoint nubbin'

My old ThinkPad P51, a serious monster that had a high-def screen and USB-C video output, finally gave up the Windows 11 ghost. The version I'd gotten (used) was, at one point, good enough to run Windows 11, but then was taken off the list! At some point, that was actually enforced and it stopped updating, no security updates, nothing.

I got a few more months out of Insider Preview, but then my keyboard and mouse died due to drivers, I spent hours debugging, and I finally gave up.

So back in the market. In the meanwhile, I've been using a gaming laptop from 2021 as my dedicated workstation in the home office (and at coworking a little), a super cheap ThinkPad E490s for mobile dev (coffeehouses, trips, and coworking), and my M1 MacBook Air when I need to macOS.

These museum pieces do well, and I've never regretted buying gaming laptops, as their CPUs alone give them years of headroom as development boxes.

But as it's time to replace both the high-end (gaming laptop is old) and the mobile workstation (P51 is dead), I am stressing too much about processors. I usually check out PassMark scores to get an idea of how fast they are. I don't know if it's accurate or useful at all, but it seems to give a pretty good relative number.

Unfortunately I keep forgetting what my current boxes' scores are for comparison. So hard right on this post's topic as we swerve into "note to self" land and record them. (I have a vague recollection I've done this before. Apologies.)

The last two are ones I'm looking at now. LOQ is for sale now for $850, and the E14 as I'd want it is $823.65.

Getting back on topic, the neat part is that the E590s I got off of eBay for under $100 a while back and inserted some extra RAM into has been my mobile box for a few months. It's occasionally a little slow, but for logic work it's... just fine.

If you've got $100, internet, and someplace to plug in with the ability and drive to learn to develop software, you've got a livelihood.

That's kind of amazing.

Labels: hardware, laptop, noteToSelf

The joys of building your own computer

I've been interested in the Framework laptop for a while. I used to build towers, and my favorite part was always reusing parts. The lifecycle was always similar, and, like a Mobius strip, after you built the first one, you could enter the cycle at most any step.

1. Learn new socket types.
2. Buy a motherboard and processor.
3. Reuse your old tower and, hopefully, PSU
4. Reuse your old hard drive (and optical drive!)
5. See if you can reuse RAM from last time.
6. See if integrated graphics are better than recycling your old video card.

If you look closely, you could often, ignoring gaming for now, have a "new" tower for the price of a motherboard and processor because the parts were interchangeable. Increasingly, you'd get a boost for gaming too -- integrated graphics seemed to outpace reasonably priced previous-gen GPUs the last few I bought.

And you could push other upgrades until you felt like paying for them. You could, indpendently of the rest of the box...

1. Upgrade your video card.
2. Add RAM.
3. Upgrade your PSU.

And those investments usually meant your next "mobo & proc" refresh would be that much better.

I do as much of this as I can with laptops. I've upgraded optical drives, RAM, SSDs, even an output port for my PowerBook 150.

But things are getting progressively worse. I was able to upgrade the SSD on my last MacBook Air, but I can upgrade nothing on my M1 now. My latest Thinkpad is an E series in part because the top-of-the-line T had one stick of soldered RAM.

Framework laptop: The price of entry is too darned high

Then I ran into the Framework laptop, which is, minus that the CPU is soldered permanently to the motherboard and there's no dedicated GPU, nearly as modular as those towers I built.

It's cool, but the price of entry is insane, unfortunately. The current price of entry is $1049 with an i5-1240P.

You can DIY for $819... sorta. The DIY model...

• Doesn't have Windows ($139)
• Doesn't have memory ($40 to match prebuilt)
• Doesn't have an SSD ($59 for closest match to prebuilt)
• Doesn't have a power adapter (doesn't seem to come with prebuilt either?)
• No "expansion cards" ($36 to match prebuild)

That means to get the same as the prebuilt you've spending $1093. That's $44 more for the privilege of building it yourself.

Worse, there are no creative ways to get in cheaper.

• There's a refurbished previous gen for $599 listed, but it hasn't been in stock since I've been keeping track.
• There's a refurb prev gen with i7-1165G7 for $799 -- but for $20 you get a much better box: MUCH faster processor, stronger backplate, and all new components. That's a deal you gotta take.
• You can put together the parts separately from the marketplace for a "true DIY", but ordering the parts yourself still runs $882 even with a prev gen i5. Again, horrible price vs. new DIY.
  • Insult to injury, you can't get the trackpad or battery this way yet.

Ugh.

I did check for people selling old mainboards, as the previous gen i5 is still an overpriced $350 on Framework's site, but didn't turn up anything. Makes me wonder how many folks have purchased and how many of those have upgraded. I would've expected some supply of used mainboards. If you could bag one for $200, maybe we're making some progress, but there's nothing there or on eBay.

Long-term isn't much better

But now compare your next upgrade. Can we board the tower's Mobius strip of infinite upgrades?

Unfortunately the cheapest 12th gen Intel chip mainboard from Framework is $449. Looks like we've got an issue.

Compare that price to new gaming laptop deals, which aren't perfect dev laptops, but aren't bad either. Here are two deals currently live from SlickDeals:

• $600 Dell i5-12500H, 8 RAM, 256 SSD
• $550 Gigabyte i5-11400H, 8 RAM, 512 SSD

And both of those have real graphics options. That's bad in that it usually means, as they're gaming laptops, you can't charge via USB-C, the batteries aren't great, maybe the webcam is crap, and the keyboards aren't top notch.

But each of those are hundreds less than a Framework without memory or an SSD. That is, if we pretend that our second round of owning a Framework only runs $450, we're just barely breaking even with buying two gaming laptops. We have to go two rounds of upgrades just to argue we've come out ahead.

That doesn't sound horrible, but at least the extra gaming laptops would give us (potentially) two more RAM sticks and SSDs to reuse down the line -- and/or a used computer we could resell.

Framework is great, reduces ewaste, and would be cheaper to repair if something died, but the Framework simply is not a cost-effective option for your latest-gen laptop, even looking long-term.

Ugh. I want to encourage what they're doing, and feel like I oughta put my money where my mouth is, but, to date, I just can't.

Ways that I'm trying to talk myself into getting one anyway:

1. Better webcam
2. Better keyboard (right?)
3. Better Linux support
4. Easily replaceable battery once it dies

That's all I got. So far, still not enough. The Framework laptop tax is too high.

Labels: business, expansion, framework, laptop

From macrumors.com:

The M1 chip, which belongs to a ‌MacBook Air‌ with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433.

...

In comparison to Macs, the single-core performance is better than any other available Mac, and the multi-core performance beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870.

From anandtech.com:

The performance numbers of the A14 on this chart is relatively mind-boggling. If I were to release this data with the label of the A14 hidden, one would guess that the data-points came from some other x86 SKU from either AMD or Intel. The fact that the A14 currently competes with the very best top-performance designs that the x86 vendors have on the market today is just an astonishing feat.

Looking into the detailed scores, what again amazes me is the fact that the A14 not only keeps up, but actually beats both these competitors in memory-latency sensitive workloads such as 429.mcf and 471.omnetpp, even though they either have the same memory (i7-1185G7 with LPDDR4X-4266), or desktop-grade memory (5950X with DDR-3200). [emphasis mine]

The most important thing to remember when you read these benchmarks is that, with the exception of one GPU core, every new Mac has exactly the same CPU. It's just clothed in three different skins.

• One is inexpensive.
• One has much better cooling and a bigger battery.
• The last is a desktop.

You really don't get the sort of performance step up you'd normally expect going from one tier to another. They've removed the reason you had to use a different class of processor in the Air -- reducing the wattage required -- by moving everything to the same low-powered chip. You no longer "unlock" a better class of processor when you go Pro. You "just" keep it cooler.

This is why I bagged a new Air.

The only reason I need macOS now is for Xamarin and iOS development. I bought a MacBook Air two years ago, and though it's nice with the upgraded SSD [sic], the processor is really getting long in the tooth. Insanely slow.

The M1's performance jump combined with the Air's price (and, admittedly, combined with the end of the butterfly keyboard) finally makes it make sense to buy a Mac again. And now that I've slowly added USB-C docks and monitors (including a nice Lenovo monitor that sends power with the video) around the house, two USB ports is plenty.

I'm looking forward to seeing how important the fan in the Pro is if you're compiling a decent amount. I may have made a mistake, and saving $300 over the Pro was penny wise & pound foolish, but I doubt it. If I could get by at all on the old Air (though it was getting close to unusable), this is going to be wonderful.

I'm also concerned about Rosetta 2 performance. So far, it appears things are running reasonably fast. If Visual Studio is happy, I'm happy. If World of Warcraft runs... well, without a fan, I bet it doesn't impress, but that'd be a nice bonus. I'm not too concerned about the rest of my app suite...

1. Visual Studio/Xamarin and the iPhone Simulator
2. Thunderbird (some concern; it's a bloated app)
3. Chrome (it's gotta work or Apple failed. That doesn't mean I'm putting money on it working)
4. Sublime
5. VS Code (already insanely fast)
6. ReadKit (though I can finally run NetNewsWire in Big Sur)
7. iStat (not hugely important)
8. Amazon Music?
9. MacVim

That's about it. Aside from maybe Thunderbird, I don't see an issue even if they don't go native soon. (I have played with Panic's Nova a little. It'll be native, so no issues there either.)

I'm looking forward to benchmarking some next weekend.

There are certainly other use cases that might steer you away from an Air. If you wanted to do video, maybe you skip the 7 GPU Air for the 8 core GPU upgraded Air or MacBook Pro.

If you need a brighter screen, the Pro is [100 nits iirc] brighter.

If you're Joe Cieplinski, and it's all about the battery, maybe you get a Pro.

• My battery life [with the M1 Pro] is likely to be close to double what I’m currently getting.

That said, USB-C has made it easy to pop a power bank in your bag and keep plugging away... and, as I've joked, I'm a Hodgman when it comes to battery power myself.

If you love the Touch Bar, which is actually pretty neat, maybe you grab a Pro.

If you never leave your desk or you're running a computer lab, maybe you grab the mini?

But I usually figure out what the floor for entry is for a platform and see if and when it's worth entering, and the bottom line is that using macOS seems like it's going to be worth it again with new M1-powered Macs.

Labels: apple, laptop, macbook, macbook pro

A while back, I picked up a ThinkPad E490s. It's the cheap ThinkPad version, but, with three exceptions, I've been very happy with it. Those three exceptions are that the WiFi often takes a long time to connect coming out of sleep, the keyboard backlighting turns off when you shut the lid (and you have to manually turn it back on when you wake it), and there's no removable battery. I think the right response to the third is that you can get an external USB-C powerbank now instead. Fair.

Actually the USB-C connection is kinda flakey sometimes, flashing the screen if my power supply jostles at all.

Other than that, it's great. RAM was still upgradeable, so I did, and I upgraded the single hard drive slot, an m.2, to a larger drive. The best part is that it comes with a nice ThinkPad keyboard with TrackPoint versus the way I BYOK with the ThinkPad Bluetooth keyboard with other laptops. I'm afraid I'm addicted to the TrackPoint at this, um, juncture.

If you remember, the last time I thought about buying a new working laptop, I decide the best buy was a gaming laptop, a decision I didn't regret much. The battery was bad. The screen wasn't great. The keyboard was questionable. But I had a MacBook Pro processor in a portable device with more RAM and storage space for less than half the MacBook's price.

And if I hadn't already bought this ThinkPad, I'd be doing it again. This LaptopMag.com post of the current deal at Best Buy confirms what I thought I was learning while looking for the next great laptop deal: The Asus TUF A15 is insanely good at $799.

Just for fun, here's the CPU comparison graph for...

1. The Dell gaming desktop I was considering for about $755 (with an upgraded power supply -- the idea being I could update the CPU and GPU in a year or so) 
2. The Asus TUF A15, and 
3. My old Lenovo Y700

And then here's the GPU comparison chart of the same three.

Wow, that's a step up. It's such a step up I'm not sure that last one is right. I still get playable frame rates in WoW, for instance, not that it's a challenging game. But less than 10% of what you'd get from the GPU in an $800 laptop today? Wow.

I realize that's apples to oranges to pears, but you can get a feel for what I'm looking at, and why a new box would be attractive. The question and answer section of the Best Buy Asus A15 listing for $799 suggests/says that this version is a Best Buy special (even though it's the same model number used for laptops with different specs), here a very bad thing, with a smaller battery than any other Asus A15 and maybe less RAM (8 gigs either way). Plus the keyboard looks like crap, and I hate 10 key numpads on laptops. Either give the normal keys more space or make the laptop smaller. Don't need it.

But the RAM is upgradeable, and I've lived with a bad battery before. Man, that's a nice step up. Too bad I put $780 into this E490s a year ago, or I'd probably bite.

Lesson: Don't play games on your old gaming laptops or you'll want a new one.

Labels: asus, hardware, laptop, lenovo

About a week and a half ago, I compared the CPU Mark scores for three inexpensive programmers' laptops. Just for my own benefit, and so I stop looking it up over and over myself, here's what the current "entry level" MacBooks give you:

So compared to my cheap-o Windows laptops, not great, though the "Escape" is probably workable. Here, again, are the Acer Aspire with i3, i5, and what I have now (the i7-7700HQ).

I was wondering if I'd bite on a Mac Pro if one dropped in time for WWDC, since I've been considering a prebuilt tower, but now that we know there's no Mac Pro until 2019, that's not an option either.

It kinda stinks. I've got an excuse to upgrade -- my Windows laptop's battery's age and dated Mac laptop -- but nothing good enough to let me turn that excuse into a true reason to buy. Wish there was a MacBook that was "close enough" to justify the Mac tax.

Which leaves me back at the completely uninspiring but insanely practical & affordable Aspire 15 I mentioned last time or wait and see if we can't get a summer speed bump for the Escape.

Labels: benchmarks, laptop, macbook, macbook pro

The battery in my Lenovo Y700-14ISK is finally getting to the point that it's holding me back. I might get 60-70 minutes out of it just with casual programming. That's not crazy. It's a gaming laptop, and it's obviously meant to stay plugged in. It also has a pretty phat processor for a laptop (an i7-7700HQ) that made it an attractive programmer's box two years ago.

But two years later, the battery's ready to go.

I've been waiting for a MacBook that was worth buying, and that I dodged buying two years ago with this Lenovo, and I remain hopeful yet again that this will be the year to get back to portable macOSing.

I want portable Windows with battery life, but I don't want to break the bank to buy a ThinkPad, since I'm planning to grab a Mac this buying cycle as my "real" work box.

I've purchased stuff like the cheap IdeaPads before, and they're more computer than you've paid for. Great battery, decent keyboard, and almost able to keep up with server and javascript work. But, ultimately, not fast enough for real production.

Acer Inspire: Where has this been?

Then I ran into the Acer Inspire while looking at cheapy laptop comparisons on Amazon. Wow. Look at these two...

• Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM for $350!
  • 15.6-Inch
  • Intel Core i3-7100U 7th Generation
  • 4GB DDR4
  • 1TB 5400RPM HD
  • Intel HD Graphics 620
  • Windows 10 Home
  • Looks like a real 9-10 hours of battery !?!!

That's not bad, but the real kicker is that it seems like this laptop was made for people willing to upgrade. Look inside this thing:

One panel and you've got your SATA drive, RAM, and an m.2 slot accessible. It's like they expected you to swap and/or upgrade this box! Insane!

But once you start adding up RAM and an SSD, well, you're pushing up to around $550. Which almost exactly where the Inspire's next step up lives:

• Acer Aspire E 15 E5-576G-5762 for $600
  • 15.6" Full HD,
  • 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250U
  • GeForce MX150
  • 8GB RAM Memory
  • 256GB SSD
  • Same 9-10 hours of battery life.

Well, hello. This is getting close to too much to pay for making Windows portable, but isn't the better processor worth an extra $100? Here are some ballparks from cpubenchmark.net -- this first is the i3 in the cheap Inspire, then the i5 in the $600 version, then the one I got in my Lenovo:

Now, for $250 over the cheap Inspire, we get an SSD (though not the one I'd've purchased, and we lose the TB of spinning platter space) and just enough RAM to squeeze by for a while -- and the chance to upgrade to 32! That's nice. Eat 32 gigs, MacBook Pro.

And the processor? Those numbers are close enough to my old i7, I could probably trade it in and not feel it too badly.

It's bigger than I'd like. I don't need the DVD drive. It's still got VGA, which even I finally removed from my desk setup recently. The Inspire is a dinosaur.

But it's an easily upgradeable dinosaur with a good drive & the latest processor for $600. That, my friends, is a proverbially impressive piece of kit.

Do I worry about the cheap keyboard? Yes. Yes and no.

Six hundred simoleons is a bit more than I wanted to spend for the equivalent of a new battery. I always think, "If you could have $X off of your next laptop by not buying now, what could you the afford to get?" And $600 would be nice to put towards a MacBook Pro with its own nice battery.

But any way you slice it, if you want a nice Windows box for some work, and don't mind not having Pro, the Acer Inspire looks like it should be your value baseline.

Labels: apple, bargain, hardware, laptop, lenovo, truck