How does SFF community feel about laptops?

[MJVR1]

I love laptops. I've been using a laptop for a while since I can't carry my S4 to class or with my friends. I really don't need a GTX 1080 and OC'ed i7. For productivity, I can easily get away with a MacBook Pro with bootcamp. Best trackpad on the market, pretty decent keyboard, and great battery life. Its a really expensive setup, especially when you add the cost of peripherals you need. But no one in the Windows market is making something comparable unless you want to pay for the super tacky 1337 gamerz Razer laptops or the plasticy build quality of the Dell XPS line.

It's not for everybody though. The future is going to be dongles unfortunately, which takes away from the portability factor of laptops. A lot of people REALLY love their mechanical keyboards and won't go to a scissor switch keyboard. Cherry Switches really are the best, but if you can compromise on your choice of input devices, it a good option for SFF enthusiast.

 

[Arboreal]

I have a love hate relationship with laptops. When I did a lot of content management at home and work, it was great to have one platform.
In my new job, I have desktop PCs, and a portable LAN box in addition to the family home PCs.

I have an X61 Thinkpad, which the 'Inner Engineer' really appreciates, but it's getting old & tired.

My wife has a modern Thinkpad for work, but uses it exclusively docked with a proper keyboard & mouse and a 24" monitor.
When she's working from home, she hates it in its basic form, so I have to get a monitor out, as she can't see the small screen easily, with all the detailed stuff she's got open. She would far rather have a tower/desktop PC.

What I really don't like is the relative inability to 'tinker' with laptops compared to desktop PCs. You can't upgrade much and to have any proper horsepower, you pay a huge premium.

That's my IMvHO, and everyone's use cases vary, mine may change again...

 

[JosephEK]

I think it would be nice to have custom laptop chassis to build inside, even if it was as large as a suitcase or something. I've seen things like this for the Raspberry pi. This way everything would likely be modular except for maybe the screen and keyboard.

Another neat idea for portable monitors I'm wondering if there are tiny projectors out there that could act as monitors which you could throw in a bag with a SFF PC.

 

[XeaLouS]

Laptops have a place when travelling. You don't need a monitor/peripherals - you can just work from a small space. And they don't weigh much.

As someone who has both had an ASUS ROG laptop from 2009 and a Regular laptop from 2013, the best use for a laptop (imo) is something light and efficient with no dedicated GPU. Gaming laptops become outdated (and cost 2-3x the desktop parts) instantly, whereas cheaper non-gpu laptops are still good enough to run chrome/productivity and even programming after 3-4 years.

my dream form factor laptop (12" laptop with edge-to-edge display, edge-to-edge keyboard, and 60% layout)

 

[Soul_Est]

I have a love hate relationship with laptops. When I did a lot of content management at home and work, it was great to have one platform.
In my new job, I have desktop PCs, and a portable LAN box in addition to the family home PCs.

I have an X61 Thinkpad, which the 'Inner Engineer' really appreciates, but it's getting old & tired.

My wife has a modern Thinkpad for work, but uses it exclusively docked with a proper keyboard & mouse and a 24" monitor.
When she's working from home, she hates it in its basic form, so I have to get a monitor out, as she can't see the small screen easily, with all the detailed stuff she's got open. She would far rather have a tower/desktop PC.

What I really don't like is the relative inability to 'tinker' with laptops compared to desktop PCs. You can't upgrade much and to have any proper horsepower, you pay a huge premium.

That's my IMvHO, and everyone's use cases vary, mine may change again...

Have you considered the ThinkPad X62? While it is currently unavailable, it would be a direct upgrade to your ThinkPad X61.

 

[zovc]

I'm searching for the right balance of portability, performance, and build quality.

I really like the presentation and everything that goes with the Razer Blade Stealth, and I do think it's black-and-green looks better than the black-and-red of pretty much every similar alternative. I love the wealth of I/O on MSI's Stealth Pro, but it has way too much red detailing to justify a "stealth" branding IMO.

The easiest choice for me would be something like the MSI Stealth Pro, with all that I/O, in a more tasteful silver brushed aluminum chassis, a 1050 Ti, a 1080p touchscreen monitor (with an option for 120Hz), and room for at least 2 RAM sticks, a PCIe NVME SSD, and one or two 2.5" drives. That's probably more power than I'd ever need on the road, but I wouldn't feel like I was making any real compromises. If you could make that device run for about 8+ hours when browsing the web without needing to be charged I would be in heaven. A laptop with a dedicated GPU that could game for 3+ hours would be really impressive, too.

Then again, I've wondered if just a Chromebook with a good battery and attractive build quality would be able to get even gaming done by utilizing cloud computing.

 

[Arboreal]

Have you considered the ThinkPad X62? While it is currently unavailable, it would be a direct upgrade to your ThinkPad X61.

Wow! I never knew that existed, that's mad! Great to see that there are people doing all sorts of 'unnecessary' things to favourite laptops...

I'm sure that if I needed a laptop with more horsepower, one of the newer X series that still have a decent keyboard would do the trick; I just don't have the requirement for something [that] small & powerful.
My 17L Parvum LAN box does that at the moment, and I hope to shrink that over time.

 

[Germanese]

Hate them, they are made with double sided tape nowadays...

 

[Arboreal]

Noooooooooo . That's getting into tablet territory. I know that Apple have soldered RAM in and glued parts for a while. Not great for sustainability and ease of repair...
I like PCs for that reason, I can get in with a screwdriver and strip it all down with ease

 

[Jin]

This forum has given me a lot of inspiration for desktop building, but I was curious what people here think about Laptops which are essentially just proprietary SFF computers with built in peripherals and because they're produced in bulk by a company their proprietary form factors are really hard to beat.

So this made me wonder: If they're basically making laptops with full-power desktop GPUs in them, why not just use that as my SFF PC where I can take it with me or plug it into my desk monitor/peripherals whenever I want to use it as a desktop?

With this sort of system unless I need more than 4 cores why not just use a laptop for everything these days and forget about building my own SFF PC? Passion maybe?

Or are there perhaps modular laptop chassis that you can build inside? I kind of like that idea, but I've never heard of such a thing before. Does it exist?

Waiting on raven ridge =[

 

[JosephEK]

I'm searching for the right balance of portability, performance, and build quality.

I really like the presentation and everything that goes with the Razer Blade Stealth, and I do think it's black-and-green looks better than the black-and-red of pretty much every similar alternative. I love the wealth of I/O on MSI's Stealth Pro, but it has way too much red detailing to justify a "stealth" branding IMO.

Then again, I've wondered if just a Chromebook with a good battery and attractive build quality would be able to get even gaming done by utilizing cloud computing.

I was watching the WAN show by Linus Tech Tips recently and Luke was talking about trying to source the right stickers to "Pokemon theme" his computers and he was trying to do a Haunter theme for his Razer blade I think. I love that idea and I'd love to have a Barebone/NUC decorated as an NES or Pokemon like Plusle and Minun, Claydol or maybe Exeggutor. Another idea is to create a very "rugged" or "simplistic" machine that looks like it came off a Soviet assembly with rough edges and a hammer and sickle logo. I always adore Russian engineering because it's usually simple and rugged like the T34 or AK-47, but then again the NES had that same look to it IMO. Don't mean to get off topic, but those are my SFF art themed ideas.

I've never used or even seen a chromebook, but I was told you cannot game on them at all. I don't even think you can get Steam. It sucks because I'd love to see Google or somebody else create more OS for people to choose from instead of just Windows, Mac and Linux. I've used Ubuntu for a week to try it out and it was kinda hard at first. It took me a few hours to figure out how to get my Radeon drivers installed (with help which was great). I too am sick of seeing bad build quality at low budget laptops. I could take a performance hit (like a chromebook) and still be happy if it was a well built machine with decent peripherals.

 

[jØrd]

because I'd love to see Google or somebody else create more OS for people to choose from instead of just Windows, Mac and Linux.

To be fair Chrome OS is linux. IIRC its bastardised Gentoo but i'd guess your referring more to the usability aspects, everything in a browser, etc.

 

[JosephEK]

To be fair Chrome OS is linux. IIRC its bastardised Gentoo but i'd guess your referring more to the usability aspects, everything in a browser, etc.

Yeah. What I meant was someone like Google should make a less lightweight, full desktop experience to compete. I wouldn't even care if it was based on Linux, I mean just look at how popular Android has become. It's so popular because it's supported by the big names and it ships on everything preinstalled. Ubuntu doesn't really have that as far as I know. If it were supported in the same fashion as Android we would see a lot more games supported I would imagine.

 

[jØrd]

Ubuntu doesn't really have that as far as I know.

They are one of the few Linux distros that do:
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop?c=us&l=en&s=biz
https://system76.com/
https://www.entroware.com/store/
These are the three that come to mind in the desktop / laptop space, there may or may not be more

 

[zovc]

The main thing about chromebooks is that the idea is to do as little computation on the device as possible. This allows you to get a "laptop" experience that doesn't feel choppy or bogged-down like a $150-$300 (Windows) laptop would without having to gun for more premium hardware. It also has the added benefit of coming close to doubling your battery life. Those are the main tennants of Chrome OS and it sounds like they're just not a good fit for you, and that's alright. A lot of people aren't impressed by Chrome OS... or have just never given it a chance.

That said, Google announced that Chrome OS will soon(?) be able to use any Android app, which is ultimately a pretty large bost to posibilities, though I think we all can imagine how many janky apps there are out there that already don't work well on a smartphone or tablet. It does give you access to a lot of things that have Android versions, though, probably including things like Hearthstone (or Eternal).

And, what I was talking about, was pretty much completely different from all of that.

Then again, I've wondered if just a Chromebook with a good battery and attractive build quality would be able to get even gaming done by utilizing cloud computing.

Long story short, you can use cloud computing to virtualize a Windows (or whatever else) computer and remotely do things on it including but not limited to gaming. I won't say that "any" computer is powerful enough to remote into a virtual machine on the cloud somewhere, but if you're buying a computer intended for consumers that's from within the last few years, it ought to be. The kicker of course is that cloud computing is a paid service and most of them aren't a flat recurring fee, but are instead based on the number of computations or the amount of bandwidth you're using... which, gaming at ~1080p ~60fps is a lot of bandwidth...

 

[Josh | NFC]

Use the right tool for the right job.

That's about the extent of my laptop discussion as I don't think it belongs on this site...there are plenty of sites for that. That is just like...an opinion...or something...

 

[Soul_Est]

They are one of the few Linux distros that do:
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop?c=us&l=en&s=biz
https://system76.com/
https://www.entroware.com/store/
These are the three that come to mind in the desktop / laptop space, there may or may not be more

http://zareason.com/

 

[ColorZepppelin]

are there perhaps modular laptop chassis that you can build inside?

**Maybe a S4 Mini with screwed monitor is the perfect SFF combination.

Perhaps the SFF utopian dream is indeed a laptop. A modular laptop where each of its components can be replaced or fixed without having to throw away the whole thing

I think it would be nice to have custom laptop chassis to build inside,

Just mentioning my project: Monolith Laptop
...and my shame at it's slow development.

machine that looks like it came off a Soviet assembly with rough edges and a hammer and sickle logo

Hehe..cool.