Why buying a laptop in 2019 sucks!

Enjoy!

 

Agree... we are living in sad times for laptops. The rubbish that is being peddled today is pretty horrible and spans nearly every brand. Quality control is non-existent and engineering is poor. The marketing is deceptive and laced with lies. Some of the best performing and most reliable laptops have mediocre build quality and lackluster displays and most of the products with the largest price tags and nicest chassis build quality have serious thermal management problems, crippled performance and are unreliable. It is inexcusable and the people that build them don't care enough to do things right.

 

Yeah, sorry no.

This is the age of the laptop, actually. I may never buy a gaming desktop for 3k again.

My HP Spectre x360 is beautiful and inexpensive and perfect for business, and my Lenovo Y540 is inexpensive and runs ray tracing games with ease for 1200 dollars.

What are you guys talking about?

R



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Indeed, laptop gaming has been brought to the masses. At the same time high end laptops suffer more than ever from bad/restricted design and QC. So perhaps it's better to say that it's a good time to buy an entry/mid level laptop and a bad time to buy a high end LGA portable powerhouse...

 

Agreed. Not only has laptop gaming performance reached near-parity with comparable desktops, pricing has become much more competitive. Today, you can get a system with a six-core AMD or Intel CPU, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti or RTX 2060 GPU, 16 GB of RAM, a 256-512 GB SSD and 1-2 TB hard drive, and a 120-144 Hz IPS display for around $1,200 or less if you can catch a sale.

 

Prices are competitive and there is some parity in that respect. But, I think the issue is not price/performance as much as low quality engineering, poor thermal management, etc. While there may be some semblance of parity with desktops looking at a spec sheet, it is more theoretical than factual. Not because the laptops are not capably spec'd, but because they suffer from firmware cancer and crippling to only partially compensate for unacceptably poor engineering. I view that as being more serious and more important than competitive pricing. We are seeing more emphasis on chassis build quality and nice displays, making decent progress there; but, mostly ignoring the far greater importance of what is on the inside. Beauty is only skin deep... ugly goes down to the bones.

Intel and others can say 100°C is "OK" all they want to, but it's not. Repeating it won't make it any less untrue. Maybe it's not going to kill their processors, but it certainly does diminish performance and degrades the user experience. And, the morons manufacturing them in such a half-assed and haphazard manner that allows the temperatures to reach ~90° or more during normal use on a product that is not overclocked is totally lame and absolutely inexcusable. And, it is also very unfortunately the status quo. Who would be happy with a car that looked nice and was put together well that was constantly running rough and overheating? Why does anyone think this is OK with a laptop? It wouldn't be acceptable on a desktop, so it shouldn't be acceptable just because it's not a desktop.

Bratty kids can be cute and adorable to look at, but their misbehavior shouldn't be excused just because they're cute. Bad parenting is the underlying issue that creates cute little brats that are sassy, belligerent and a pain in the butt to deal with. Same thing here.

 

I agree with your post, Mr. Fox. While I still think this is the first time in years that laptops are really worth buying, you are right that there is a lot of work to be done.

But I also wonder how possible it is to have six core cpu running at 4ghz on all cores and actually cool it effectively at a reasonable cost. At the very least they should undervolt wherever possible (I had to do my own on my Lenovo).

The Apple laptops upped the ante on build quality BUT they have always sold machines with garbage processors for a ridiculously high price.

My i7 8565u is really fast in my HP and the cooling is very good though I am not playing games.

R

 

Yes, they should undervolt and come up with some kind of customized tuning profile that will accommodate an average range of processor bin quality on mass produced machines and make those their BIOS defaults. And, they could do more with thermal management than what they are doing. It's like a monkey-see, monkey-do, affair where they copy the engineering mistakes of their competitors. I don't know of anyone that would not be willing to pay an additional $50 to $100 USD to have a product that worked extremely well. In many cases the shoddy engineering is such that even the end users with more advanced technical skills cannot properly fix the shortcomings (like wimpy heat sinks that fit poorly and don't include enough heat pipes, poor ventilation, etc.).

The race to have the thinnest and lightest has caused some of these issues. While that is still conceptually popular in some circles, it's not nearly as popular as it was when everything was chunky. I suspect the implications of being extra thin and light have come home to roost and what seemed like something that should be aggressively pursued in the minds of some folks isn't everything they hoped it would be. Those with some common sense about it have come to grips with the idea that there is a happy medium and they cannot have good temps and nice performance when the thin and light concept is taken too far.

 

never been a better time to buy a laptop.

laptops might be bga crap nowadays but they are thinner lighter and more powerful than ever when compared to their desktop counterparts.

Lug a desktop to the couch lol


notice this mobile 5870

https://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-5870.23073.0.html

now compare it to the desktop 5870

so I definitely have a valid point, not here to argue reality.


also when NBR was all in the rage this laptop was the most popular in NBR

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-G73JH-ATI-HD-5870-Gaming-Notebook.28191.0.html

notice battery life at a crazy amazing 1.5 hours and like 2 inches thick

now look at this

https://www.notebookcheck.net/MSI-G...0H-RTX-2080-Max-Q-Laptop-Review.423050.0.html


2080mq vs desktop 2080

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-2080-Max-Q-Graphics-Card.386276.0.html

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDI...phics-Card-Benchmarks-and-Specs.377901.0.html

 

Laptops definitely have their place and the gap between "high end" gaming laptops and mid-range gaming desktops has never been smaller. Can't hate that and it cannot be argued to not be true. If you like thin and light, then it is a real plus to have so much performance potential in such as compact package, assuming its degree of thermal malfunction and firmware castration is kept to a dull roar so it doesn't lag behind competing products carrying similarly engineered deficits.

If you like big DTRs with desktop CPUs and higher TGP MXM cards, then the performance gap is even narrower. In large part that is because firmware castration has infected desktop GPUs and computing at every level is being dumbed down more and more, including desktops. That allows companies like NVIDIA to milk their technology to get more mileage out of the same product by carefully metering performance and tweaking the same basic product to look like something new and special over multiple generations. The down side is that this same strategy is used (abused) as a crutch for not building better laptops that are engineered to run cooler, last longer and be easily serviced and/or upgraded. They are built to be disposable, short-term and destined for failure. That is terribly unfortunate.

Some folks pretend to be enthusiasts. In reality, they are only enthusiasts at spending money to buy something shiny and new to play games on a little better that they could yesterday, and the day before yesterday. And, since most laptops cannot be upgraded in a meaningful way today, that is becoming the only option left for the laptop market segment. The only place left for real PC enthusiasts to enjoy their hobby in a meaningful or creative way at this point is desktops. That's pretty sad. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is what it is and it's not likely to get any better. It is also sad that it is unusual to find examples of "high end" gaming laptops with strong specs that do not have lots of compromises that diminish the greatness they would be capable of it they were actually made well, by companies that cared enough about their customers and their own reputations to produce something truly phenomenal. Greatness only exists to the extent that one product is not as lousy as another one with the same specs.