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Laptop with BIG, BRIGHT display, full-size keyboard and BIG battery?
Hope everyone's doing well!
As I'm currently in a situation where I don't have a fixed place to work from reliably, I'm looking to retire my trusty ASUS X93SV from 2012 and searching for advice!
As with everything, I have very different expectations and priorities in this endeavor too, so maybe someone here is as much of an oddball as me and can recommend something.
1) If I'm working on a laptop, I'll be mostly working outside and/or other brightly lit places. So a VERY BRIGHT ANTI-GLARE display is a must!
2) When I'm working, I'm serious (🥳), so SIZE MATTERS. My X93SV has a 19" display and a full-size keyboard with separate numpad, and it's ALMOST TOO SMALL. All I can find is 17". Are there still BIG LAPTOPS with a PROPER NUMPAD?
3) I will mostly either be away from power sources and/or not want to carry around cables and power bricks. At least 7 hours of BATTERY LIFE with FULL DISPLAY BRIGHTNESS is a must!
4) no mechanical hard drive -- SSD at least 500 GB.
Now so you don't think I'm crazy, one thing that I DON'T care about AT ALL is "thinness" or weight. The damn thing can be as heavy and thick as it wants, I have two healthy arms and hands (for now).
Any suggestions? ☺️
Thanks!
Comments
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I can't remember the last time I heard about a laptop with a screen larger than 17.3". This articles attempts to explain that - https://smallbusiness.chron.com/biggest-laptop-screen-size-currently-available-73219.html
You can get a number pad as a USB/wireless peripheral, so I would consider that option. Otherwise, the full-size keyboard w/ numpad requirement really limits you.
Here are some lists to check out, if you haven't already. The LG Gram 17 is on all of these, so that might be a good place to start. It happens to be light for a large laptop, too.
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/best-17-inch-laptops / https://www.techradar.com/news/best-17-inch-laptop (both Laptop Mag and TechRadar owned by Future)
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-17-inch-laptops
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/06/15/best-17-inch-laptops
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/best-17-inch-laptops
Have you thought about a normal laptop, and using 1 or 2 battery powered displays?
16" is about the average but you might find larger...
I second @AlmostAnonymous. I’m also a mobile laptop worker and that is my solution, too. You are a programmer, so it’s neat to have your IDE fullscreen on one monitor and a console, browser and stuff on the second monitor. If that‘s not enough add your iPad as a third screen with Duet. Get yourself an IKEA Dröna to keep the laptop in the shadow. I’m using USB-C powerbanks with 30W PD to power my MacBook for the whole day at full brightness.
https://lifehacker.com/use-an-ikea-box-as-a-foldable-laptop-hood-for-outdoor-u-1706052882
A few years ago, there was the Acer Predator 21X, a 21" behemoth with Nvidia SLI at $9000.
About 10 years prior, HP (or was it Dell/Alienware) made a 19" (or 21") with 9800GTX.
And Clevo still make their 17" barebones with desktop mobos and CPUs. Check Eurocom, Sager, Xotic-PC resellers, etc.
These days I'd get a small 19" rack with a M1 Mac Mini and rackmount-foldable LCD, keyboard, mouse....check datacenter supply sites for those LCD panels and 3U-6U racks.
Or a MBP, Razer Blade 15" or 17", or MSI Alpha 17".
Actually, thinking about it, there are a lot of monitors out there that have a low-voltage DC power input. Similarly there’s a lot of small-form-factor desktop computers that have low-voltage DC input.
(Incidentally, I did the PAT testing at work and therefore skipped all of those aforementioned units, as they don’t have mains inputs, therefore PAT testing them is a waste of time – unless I was an independent PAT tester, in which case they’d be covered in green stickers to justify the huge bill at the end of it).
Given a monitor of choice, a suitably powerful SFF desktop, all you’d need is a portable solution to the 12VDC (and/or often 19VDC in the case of the SFF desktop). Increasingly this is very feasible using ganged banks of 18625 cells or similar in charging/supply systems that would completely beat the pants off of any laptop power system. It would also make solar charging a sensible adjunct.
Why not going for a standard size laptop and adding a portable screen ? That would keep everything light and cheap.
That Idea with the foldable racks look awesome also :-)
Hey,
I've actually found that article already while researching... yeah but as soon as you start adding external components and cables and whatnot (I don't think a wireless display connection is useable in real life), the whole thing starts to lose its mobility and it gets cumbersome, so I'd want to avoid that. Also, a 17" screen means that the keyboard won't be large enough anyway.
@AlmostAnonymous @krassmann @u0421793 @jazzmess thanks for your suggestions... the thing is that as soon as the whole thing consists of multiple disjointed pieces, the usability factor decreases by an order of magnitude, so that's a no-go...
@SevenSystems I am not finding anything larger then 17’’. Most articles I have read have been taking an external monitor with you. I am sorry for your situation and hope that you can find a solution. Also does this mean an end to the IBM keyboard?? 😢
Sooo... another huge market gap. Large laptops. I guess most people actually don't use their laptops for actual work anymore nowadays, but for showing off their "thinness" while sipping their Lattes
(I know, I know...)
Well, you must know what’s good for your way of working. For me the multi-device setup has a better usability than one big screen because it’s very flexible and I can adjust my setup to the type of work or the situation I’m in. On the train/plane I just take out the laptop, if I need to read or take notes I just take the iPad, if I work on code I use the laptop plus the monitor, if I need to additionally chat a lot I add the iPad to host the chat window. Setting up a workplace with the three screen combo takes just a few minutes. I also like that the multi-screen setup is like a cockpit where each screen has its dedicated purpose.
Moreover I think these monster laptops are usually tailored for gaming. They are rather portable gaming PCs than mobile work computers. They consume a lot of power and the battery life is short. If you don‘t have wall power, you would need a lot of powerbanks to have a full working day. It‘s also questionable if you find powerbanks that deliver enough PD watts. You would probably need to buy one of these big camping batteries. I would also assume that on a hot day such laptop would overheat quickly and then throttle down the CPU. Believe me, for mobile and outdoor work you are better off with several devices each with their own battery and low power consumption. I’m doing this for many years.
Fully agree on this. I have a variant of the xmg apex 15 with a lesser graphics cards (1660ti) and a 3950x, it's doing great, but your cannot push things like you would on desktop. I can manage a fixed frequency of 3.6-3.7GHz on all 16 cores, but could not go pat this.
It can run on batteries but it last barely 30 minutes, so that's more of a emergency supply than anything. There are lots of compromises and you have to inquire what voltages/timings work with ram CPU. I even have to discard SSDs such as the 970 Evo plus from Samsung as they were taxing too much power. But now that I found a good compromise, it's quite impressive to have this amount of power in such a small footprint :-)
I doubt it is practical now (price/resolution/battery?) but in a few years this may be dandy swell.
One thing I didn't mention -- I do not really depend on CPU / GPU power too much. The Asus X93SV's specs (from 2012!) are still pretty okay for my use cases. I run a highly optimized Arch Linux install which is pretty good on resource usage. The only thing that sometimes gets bothersome is the 4 GB of RAM... the whole thing used to grind to a halt as soon as it started swapping to the mechanical hard disk, but as soon as I moved the swap partition to a speedy USB SSD, all good!> @AudioGus said:
I've researched into those as well... the main problems will be
1) resolution -- they're not very high resolution, or if they are, then extremely expensive... plus you also have to consider that not the entire "display" area will be filled with the desktop, so the effective resolution is even lower
2) my eyes -- I'm extremely myopic (-9 diopters), and I'm not sure most of the VR headsets can be adjusted that far. Also, one of my eyes has a strong cylindric refraction (2 diopters delta difference between horizontal and vertical refraction), I doubt any VR headset "supports" that
But yeah, the idea itself is great -- even for desktop use. If some day the resolution is high enough and the needs of strongly myopic people are honored
EDIT: Just found out that apparently, you can wear glasses while wearing them. That's unexpected. Might research more
Hi, I haven’t watched this vid yet, but looking at the thumbnail, maybe this might be right for you..-
So, it seems like a laptop display larger than 17.3 inches simply doesn't exist anymore, at all. Odd!
Well, so I'm so far settling on this one, in case anyone is interested:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-AERO-17-XB-i7-10875H/dp/B086NFLNZP/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=gigabyte+aero+17&qid=1626635096&sr=8-2&th=1
Ticks the "large display" (well, as far as possibe), "numeric keypad", "bright display", "512 GB or bigger SSD" boxes nicely. The "battery life" box is probably only so-so ticked
Sounds like you just need an microsoft studio (28")