I work at an e-waste recycling company and I definitely agree that some manufacturers have way too many product lines and models. I'm not sure what the difference between an HP EliteBook and a ProBook is. At least with a ThinkPad or Dell Latitude, you know you're getting a half-decent laptop, but I'm not sure what the difference in the model numbers mean. (I remember a co-worker telling me he found a ThinkPad T-15. It could be a J-9,000,000,000 for all I know: it doesn't mean anything to me.)
Then there's the cheap laptops with what I call a "Shenzhen Special": a 1366x768 TN screen. Those should never have been a thing. Even cheap phones 10 years ago did not have screens that bad, but laptops 5 years ago do.
> A whole laptop for less than 400 USD is a great thing for the other half.
I paid my "new" ThinkPad X13 Gen1 400 Euros + 29 euros for shipping, less than a month ago, from eBay. It comes with a 8c/16t ryzen cpu, a full-hd touch display and 32GB ram.
Even if it was 500 euros, it's an incredibly better value than a "Shenzhen Special" piece of trash.
I just buy second hand thinkpad for half of that if I want a good enough one.
Recently bought a Thinkpad x390 for my significant other for 170€ with a brand new battery. Works well enough, is small, light and quiet, has a decent keyboard and fullhd screen. Very little battery drain when suspended. Brand new laptops at twice that price offer a much crappier experience.
> I just buy second hand thinkpad for half of that if I want a good enough one.
happy that works for you, but for my data center environment, where I need a bunch of cheap, simple laptops in the colo -- and in some cases, burner laptops for dubious countries with data centers -- cheap and simple is the requirement.
2nd-hand and refurb create question marks as to security and reliability, and we already have enough holes and questions.
I worry about gpu driver support and the like. I have a 2014 Macbook pro that I run linux on, and it's generally great, if you ignore some minor thermal issues. But x265 decoding happens only on the cpu and the gpu support in wayland is lackluster.
It think a modern under 400 laptop would not have all of the above issues.
I stopped hunting and just started buying MacBooks and I’ve been pretty happy for the last 10-odd years and generally regretful of any other laptop purchase I made in the meantime.
Lenovo did themselves a disservice by discontinuing the W15 which I thought was worth a solid shot until they started putting spyware in everything.
As a linux user I hate this. I know 100% that the MacbookPro (16'', m4 whatnot) is probably the best developer notebook out there, but I just can't feel good giving Apple my money.
Until recently I was a die-hard macbook-er, but Apple has turned evil (look at iOS, there's another article on HN about iOS browsers are still webkit based, even though EU has apparently slapped their wrists or Airpod buds which are closed to developers (Zuck was complaining about this recently)).
So I use a Thinkpad Carbon, Linux and hope RISC-V will come from on high one of these days.
The lead dev, Hector Martin (marcan), stepped down a few months ago after a row with Linus about a few kernel patches. Other high profile devs also left the project shortly thereafter.
Asahi doesn't work on M4-series Macs and it doesn't look like anyone will be able to make it work in the next few months at least.
I am not as picky as the author but I also find it crazy the amount of laptop models for a given brand. Same for smartphones. I don't understand how having so many SKUs at similar price points can be profitable.
Different model numbers allow discount segmentation by distribution channel so that price matching can be defeated. Also it makes it easier to slip out of issues by updating sku numbers.
They can sell the same "production output" as different SKUs with different prices in different markets/retailers, with just enough minor cheap-to-make variance so regular people can't find out.
If you are competing with other hardware sellers in the same software ecosystem, then you are competing for buyers that have a diversity not only of means, but of value weighting for different features; having different SKUs with different feature mixes at similar price points is how you compete in that market.
Having simple tiers rahter than multiple offerings with different focuses at similar price points and also a diversity of price points works really well if you aren't competing that way, but not everyone can be Apple.
What non-mac laptops would HN recommend these days? I usually look for laptops without a dedicated GPU, mostly because it adds to weight/battery consumption and I have a desktop anyways. Build quality, display quality, battery size and linux support are usually what I look out for.
My laptop now is a Dell Precision and I hate it. It is Ubuntu certified and yet suspend and the Webcam is broken. It's a work laptop which I don't use much, but I'm considering getting a new private laptop, and it's very
disconcerting that even a "certified" laptop have issues with Linux..
All I want is decent battery, hardware which work, medium sized with ideally high resolution screen.
I am after this too. I have had my eye on StarBook but I am waiting to hear recommendations from others.
HP EliteBook with Linux on it also comes recommended to me by my sysadmin BIL.
cant recommend more completely. after extensive research it came out clearly ahead for linux, plus practically as open hardware as framework and fantastic customer support. wont have to replace for a long time but next one will also be starlabs.
Hey you bought it? Have a few questions if you don't mind
How is the sturdiness? Does the firmware have any particular issues with linux? I mean bigger than usual problems with things like suspend/resume/laptop lid/usb autosuspend.
How is the battery life?
Also, how is the shipping time? I read a lot online about folks not receiving it for a year+
DHH is a big fan of Framework laptops. Build quality is great, display quality isn't as good as MacBook Pro, battery size is good, and Linux support is outstanding.
I just got an HP Zbook Ultra G1a with 128G. I added a 4T 990 Pro SSD and loaded HP OEM Ubuntu 24.04, then kubuntu-desktop. I added AMDGPU software for OpenCL. Except for no dGPU, it seems like a near perfect laptop. Great OLED touch screen, decent keyboard, 4 USB ports plus HDMI.
I had to remap the home/end/ins keys which were oddly placed. It has that useless and totally annoying CoPilot key that cannot be remapped either since touching it sends multiple keystrokes both down and up.
ROG Zephyrus G14 2025 with the 5070Ti, comes as close to it as is possible imo. If you want more battery life and/or don't want to game then you can literally run it on the 890M and disable the Nvidia GPU, as easy as never installing the driver for it in the first place (I am imagining you as using Linux)....
MacBook Air M4 is sufficient for almost everything (except maybe gaming), but that depends on how much you want to get caught up in Apple's ecosystem.
I've asked the author if they considered Proart PX13 before, they told me they didn't see it fit due to five reasons including:
-Has an NVIDIA GPU
I'd probably suggest the M4 Macbooks, as there are not many AMD graphics based laptops out there at the moment, and the battery life of an ARM based platform does not seem to be compareable to an x86_64 yet assuming you won't need a x86 processor.
The HDMI port is no biggie any more. Both laptops I have that are new enough to have a USB-C port put out video through it with a cheap (not Displaylink) mini docking station. Even the one not marked appropriately at the port (a HP 840 G6). The other is a recent-ish Acer Swift 3. Both are running Linux.
love my starbook mkvi. coreboot bios features like setting charge level and frequent firmware updates (over fwupd, which is rare and extremely convenient!) linux first class, tteir own hardware all are fantastic. battery not fantastic, but i run many VMs and keep charge level to 60% so I am bad judge, ttough 6hr is good ballpark. speakers are not bad but not macbook level at all. support is super quick and knowledgeable. had this pc 2yr or so now, will be buying from starlabs excrusively in the future. only wish i had more usb c ports, but new models do. practically as open hardware as framework, with ram and ssd user erplaceable and even battary and motherboard replacements for sale, but much better linux support from what ive read. highly recommend!
I've heard that a lot of people who made the switch to Linux lately really like the Framework Laptop 13* laptop. DHH is one of them.
As a plus if you know your way around hardware the whole thing can be disassembled and upgraded, you can even buy it as a DIY package if you want.
It's pretty high on my wishlist as a system for non-gaming purposes because I don't really think the integrated GPU in the Ryzen AI HX 370 can cope with that very well. But Linux and Wayland should run terrific on it.
Framework laptops are very costly, more than an equivalent Macbook but they have inferior screens, keyboards, speakers, touchpad, processor speed, GPU, build quality to Macbooks. They sell you on upgradability and repairability but Macbooks tend to last a decade.
Discrete GPU is a liability. Makes the thing hotter, bigger, hurts battery life and stands a decent chance of being the thing that kills the machine when the solder joint breaks down. I won't buy a laptop with one in. Different people have different ideas of perfect (e.g. I don't want a touch screen - not interested in fingerprints on the screen or the hit to battery - but the OP requires it).
I touchtype and having a numberpad is a major annoyance. I hate that bigger laptops usually have a numpad. The TouchPad goes off centre because of this.
Not everybody remembers that the numberpad is intended for touch-typing use by the left hand, if you are a right-handed business accountant for instance.
This was to allow for a nearly-universal established workflow where the right hand would shuffle the papers or maintain a pointer at a ledger as the data was entered to a mechanical adding machine, without taking the eyes off of what the right hand was doing. The #5 key with the tactile marker is the home position for the middle finger.
The adding machine sitting to the left of the desktop (sometimes on a cart) didn't need to be observed at all, it printed each entry on the roll of paper as you went along, subtractions or negative numbers optionally in red ink. Which could be audited later if necessary if there were any questions about correct data entry. Printing calculators having a financial mode have mimicked this like forever too.
Nobody would have ever expected IBM to be able to sell a calculating machine of any type without maintaining at least this particular backward-compatibility feature.
So it could be seen as more easily integrated by those businesses adopting their first computer of any kind.
Spent a long time researching upgrade to my x230 and the starlabs starbook won out withoun question. hardware is designed in house, firmware over fwupd (and are regularly released), made for linux, all parts user replaceable, and customer support sincerely the best ive experienced at any company. not affiliated, just very happy customer.
I despise the trend where every big box store get their own model number on the stuff they sell, so it seems like Lenovo / HP / etc. are selling 1000 different laptops. When in reality they are mostly the same, with some small tweaks and differences, depending on where you buy them.
In many ways, the market for laptops has collapsed.
My latest laptop purchase I view largely as a bonfire where I burned $1200 in effigy, and not from lack of marketing, but from lack of real options.
Lenovo has lost a customer in me for life, and it taught me a very important lesson. If the options don't exist anymore at a reasonable price point or reliability you just have to build your own.
For the recent purchase (2 or 3 years ago), here is a running list of failures.
A required Lenovo Advantage firmware update (same day as delivery), bricked default power charging preventing charging and running while plugged in. This forced an RMA when the battery died without any way to power the device on.
The new one received 2 weeks later headphone jack failed. 2 months later and several separate USB PHY ports had failed requiring a USB hub on the remaining functional port. by 6 months, HDMI became intermittent. 7 months the Webcam microphone and video had failed enumeration. Just shy of a year the WIFI, and especially bluetooth became intermittent.
I sought out a business laptop capable of video editing. I got a dumpster fire, and worse it didn't function at all under Linux so I didn't even try; the failures were W10 the entire way.
Anyways, nowadays you just have to build your own cyberdeck using distributed computing principles. The old macs used several chips in parallel, why not RISC?
I know some people have already done it, and the performance they are getting isn't half bad and the work I've seen seems light years beyond where security is today providing peace of mind that people once had with regards to firmware malware/bad state (you could always reset to a known working safe state where it wasn't accessible to the internet).
Imagine the peripherals, basic display, attachments, boot all controlled by an elevated privileged FPGA that you dock to which oversees the other equipment that does the performant work which is offloaded to a distributed backbone.
Most off-the-shelf mainboard chip combos today run ~$500 minimum, for a ton of features that aren't needed, or wanted, and just slapped together. Even a basic case runs at least $100 now with fans that fail. within a month.
Then there's the cheap laptops with what I call a "Shenzhen Special": a 1366x768 TN screen. Those should never have been a thing. Even cheap phones 10 years ago did not have screens that bad, but laptops 5 years ago do.