2016 and Beyond: What are we missing in laptops/notebooks?

What's the display limit on running a screen off USB 3.2 v. 2x2?

Concur that 4k x3 isn't the most sensible gaming option for a laptop at present; though I'd be hard pressed to ever go without 4k anymore.

I can see why the slide-out option will be falling out of favor soon. Laptop segment is trickle-down from smartphone segment. And the current "new hotness" that smartphones are trying to work out, is folding displays. I think this is where laptops will be headed--although they may not simply "fold flat". Perhaps something like a roller-shade that can be externally plugged into a laptop chassis (sans screen).

 

Not sure that the new standard is but with usb-c using the DP standard you can chain 2 displays iirc. I'm thinking about using it if I get a thunderbolt dock.

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Packed pixels is about to come out with 2 mobile monitors. One of them is 4k resolution 15 inches and hangs on the side of your laptop monitor. You can put one on each side. I feel like this will be the closest we get to project valerie.

 

This is less dreaming but more a realistically cool way for the XPS 15 to differentiate itself.

Background.
Right now, the 15" premium market is hot, with the Aero 15x, XPS 15, Razer Blade, MacBook Pro, Asus ZenBook Pro, etc. all being really, really strong products in their own unique ways. With Dell about to release an XPS 17 next year, which will realistically have more focus on performance with larger thermal headroom, this could allow the XPS new opportunities to fit within the lineup.

The XPS 15 is kind of lost right now as it hasn't really been redesigned since 2015. There are now 15" competitors that are both more powerful (Aero 15X, Razer Blade) in not much heavier cases, and 15" products that are slightly more portable (MacBook Pro).

What Dell could do is make an ultraportable computer with the same performance as the current model. The lightest and smallest full-powered laptop out there.

-Eliminate the screen chin bezel while keeping the other bezels the same size, effectively reducing the footprint to a ridiculous amount for a 15" notebook. ~10% smaller footprint, ~3.75 lbs
-Keep the same battery (97whr) for the current 8 - 10 hours it has now
-Keep the same processor options (H-class)
-Keep the same graphics card families (mid-tier class as it is now)
-Keep offering the 1080p screen for people who want battery life, while offering the 4k version for people who want a better quality screen
-Port selection: 3x USB-C, 1x USB-A, SD-Card reader, Headphone Jack

To do this, Dell would have to do some clever redesigning of the inner chassis to not allow for flex as it currently is, but perhaps some sacrifices need to be made:

-Keeping only one m.2 SSD Slot as it currently is, although most other competitors have 2
-Get rid of some of the unused space on the topdeck where the keyboard and trackpad are with close consideration for keeping comfort and not feeling "cramped"
-Eliminating an open RAM Slot, currently individual SO-DIMMS appropriate for the XPS 15 can go up to 32 GBs, so while competitors may have 64GB options within the next couple years, the XPS 15 will be stuck at 32... but is that really a problem? How many people are even going to purchase 64 GBs of RAM? Software hasn't caught up with the hardware for the past five years.

 

Idk if I’d call any of those laptops “strong”; popular maybe, but they’re all rather garbage tbh. Pretty much all of them (except the vapor chamber Blade) thermal throttle to hell, the XPS still has coil whine issues, the Aero’s display is hilariously fragile (don’t pinch it or it shatters), MBP has the keyboard and display defects, and Razer/Asus just have some really poor quality control and build quality.

That said, it seems like defective, “pretty” laptops are the future of laptops...

 

Yeah, design before functionality. It’s Sad!

 

Well when people are more willing to pay for the name than the practicality, why spend the extra dosh to improve it?

 

Do you have statistics, numbers, or anything objective besides complaints online to back any of those claims up?

If they were really THAT bad, would they be allowed to sell them?

I'm not even a Dell fan, but my 9570 has been great.

 

For the QC issues, there are the owners’ threads here on NBR and elsewhere. Normally I’m with you on dismissing most user reviews (since it tends to boil down to “it rocks 5 stars” or “I hate it no stars”), but where you have a number of users reporting the same issues (such as the Razer Blade battery swelling, or just the entirety of the /r/MatebookXPro subreddit), that’s something to take note of.

As for the thermals, I’m referring to testing via ADIA and Heaven at the same time (puts a full stress on the CPU and GPU), and seeing if ADIA reports and thermal throttling (and/or hwinfo reporting power throttling, such as is the case for the Thinkpad X1E). If there is throttling, it means you’re not getting the performance that you paid for when buying X CPU and Y GPU; at best you’re a getting sub-X and sub-Y performance for X and Y price. More than welcome to try it out yourself:

Brands as a whole don’t really matter at all; you need to pay attention to individual models and judge them to their own merits. Overall I like Dell as well and am happy with the 7577 (not to say it’s perfect; the display is garbage), but Dell makes both decent (older G series, Latitude 5000/7000 except the 7390) and bad units (most of the Inspiron line, XPS, Alienware).

 

That's why I'd like to have a THICK 15" laptop that will tear through games and doesn't overheat.

 

Not all thick laptops handle heat well (and hell, the Alienware 51M will smoke / catch fire), but it’s certainly easier to make a properly-cooling laptop when you’re not worrying over a mere few millimeters.

 

FACT.

Still though, we're talking about AW, and imho, that brand stopped being good when dell bought it.

The only way i can keep my Gigabyte P35x from overheating during gameplay is to manually turn the fans up to full blast--and even then, it will choke on trying to play new games at 4k. Oh it can run them fine...for a few minutes. But then heat catches up. Issues I never had with my MSI GT60

 

Almost a year on from its release and the Dell XPS 15 9570 is still suffering from countless issues...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/xps-15-9570-owners-thread.817008/page-266#post-10904843

Why fix the current (EOL) XPS models as the new models is soon ready for release?
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/xps-15-9570-owners-thread.817008/page-266#post-10904862

 

A lot of these notebook manufacturers' QC is pretty poor, and obviously they've taken their sweet time with fixing these issues. I have a 9570, and I understand what I bought. I agree with you. But this still isn't indicative of how objectively bad the situation is. What percentage of them have these problems? Nobody really knows except for Dell. Of course people are going to complain online. For every 100 people that complain about their problems, how many will leave a positive review? 1? 2? 5 maybe? If it was really as bad as you guys are saying, there would be a lawyer hopping all over for the $$$ in terms of opening up a class-action lawsuit.

And really, to call a whole product trash and to espouse the notion that all thin-and-light 15" laptops are trash is just ignorant. Not everyone wants a 8 pound monster with 2 hours of battery life, and are more than willing to sacrifice a little bit of the advertised processor speed because of poor cooling for a sweet-spot of portability AND performance.

 

Flaws with the products ain't the same as notebook manufacturers' QC (quality control) https://www.dell.com/community/Inspiron/Dell-G3-3579-High-Dpc-latency-Acpi-sys-2700ms/m-p/7235833#M47478/jump-to/first-unread-message?ref=lith_popular

And not all notebook manufacturers launch a product then change the specs afterwards (after the review of the products done by tech websites). The coming buyers don't get what they have seen from review sites.

 

Again, a thread with two replies is not proof of anything. If 100% of users had this issue, there would be action taken. Do you know how much percentage of these computers are giving consumers problems? Nobody knows and online complaints are not valid bodies of data; it wouldn't work in any objective study. Your sources are tending to be subjective.

Dell lowering the throttling headroom is what they determined to be the best case for their computers. They aren't making money from doing that. That's what they deemed as the best path forward for this laptop. Consumers should be aware, and determine whether they want to purchase a product where the company wants to play it safe with the thermals of a computer at the sacrifice of performance. That's where I agree with you. I'm not arguing with you there. My point is: to call a whole product trash and to espouse the notion that all thin-and-light 15" laptops are trash is just ignorant. Not everyone wants a 8 pound monster with 2 hours of battery life, and are more than willing to sacrifice a little bit of the advertised processor speed because of poor cooling for a sweet-spot of portability AND performance.

 

So you're implying that 0% of any of these laptops have issues whatsoever? Or that if 99% of them had problems, we shouldn't expect people to complain about them?

Customers *should be aware* sure, but most people don't spend the time to sit down and research these things in-depth and they end up buying whatever laptop has the best marketing appeal to them, rather than based on whatever merits the machine has. And to be frank, considering how little attention people pay to more important purchases (like cars or homes/apartments) or important non-purchases (voting, mainly), I can't exactly be surprised that people are too lazy to bother looking beyond the marketing hype or positive reviews.

You can have a thin and light laptop that isn't trash (Acer Swift 3 is a decent example, as is the Lenovo Thinkpad T480s), but a lot of them *are trash*. People want the OEMs to shove in i7 quad/hex cores and something higher end than a MX150 and expect it to somehow give Newton the bird and to defy any sort of thermodynamics and perform as the spec sheet says they should perform, which frankly is delusional. And to be honest, for a lot of these people, where the most intensive thing they'll likely do with the laptop is watch Youtube or spam out Chrome tabs, lower-end hardware that's more appropriate for these machines would still be more than powerful enough for their needs *and* would actually work properly in something like the XPS. But no, people want to brag about their on-paper specs and play the "MUH BIG NUMBERS" game, while being ignorant/arrogant of the fact that these things don't have the performance they say they do. And honestly, you don't need an "8 pound monster with 2 hours of battery life" to get a decent, small gaming rig; the TongFang rebrands (such as the Eluk Mech 15 G2) is something like 4-5 pounds and gets about 4-5 hours of battery life with light usage, just as one example.

It's fine if someone still wants to buy these things despite the flaws. Their money, they can spend it as the please. But to say that they're actually good laptops flies in the face of reality.

 

I never said that 0% of these laptops have problems, or that if 99%, not 100% had problems, people shouldn't complain. I never said that - my point is using a few threads on the internet with people complaining of issues is not objective data at all. Especially to call entire lineup market segments and product lines "trash". There are many, many, many people perfectly happy with the latest 15" XPS, Aero 15x, Razer Blade, and whatever thin-and-light performance computer you want to name. People that are satisfied with their products tend to not go on internet forums or make articles on issues they are experiencing. You think it's worth it to ultrabookreview or whatever to write an article titled "Current Dell XPS's are great and reliable!" No, of course not. Nobody would read that nor care. Instead they make an article based on a small, vocal group of users on the internet that are experiencing similar issues for an article. It's ok to write about that, but it's not right to call that objective data by them or you guys.

And come on, the Swift 3 and Thinkpad T480s is not in the same class laptop as we are discussing. MX150s and U processors is ultrabook performance. That's not even in the discussion. We are talking about the class of thin-and-light 15" notebooks with a step above in performance. H processors, 1050/1650 and up, thin, and around 4.5 pounds or less. And it's funny. You are saying these notebooks shouldn't exist, or people are foolish for purchasing one. You claim that only people that brag about "MUH BIG NUMBERS" would buy something like this. Hilarious. That's why the thin-and-light PowerBook / MacBook Pro has been so wildly successful and all other manufacturers copy Apple's trend. And why the Dell XPS lineup is one of the most recognizable PC lineups. These computers are wildly popular. I think you are the one really only caring about "MUH BIG NUMBERS" because YOU are the one complaining that the processors throttle occasionally - but still remaining much more powerful than U processors, when the computer is maxed out. You are the only complaining about small loss in percentage of performance with no regards to any other factor, like design, portability, or usability.

It's quite frankly narcissistic to think that just because you disagree with how people use their laptop or look for in a laptop, it's foolish for them to buy it (even though they can do what they want with their money).

 

Well, when I buy laptops, one of my top concerns is being able to perform as they should, be it a 8250U and MX150 or an 8750H and 2070, etc. All because people either are ignorant or arrogant about performance loss due to throttling or build quality issues doesn't really say much about what I should look for or what I should recommend people to buy. Neither does it mean that they are good laptops; again, why would someone who's clueless about the issues raise any sort of complaint online if they don't know any better? And it's not like people don't just immediately stop buying bad products after they've been shown to be bad (people still buy current Macbook Pros despite the keyboard/display issues, for example), so what's your point?

There are *some* decent thin gaming laptops, despite what you think I said. The vapor-chamber Blades have decent thermals, so they can actually obtain the performance the spec sheets imply (ignoring the quality control issues), and the 2019 MSI GS65 thermally modified by a decent reseller (GenTech or HID, for example) does acceptably well also. OEMs can make a good thin gaming laptop if they put their minds to it, but that's more expensive than putting out crap and customers don't care anyway, so why bother making something good?

All because people want to *believe* they're good laptops, doesn't make it so. And call it however you like: those things are still bad buys, but I can't stop someone from spending money on a bad buy. If this offends you in some way, that's your problem. It really shouldn't though... it's *just a laptop*

 

I'll just agree to disagree with you. I don't think they are bad buys. A lot of people don't. But a lot of people do, too. You have a lot of valid points, hope you can see what I'm saying as well. We can agree to disagree, can't we?

 

I don't see it as a "good guy bad guy" thing. Just companies who bother to do decent engineering and those who don't. But in the end, you'll have customers who will buy the crap no matter what anyway. The types who see "thin bezels!" and don't stop to think if it's actually decent, you know?

 

... I'll just disagree with you then before I spend too much time here arguing. It was fun man! Great insight by you that I respect.

 

I want a laptop with a big socketed APU chip kinda on par with whatever console grade graphics are at the time something like the am4 where it supported 3 generations of chips.

Then split me off a 8x PCIe lane to go to an open standard connector kinda similar to MSI ge stealth book they made.

Would make that gaming dock eGPU viable or at least more so.

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As much as I don't like single purpose data ports, a dedicated PCIe is one that I'd really like to see. Something that's explicitly for an eGPU but not proprietary to a manufacturer.

 

Pretty much. And really you can plug anything into that enclosure that is PCIe compliant.

Personally I think I would try to place it as an expansion bay.....maybe rip out the CD drive in favor of that.

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I recall Lenovo doing something similar, but they made it a hot swap bay. An interesting concept for sure. One I've been kicking around in my head would be a sort of hybrid solution. Something that attaches to the case but is more shaped like part of the laptop. It's outside and removable and contains everything needed to make the particular piece of hardware work. Like conformal fuel tanks on a fighter.

 

This was done in the y400/y500/y510p/y500

There was also a mod that made that port into a eGPU but lenovo had a whitelist of sorts so it only worked with AMD GPU. Many of those that wanted something like that used the RX 480/580 and I think there were a few Vega 56 systems as well.

 

Those were the ones. And the egpu wasn't hot swap like the extra fan or drive or whatever else you could put in there I think. But still it was something.

 

Yeah except the fan and hdd basically never really existed, vaporware of the highest order, along with the 755m5/750m5 SLI GPU. It burned me from Lenovo for years. If you DID find the GPU online more often than not it didnt work due to a BIOS limitation that was never patched, not to mention updating to 8.1 broke SLI (had to get vBIOS update) at the time. It was an excellent machine with essentially no support and promises that were never delivered.

I only recently picked up a used t440p because of the i7 4980hq I already had and everyone else already tested this machine to hell and back (plus it was 80 USD)

So yeah it exists, just a long list of crap alongside it.

Product support would be a nice addition to the thread I think lol

 

I was having trouble remembering exactly why it didn't take off, there it is.

 

Honestly, I have very modest wants;

I want 2k+ USD laptops to be factory pasted with top end pastes with good application.

I want laptop manufacturers to determine their own TDP that their chassis can dissipate and set the TDP on the chips accordingly. And also I dont want any unnecessary resistors on the pcb driving voltages up for no reason. Quite frankly nothing should be locked on my hardware... its mine, I should be able to melt it if I want... just void my warranty but dont make it difficult for me to use my own hardware...

I want the body to be adequately rigid where I dont have to treat the laptop like an infant, preferably built with light metal panels.

I want easily upgradable components, like the screen panel, storage, ram and easy access to the cmos battery. (Just make a little pop-open window at the bottom panel..)

 

At least HP is listening for this one. Theyre adding liquid metal to that dual screen Omen 15

 

I just thought of 2 uses for folding screens for laptops.

One is the Asus Zenbook Pro Duo approach but instead of two seperate displays, it's just one that folds.

Another is one that wraps around the back of the display that folds outwards. If there was just 1 fold on the left and right side of the screen, we could have 32:9 screens for laptops BUT if then if the screen was double folded, we could have a 48:9 laptop! (same as triple screens)

The second one is a bit out there but just an idea

 

Pretty sure ASUS is planning on that too.

 

I prefer my t440p's and Rangers.

Just like anything else, if you buy something for the branding you're burning your money regardless. Look at the individual model in question then move forward if your boxes have been checked.

 

This x100 especially on thin and light gaming laptops that are all the rage now. Pretty much all reviews for such laptops show temps on the higher end and recommend you to undervolt it

 

Yea, though in all due honesty you should probably undervolt any Intel CPU you get from the latter years.

Just about everything I have seen runs like a furnace even my 6920hq in my GT 83 till I tuned it.

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Still want to see a magnetic charger connection in something higher end.

 

Laptop DIY builds? I would love that so much.

 

How about AMD desktop CPU laptops? Zen 2 Ryzen in a laptop would be great!

 

Yea, I am holding off my upgrades to wait and see what's happening. Lol

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end of the year brothers! or early next year.

amd 16 cores in laptop or intel 10 core comet lake.

 

I'm hoping to see AMD start to storm the laptops. Hopefully they can force the market down and give me options of something to buy.

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like old days, some decent specs for decent value. 2k for 8 core laptops etc

 

Man I know there's a lot of overhead to get it to market at this point but I really can't wait for some competition in laptop chips.

 

One thing for sure... You won't get cheaper laptops if they go that route. Only cheap graphics chips, less storrage and ram will affect the prices.

 

Yea, they got us deadlocked into being bent over and shafted because they know 90% of us are not in a position to go with a DT.

**** I'm starting to hate my hobby.

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New GaN-based chargers are making chargers for phones and such smaller and more efficient. Maybe we can see some of these be scaled up for laptops? Would love a smaller 230W brick for my laptop.

 

Hopefully soon, if not for the weight reduction at least to take up less space in my bag. Also I know it's probably terribly impractical, but seeing those concepts for wireless power delivery over a distance makes me wish someone was seriously working on it for a laptop.

 

A button to punish my computer!