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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I just had a look at a newish Lenovo sitting next to me and it's packed with gaudy logos stuck to the inside hand-rests:

* Intel Inside

* AMD Radeon graphics

* Energy Star

* 2x JBL speakers (two mentions of JBL, one's not even a sticker)

* Dolby Digital Plus

...and a few others that depict generic features of the laptop (Do I really need a sticker to tell me I have a webcam on this thing?) Honestly it just looks tacky, like a Nascar car. I'll peel them off some time but yuck, totally tasteless.

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> yuck, totally tasteless

Huh. Now that you mention it, I have a Windows _ (the _ is where the sticker is worn down -- 7, I think?) sticker on my Lenovo Thinkpad (which doesn't have Windows currently installed, mind you).

Never really noticed it. I'm usually too busy starting at the tastefully design webpages dancing on my screen.

My 1 year old Thinkpad has one too, but on the bottom. I guess the Microsoft kickback is less than the Intel one.

A generic one, or the one with the license key? The latter at least makes some sense...

Yeah but if you remove all of that except for the Intel Inside Core i7 and the NVIDIA GEFORCE stickers... well you've just maintained the resell value of your Lenovo.

Yeah, sort of a ritual of changing jobs for me. Reject the three different Macbooks on offer, request a Lenovo Thinkpad with crazy specs, remove the gaudy stickers, install Linux, and then get the trackpoint working on boot/reboot/wake/thaw with my preferred sensitivity settings.

Which thinkpad model? Screen size? Weight? I must carry three (!) laptops with me: shitty windows that I nearly never boot, macbook pro for webex (!) and not to get in trouble with bosses in meetings, and my beloved 17" asus, with ubuntu, which I kind of hide, and which is getting too heavy for me. In all over 10kg. I work remote, so this is only a problem for the occasional gatherings.

I use a P50 with 64GB of RAM, and an i7-6700HQ Intel processor. It is not light by any means, but it is certainly less than your 10kg (the specs I'm looking at say it's about 5.6 pounds, which sounds about right). It's got a 15.6" HD display, though I could have (and probably should have) opted for a 4k display. Also has a 1TB HD and a 1TB SSD. At my workplace, we're using Zoom, which works flawlessly on Linux. I have worked at a place that used Bluejeans, which did not work so well on Linux, and so I actually ran that inside of a Windows VM in Virtualbox. I would highly recommend one of these Thinkpads. It seems you would greatly benefit from buying one. They are packed with enough specs for you to run whatever combination of virtual machines you could possibly need in your everyday work.

Holy cow! The closest I could find in Amazon.de [1] is selling for 2200€, and it has only 8 GB RAM. Do you mind sharing how much did it cost you, and where did you buy it?

[1] https://www.amazon.de/Lenovo-ThinkPad-2-6-GHz-6700HQ-1920-x/...

Sure, I bought mine through Amazon, but like with any of these machines, you will save a lot of money by purchasing a machine with the lowest specs possible, and then buying the upgraded parts (RAM, CPU, drives, etc) and installing them yourself. I bought mine for about US$1700 altogether, including the new RAM and storage options. It is not cheap, but it is absolutely worth the money if you work with computers professionally at all. The only thing you can't really swap out is the display, so you'll have to buy that in the base model. These Thinkpads are not cheap, but it's easily some of the best hardware I've ever bought. Better even than all that old phenomenal Asus hardware! Thinkpad models seems to be hit or miss, and so I would research beforehand which ones are not great. I've previously used for example a W530, which is definitely a hit, along with the P50.

Why not install windows and linux on virtual machines (or dual/triple-boot) on a single highest-end macbook pro?

Can not get used to keyboard / mouse of macbook

i used to have the same problem, but i found after a week of using only the mac I got used to it :)

Since my main development environment is Linux, having to work inside the VM is actually making this problem more difficult:

1. I have problems getting used to the Mac keyboard

2. I have problems getting used to the keyboard mappings inside the VM running in the Mac, which is different to the keyboard mappings in my barebone Ubuntu machine, and different to the mappings in a VM running in my barebore Ubuntu machine

3. Integration of host OS (macOS) and VM is another source of pain (copy-paste, file sharing and so on)

If I was able (or willing) to ditch Ubuntu and do everything in the Mac, without VMs, this would be easier to achieve.

As a software developer, I find the lack of dedicated home/end/page up/page down keys almost impossible to get used to. The new Touch Bar makes things even worse.

But I'm genuinely curious why people want to pay this huge price for merely okay hardware? You can get a lot more power out of a non-Apple product for a lot cheaper. I am not trying to start a flamewar here, I've just never been able to wrap my head around this idea.

You would get into trouble using Ubuntu around your boss? On what basis?

Only windows pcs with corporate software packages are officially allowed into the VPN. Macbooks are tolerated, anything else does not exist.

>I'm too good to use the computer everyone else uses, I need a special computer to let everyone know how different I am

Oh come on. I consider myself an anti-snob but when your laptop is the primary tool that you use throughout your day I think it makes perfect sense to very picky about it.

>Appeal to popularity. Come off as an asshole, not just a jerk (and definitely not just snarky).

My XPS 15 just had an Intel logo and I pulled it off after I got it. I kinda want to block out the Dell logo now on the bezel. I hate advertising.

Weird. My Thinkpad only has an Intel sticker.

The stickers are there because they sell these things on store shelves to people who actually care about the hardware they are buying.

They aren't that hard to take off.

Such a weird comment on a Hacker site (at the top too). Hackers used to care a lot less about status and appearances, and more about doing cool shit. It's unfortunate that changed.

It's entirely possible to care about doing cool shit tastefully.

Taste clouds the mind. It introduces preconceptions, encourages judgement, and makes it harder to see the true value in something. Thankfully, many hackers were not dismissed due to their lack of "taste".

Just take the Lenovo laptop for example. I don't know which model it is, but some models are incredibly practical. They have very long battery life, beautiful keyboards, and are built like a tank. But no, let's focus on the stickers.

In as much as taste = preference, I'm not sure that is an accurate statement. Preferences do not necessarily cloud your mind, nor are hackers devoid of them.

Just take the Lenovo laptop for example. I don't know which model it is, but some models are incredibly practical. They have very long battery life, beautiful keyboards, and are built like a tank.

Which is presumably why the previous poster has one sitting next to him.

But no, let's focus on the stickers.

It is the focus of this thread. Why would you even open it if you're not interested in discussing them?

Exactly. I got the laptop because it's an excellent work horse, has specs suitable for what I need it for (programming), and runs Debian like a champ. The point, which I probably failed to get across, is that I find it funny how Lenovo put so much care into making a kickass laptop, then proceeded to carelessly slap a whole bunch of stickers all over it. Obviously the stickers can be removed but it seems like such a lapse in design quality for an otherwise very good laptop.

Everybody has always cared about status and appearances, even if that appearance was the appearance of not caring about status.

Personally, it's not so much how it looks, it's having those damned stickers right underneath my hands as I type. I'm one of those people that washes my hands a couple times a day -- not like anti-germ OCD washing, but just... conscious washing -- and those stickers always mess with me. Though it is a little bit about looks, because I always end up putting on my own Linux Mint sticker on the case and a little penguin sticker over the Windows button. But only marginally about looks.

Hackers didn't "use to" anything. Some do, some don't.

I care about aesthetics and design a lot and I always have. I consider it related to the ocd-like tendency in me that sortof itches when I see code that is inconsistently indented or when a non-mutating function is named with a verb that I feel indicates mutation.

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