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Comment by banal00 | Hacker News Reader

These posts are annoying, IMO. Reviews and blogs posts about them are everywhere by like minded readers, and this is the discourse such posts bubble up every time here.

Guys. I mean. Seriously. It’s a laptop. It’s not worth a request for comments every week.

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Hi. OP here.

I did do some reading before posting. Here are some of the threads I had read before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21302412

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861949

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216287

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28023345

None of the threads seemed to have a consensus e.g. some swear by the Dell XPS 13, others say the laptop has been a crap experience more or less. Others still prefer Lenovo Thinkpad variants, and even these have those who've had negative experiences. I was hoping for a winner of some sort or at least a list of recommended laptops that I can bookmark and spend time reading reviews of. Hope that makes sense and sorry for the inconvenience caused.

I'm happy for your post (I might be about to look into deciding for a laptop, too, and unlike general review sites the discussion here is centred on the use for a particular community we're part of), and honestly I find JabavuAdams' post pretty toxic (it does elicit more heated arguments). The annoying thing here in my view is this sub-thread, not your post.

Thanks stranger :)

Look I’ve designed electronics for big corp; if you used the internet 99-2004, parts I designed probably switched your packets, or boosted signal.

You’re trying to predict your future. No one here can help with that.

You know your philosophical constraints. Hardware across vendors fails at largely the same rate due to normalized manufacture and sourcing patterns now. It all comes from the same few parts bins pretty much. The key specs are listed on each site.

Reality is you have roughly the same risk of getting a lemon or finding a laundry list of nitpicks with any choice.

Reviews are hard. Nobody agrees on anything, and some people have very strong options about certain things (trackpads, keyboards g that little mouse nub between the g an h keys)..

I have a system76 oryx pro running pop os. It’s older now (8th gen intel). Works well, though I had a fan start grinding, it was an easy replacement. The machine is a clevo so replacement parts are easy to get. I like it. My previous home machine was a 2014 Mac book. Oryx is bigger, faster, heavier. The build quality isn’t as good as the Mac but it decent. It has nvidia graphics which even run games. Battery life isn’t great, especially when running the nvidia card (you can switch to intel graphics ). It upgrades the os easily unless like me you do so manual stuff.. system 76 support is good (part of what you pay a premium for)

I just got work to buy a new system 76 machine for me. The amd laptop model “pangolin”. I like it so far.

> None of the threads seemed to have a consensus

That probably answers your question ;-). Along with the fact that you found multiple previous discussions. There is no consensus to be had, everyone will have their own particular definition of 'good' and the variance is so wide that you'll just have to figure it out for yourself.

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