> What features are you seeking that aren’t available? There are many powerful, heavy laptops. There are many 16+ inch form factors. My current laptop has dual screens!
Sure, there are many powerful, heavy laptops. Almost none with a HiDPI screen, though. And almost none that lack a numpad (and off-center trackpad). And almost none with half-height arrow keys, even among the ones without numpad.
To find one with all three of those? You may as well not even try. I have more requirements, but nobody really cares even about the most basic ones, so there's no point in hoping for the more complex ones.
Even among laptops with 4K screens they're bound to have "full-size" keyboards with a numpad. If no numpad, the arrow keys are still likely to be full-size, and there are probably dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn buttons, which are always stupid compared to putting them into Fn+Arrows.
I get it, portable workstations are designed to be desktops in a laptop form factor. They're not designed to be laptops. But maybe something out there should be. Maybe there should be even a single laptop on the planet that is actually designed like a premium laptop, with workstation-class power inside.
There probably won't be, though - far more likely for everybody to tell me my expectations are completely unrealistic. (It'll happen any second now, probably.)
> I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on things you don’t like, but that doesn’t always exclude the things you do.
The Framework Laptop 16 is one of the first Windows laptops I have ever seen that checks many of those boxes, but unfortunately it's still thin and light (and also AMD).
I recently got a Apple 16" MacBook Pro and it's okay. Really many of my requirements were inherited from the Mid-2015 MBP being possibly the best machine I'd ever used, but then Apple became terrible for a while, and nobody else (not even Razer) did a good job of replicating what I liked about that machine.
The new Apple Silicon machines outperform full-size desktop workstations. I'm OK with that.
(According to Geekbench, this machine outperforms my desktop 12400F by 20% in single-core and over 100% in multi-core, and it's also less than 5% behind my RTX 3090 in GPU performance... in practice though, I've noticed certain work tasks drop down from taking over 10 seconds to under 3 seconds.)
The reason I don't like thin and light Windows laptops is because they freaking don't.
In pros they stick more ram chips in parallel, and depending on storage the same for flash. I.e. more bandwidth. That may aid your tasks more than the extra geekbench scores.
Sure, there are many powerful, heavy laptops. Almost none with a HiDPI screen, though. And almost none that lack a numpad (and off-center trackpad). And almost none with half-height arrow keys, even among the ones without numpad.
To find one with all three of those? You may as well not even try. I have more requirements, but nobody really cares even about the most basic ones, so there's no point in hoping for the more complex ones.
Even among laptops with 4K screens they're bound to have "full-size" keyboards with a numpad. If no numpad, the arrow keys are still likely to be full-size, and there are probably dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn buttons, which are always stupid compared to putting them into Fn+Arrows.
I get it, portable workstations are designed to be desktops in a laptop form factor. They're not designed to be laptops. But maybe something out there should be. Maybe there should be even a single laptop on the planet that is actually designed like a premium laptop, with workstation-class power inside.
There probably won't be, though - far more likely for everybody to tell me my expectations are completely unrealistic. (It'll happen any second now, probably.)
> I agree it can be frustrating when the mainstream focuses on things you don’t like, but that doesn’t always exclude the things you do.
The Framework Laptop 16 is one of the first Windows laptops I have ever seen that checks many of those boxes, but unfortunately it's still thin and light (and also AMD).
I recently got a Apple 16" MacBook Pro and it's okay. Really many of my requirements were inherited from the Mid-2015 MBP being possibly the best machine I'd ever used, but then Apple became terrible for a while, and nobody else (not even Razer) did a good job of replicating what I liked about that machine.