And every price point has one thing you want that the other ones don't have, so you end up sophie's choice-ing your way through Dell's website. And then you go from their Home to their Business site and the prices, features, bundles, and add-ons are different for the same hardware.

It's the same reason Google started making Nexus phones: so that someone, somewhere, would make a good Android phone without messing something up.

Something I do want to note: everyone seems to only ever look at two, maybe three companies for "serious" notebooks: Dell, Lenovo, and (maybe) HP. However, I've found that by far the best company to buy laptops from is Asus.

The latest example of this I've seen is the Asus Zenbook UX305LA. The specs are:

    8GB Ram
    256 SSD
    Intel Core i5-5200U
    1080p IPS display
    A keyboard devoid of obviously poor layout[0]
    Nice large multi-touch trackpad[0]
    Weighs 2.86 lbs (1.29 kg)
    8+ hours of battery
    Full out of the box Linux compatibility
    ---------------------
    Price: $750

It seems to have an absolutely killer set of features at a great price point, and this seems to be a trend with Asus. My current laptop is an Asus TP300LA, with nearly the same specs (though thicker and heavier), and it sold at the same ~$700 price point two years ago.

I highly recommend people look to Asus for their standard "programmer machines".

[0] - http://cuttingedgenotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AS...

My two last laptops have been from ASUS. No complaints, no problems with reliability, decent trackpads and generally solid builds (not Apple-solid, but they are also not Apple-priced as you point out). For a while, they were the only company making decent 13" with discrete graphics.

The thing that I found incomprehensible, and somewhat tangential to the grandparent, is how ASUS manages to screw up distribution so badly. They release slightly different models at slightly different times in different geographic regions, and it is usually impossible to buy, say, the European or Asian versions, in the US. A year ago I was quite literally ready to throw money at them in exchange for a UX303LN to replace my aging U36SG, but my dream model was only available in Europe. The only two options I could get in US both had something wrong with them. Repeat: they actually manufactured a laptop to the exact specifications that I wanted, but didn't give me a way to buy it.

Considering they have global distribution channels, it don't imagine it actually being hard to make all models globally available, so the only other explanation I have is forced market segmentation: the two models available in US were pretty much the lowest and the highest end, with nothing in the middle.

I had been waiting to see if UX303UB will make it to US, or if it will suffer the same fate. Instead, I just pre-ordered a Surface Book.

There's more to a laptop than just its theoretical performance. It also needs to be reliable and tough, light-weight, ergonomic (good keyboard, touchpad that isn't touched accidentally), cool (otherwise CPU & GPU might be throttled), etc.

And to add to that, how repairable if something breaks?

I've found the general quality of Asus machines, especially the zen book to be exceedingly poor when trying to come off of a MacBook Pro. The touchpad and keyboards typically are horrible. That's what matters to me more than ram or Cpu.

which ones? The zenbooks have been pretty sweet, accurate trackpads, decent keys, although personal preference is hard to really nail down. build quality pretty good, screens could give you 1920 matte screen even back to their 2012 iterations.

the out of the box linux compatibility is a game of chance on those. you have half the models with shitty broadcom cards. a third with the only atheros cards they can find without any drivers and the remaining with an intel card for this month and realtek after that.

it's just a pain in the arse to find one that you can reliably recommend. and 1920x1080 is still a shit resolution.

I used a laptop with a broadcom card 2-3 years ago; it worked for me.

Exactly. I mean there are basic things for which you shouldn't have to hunt models. Anything with the basic size, shape and weight should have the standard ports and connectors I am guessing they are cheap enough. Having to shop for a different line of laptop for want of 2 USB 3 port is ridiculous. This is a made up example but you get the meaning.

What I think can be reasonable price points for laptop

  Basic build vs. premium construction (Non-plastic super rigid maybe)
  Weight (regular vs ultra light)
  Ports, keyboard, touchpad should be standard I think. Maybe premium ones might have the latest techs but nothing should be atrocious.
  The next bit should be priced based off whats chosen but really most cpu, ram, storage, display should be available on all model. You might restrict the premium to some high end configuration but even on a non-premium build you should be able to get high end display for most part.

What you shouldn't end up is having a $1400 vs. $1500 line of products where the $1400 has got better ports or display option then the $1500 laptop.

A huge amen to this...

The universe needs

4 size formats (11, 13, 15 and 17 inch) 3 screen resolutions (1920x1200, 2560x1600, 3840x2400 (17inch only) all 16:10) 2 keyboard options on 15 and 17 inch models (with or without keypad) 4 RAM options (8, 12, 16, and 32 GB) 7 drive options (128, 256, 512 or 1TB SSD, 500GB or 1TB hybrid, 2TB HDD) 4 GPU options (Embedded, High end gaming, Mid gaming, Stable/Workstation (K620, for example)) Touchscreen or not option Removable batteries (except in thin and light and cheapest possible which have integrated batteries)

3-6 body types 1) thin and light (only 11/13/15inch) 11hr battery life, no discrete video, SSD only 2a) middle of the road plastic (13/15/17inch) 6hr or 9hr battery 2b) middle of the road metal (13/15/17inch) 6hr or 9hr battery 3a) rugged/thick/workstation (15/17inch) 4hr or 6hr battery, option slot for either BlurRay RW or 2nrd drive or 2nd video card or secondary battery 3b) thick/gaming (15/17inch) 4hr or 6hr battery, option slot for either BlurRay RW or 2nrd drive or 2nd video card or secondary battery Optional) cheapest possible (15inch) no discrete video, 6hr battery

Not sure why OEM’s can’t get this straight. Also not sure why 1366x768 is still a thing nor why keyboard options aren’t a thing.

> It's the same reason Google started making Nexus phones: so that someone, somewhere, would make a good Android phone without messing something up.

The problem Google have though is they have zero input into the hardware design, other than choosing from the existing models. So their ability to prevent cock ups only extends to the software.

Except there was the Nexus 7 TRIM issue that killed SSD performance and took a year to patch. I suppose they've had a lot to learn.

This is what I was hopeful for when VAIO was spun off of SONY last year.

When I saw the "machined magnesium body" line in their video [1] I was immediately reminded of the VAIO laptops that had beautiful material way back in the 90's.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVfOe5mFbAE&feature=youtu.be

"Fun fact": Steve Jobs is said to have admired Sony [0] and things like the MacBook Air is presumably inspired by the Sony VAIO X505 [1].

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+admiration+for+so... [1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/6/5385716/sony-vaio-iconic-pc...

I bought a Sony Vaio 15 Flip ($1200)[1] new vs. a MBP, Surface Pro 3 or Wacom Cintiq (needs a computer) for drawing. Artists are still looking to buy them at $1400 to $1800. It has a large drawings surface vs Surface Pro 3, a dedicated GPU, lots of ports, and a great screen. It runs my CAD programs (Rhino, MOI and AutoCAD Fusion) sufficiently for an i5-based notebook. It has some other great screen positions for just browsing. It a very sleek and well-designed unit. I can see how Jobs would admire them or be inspired by their innovative designs. Just look at the PSP vs. the Nintendo Gameboy physical design. I did consider an Apple Modbook [2], but it was too blocky, expensive, and going to a third-party for a modded Macbook didn't feel right, although they are Apple-endorsed and sponsored now.

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425731,00.asp [2] http://www.modbook.com/

Sony actually manufactured the early Powerbooks under contract.

That's correct. The Powerbook 100.

I worked at Geek Squad in the mid 2000s and we had one regular customer who had one of those X505. Its thinness and its lightness were unbelievable back then.

I still miss the z series... But the z series had ethernet ports. This surface thing is useless to me.

You can order a new Z here: http://us.vaio.com/

As a pleasant surprise, it still has a built-in RJ45.

At $3000 I expect a dedicated graphics option...

You'll probably be best served by the (ugliest ever) "surface dock." See the same page.

I use a surface and I have an ethernet to USB adapter, works pretty well.

But then you loose the USB port. But the main problem of USB adapters is that they don't like being unplugged and plugged back which happens quite frequently with a laptop. With a real port connectivity is pretty much instantaneous. I used USB adapters for a while on a MacBook pro and came to the conclusion that I will never ever buy a laptop without ethernet ports.

What I wonder is why they don't come up with a mini-ethernet port format? Ethernet ports aren't exactly high tech.

Anker makes a USB 3 hub with gigabit ethernet. I've got one, it's pretty great.

http://www.ianker.com/product/A7514041

That is my docking station at work! Fully linux compatible, built properly too, albeit Apple aesthetic rather than the black plastic that is more me.

I didn't realize such a thing was being made! thanks for the tip

> What I wonder is why they don't come up with a mini-ethernet port format?

I suspect that is part of the problem. The plug is just so big - though IMO Thunderbolt and USB adapters work OK. Realise not everyone thinks this way, though.

> But the main problem of USB adapters is that they don't like being unplugged and plugged back which happens quite frequently

? That's basically what they're designed for.

Maybe I am unlucky but I tried different adapters. The Apple ethernet adapter is not even plug and play on windows and requires a reboot. But even USB adapters take a while for drivers to load then I had all sort of problems: the connection regularly being recognised as 100Mbit when it should be gigabit or the USB adapter not being recognised after a couple of unplugging without a reboot.

The Apple Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter is basically a PCIe devices over Thunderbolt. Unless your OS has hot plug PCIe, it's going to require a reboot.

At least Windows and Linux have supported hot plug PCIe for ages.

Although hardware PCIe slot register must support the optional presence detect bits. Also slot capabilities register must report optional hotplug support and surprise removal support.

I guess thunderbolt has those features supported by default.

IIRC, the apple thunderbolt ethernet adapter violates thunderbolt spec and relies on the adapter specific driver for hot-plug when it's supposed to be a generic interface... this is a problem in other OSes running on mac hardware even.

How about a cable that’s USB-C on one side, has the ethernet controller built into the plug (similar to the way a Thunderbolt chip is crammed into the plug), and ethernet on the other end?

Remember these? http://www.recycledgoods.com/media/extendware/ewimageopt/med...

Never quite sure why the small connector didn't become the standard for laptops.

The 15-pin I/O connector for ethernet was part of the PCMCIA CardBus standard, which is why dongles could be shared between cards. After PCMCIA picked up speed, a "non-practicing entity" pulled a patent out of their portfolio for a "programmable connector". Because the PCMCIA ethernet card itself plugged into the computer and presented a different connector to the outside world, the NPE was able to sue and/or settle with something like 90% of the companies making PCMCIA ethernet cards & modems.

3COM had a cool connector on some of their cards called XJACK. It was a little tray you slid out of the card. It had a hole that your RJ-45 plug slid into and some pins. It would certainly make for thinner devices today, but the connectors broke pretty easily and you ended up with an ethernet cable sticking out at a weird angle.

Before everybody standardized on RJ-45, there was a standard called AUI which used a 15-pin D connector. Your network card would have an AUI connector and you'd buy an adapter for whatever kind of network you needed to attach to. Apple had their AAUI which was much, much smaller (about the size of 2 mini Display Ports?). But I think licensing kept that from taking off as a standard.

Well, that's actually an alternative. Instead of having a full standard RJ45 port, having a smaller laptop-friendly proprietary socket with a cheap plastic adapter to RJ45. The adapter would just be a piece of plastic and therefore this would avoid all the driver related problems and would not require manufacturers to pick up the phone to agree on a standard with their peers. That would work for me.

I think that was before my time. All it would take is a different plastic socket format. The top 10 laptop manufacturers could agree on a standard in a 10 minutes conference call.

Real products don't work like fads in Javascript.

> What I wonder is why they don't come up with a mini-ethernet port format? Ethernet ports aren't exactly high tech.

Regular ethernet is so ubiqutious that you'd end up needing adaptors anyway. At that stage, you may as well use a USB-whatever to Ethernet adaptor.

Not if it's a standard. Think micro-usb ports. You can find micro-usb cables everywhere. In this case you would find RJ-45 to mini-RJ-45 cables.

You can do Ethernet over many connectors. The end points will still be RJ45, which are very ubiquitous. That issue will not be resolved any time soon.

It has, in the docking station; which makes sense to me.

> While I hate the almost singular choice for OsX

I actually find that this is less true now, and I miss when it was more true. There are a lot of choices now, not just at price points, but at form factors. Do I get a 13" MacBook Air, a 13" MacBook Pro Retina, a 12" MacBook, or the upcoming 12.9" iPad Pro?

I was just speaking to one of my devs about this today. Steve Jobs' turned Apple around by removing choice. You had a Consumer and Pro category and they each had a laptop and a desktop. The new Apple is slowly drifting into Dell territory, where I have too many options. It becomes the Netflix problem where I find myself having too many options, so I browse the offerings, and before I decide, fall asleep.

Steve Jobs got rid of a lot of stupid choices in the Mac line, but he was not anti choice.

At one point, the ipod lineup went from about $50 to $500 in $25-$50 increments. Every little increment was just that much better, in a way that made it very easy to spend a few more bucks. This one has more space, that one is a little bigger and has a screen, that one is a ton bigger an can play videos, this one has more storage than you'd ever imagine.

The ios lineup looked like that a few years back, between the ipod Touch, carrier subsidies for phones, and the new at the time ipads. The declining subsidies has cut off the 0$ upfront low end, but they're extending up with the pro.

My feeling on the laptops is that the Air is not long for this world (which sucks, cause I really like mine), and the model confusion now is essentially a transition state because they can't make all the engineering happen in one year. At some point, Apple is going to manage to make all of their laptops essentially iPads of different sizes, with attached keyboards.

(Why they can't do a bigger one with a real keyboard, days of battery life, and a monster processor is left to the imagination)

I think the problem is they're in a transitional phase right now. Retina displays aren't ubiquitous yet and are introducing an extra axis of differentiation on the one hand, while the new ultralight Macbook is the first example of a step change in form factors. They're a long way from PC manufacturers where the main distinction between two models can be as trivial as the audio chip and speaker specs.

What I meant is a single vendor. There are other laptops out there good or bad and if I wanted one for price or design I can't. For example I would probably love to run OSX on something like a surface book if that was possible, or linux for that matter.

I hate the lack of ports in the Macbook 12 but thats the only 12" OSX machine you can get.

Microsoft has done really, really well with the Surface tablets, from what all my Dev Ops and Systems friends tell me. I'm still a bit wary of the detachable keyboard form factor but hey, it would be cool to see them get another win with the Surface Book.

>You don't chip $50 off a premium laptop and make it crappy

I got that kind of feeling though when he was talking about both the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book. The SP4 is thicker than it could be because you wanted to add a full USB-A??? WHY?? and there are USB-A and not USB-C and a full SD slot on the Book ... WHY??? It made me ill to see them add that shit. It felt like typical MS snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Full SD?? Not micro SD??? Not mini SD??? Why again??? sigh

Full SD makes complete sense. Many cameras use an SD card.

Now you need a separate adapter to carry around with your laptop instead of a nice built-in SD card reader.

I'd bet an extremely high (and growing) percentage of people never connect a digital camera to their computers, and those that do probably do so rarely. So do the benefits here justify the costs?

How do people transfer photos from digital cameras then?

Many cameras don't have built in USB/networking of any kind.

Most people don't own digital cameras any more, they just use their smartphones (which have USB/networking).

LOL, your comment is quite funny. This may be true for "most hipsters that don't care about photography", but in reality there are still many folks using regular mirrorless camera or even better, full frame DSLR because their price has dropped so much in the past 3 years. And these folks also happen to be the ones looking for premium laptop options in order to get data transferred fast (wifi is too slow for RAWs) and work on their pictures before publishing them.

It's not because you dont have a use for it that everyone out there is just like you.

Actually, I have a dSLR myself. But I'm a tech nerd and extremely aware that most people are nothing like me. Most people just take selfies on their smartphone cameras, run them through an ig filter, and call it a day.

Again, most people dont have a 1000+ USD laptop. You are not talking about your regular laptop user here - there is definitely more people who have large cameras and not only smartphones among the ones who buy expensive computers.

I mean, I'm obviously biased because of my age, but walk into any college lecture hall and it's all $1000+ MacBooks. Only a small minority of those same students will ever buy a dSLR.

Wifi is not too slow for RAWs. I backed-up my entire library to the cloud over wifi. I would bet most people don't need to transfer their files on a fast enough timescale that wifi is too slow for them.

Most people use only their phones as cameras now.

No it doesn't its a horrible and unnecessary dependency. Why not simply do what Apple did with the MacBook, for those hands full of users who still need an SD reader and can't connect the device directly by wire, they could simply plug in a dongle. It's absolutely stupid really, especially with USB-C looking to take over. Hell, they put it in the damn phone, why not be consistent and go with it everywhere. stupid.

You have insert mini and MicroSD with small adapters into SD slots, but you can't do the opposite. On top of that, SD cards are the ones with the biggest capacity out there. MicroSDs are very limited in storage and tend to be very costly when you go in the high storage range.

pretty annoying, especially when its so close to being the perfect laptop for me, one that i could go a good 10 or so years without having to upgrade if it only had included usb c and a fingerprint reader.

but from their point of view it probably makes more sense because where would you go after making a perfect laptop like that!? it would already be as thin as it can and there wouldnt be that much more to add to it apart from and slightly better cpu or gpu

> and a fingerprint reader.

It has a fingerprint reader.