Meanwhile, the expensive laptops with actual desktop-class components have unacceptably shitty peripherals, so you can't even pay more money for what you want; it simply doesn't exist.
This is what upsets me the most about laptops.
You can find all sorts of beautiful 4K ultrabooks with the perfect keyboard and trackpad layout, and great webcams too—if you don't mind putting up with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM... If you want a really modern and powerful CPU with lots of RAM, you'll be looking at the likes of Clevo and AORUS and etc. that put desktop-class parts in a thick chassis, but... that bodes terribly for the peripherals they end up using.
Some of the Clevo machines have individual gimmicks like 300Hz displays, but none of them seem to have all of "high DPI, good keyboard layout, good port arrangement, high performance". And this is true for basically all laptop vendors.
OEMs think good peripherals always equate to "thin and light" which results in bad performance, either through bad parts or bad thermals. Maybe Frore Systems' new cooling solution will help slightly with ultrabook thermals, but until that happens, laptops are just suck.
You may notice that this only matters because I even care. You may also notice that this is exactly what building a desktop is for. I am building a desktop, but I also have to build a laptop from scratch for the desktop so I can operate it from bed. Which would have been avoidable if I could've found a laptop in the first place.
The point anyway isn't to say that there aren't any good laptops out there, but rather that if you want high performance (e.g. you are bothered by slowness), you can only get it as a package deal with the rest of the laptop... obviously. But the package deals all suck. The laptop market is so annoying sometimes.
Big reason why I dislike the market so much: the existence of that machine with only a single flaw that nonetheless ruins the value of the entire product. There's nothing else like it. It seems to be the absolute best machine the market has to offer... and it just barely misses. :(
However, the screen resolution seems to be the only problem with it, so anyone who doesn't require specifically 4K (most people) would probably find it worth considering.
[0]: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-x16-2022-seri...
Once the patents on Apple's trackpad expire, then we'll see.
But having a good trackpad doesn't make up for other blunders like an annoying keyboard layout, a low-DPI screen, or etc., and you bet nobody who makes the thick and heavy high-performance machines is going to care about a good trackpad anyway.
You don't really see OEMs that put top-of-the-line hardware inside a thick and sturdy chassis, and then... add a nice 4K screen and a numpad-less keyboard and put the charging/USB ports on the left instead of the back.
The list of possible blunders is so long that you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine that hasn't been subject to most of them. That's just not how laptops work. Laptops are a package deal, all or nothing. You can't ensure every requirement individually like you can with a desktop.
And the reason I don't like the market is because nobody makes a really good one.
Put it behind a VPN, use wake-on-lan and boom, iPad is essentially a fully blown computer.
What is the point of having half a TB of storage, however many gigs of RAM, lidar, radar, sonar, and the best processor architecture money can buy to render a glorified, interactive video?
I would like to be able to write code without having to pay the price of internet latency. I don't need a $1000 tablet to render RDP.
It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
I didn't claim that it was sufficient, but it is necessary.
> It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
Of course. With other people's money (typically).
That would be the ideal device for me when I'm on the go, that I can still use to watch Youtube videos in the bathroom. I do not need a full laptop when I work at home with a $5,000 desktop PC, nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered.
It is really sad to have the tech to do something, but it doesn't exist because the bean counters said no.