Last Saturday, after logging on Twitter X, I came across two tweets from two great programmers I follow.
*** Deeply Negative Tweet Alert!!!!!! ***
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) May 18, 2024
My ASUS Rog Strix G16 super hyper gaming laptop has lasted approximately 1 year before destroying itself.
For about a month it has been in a mode where it's impossible to sleep it (and there is no Hibernate option in Windows any more,…
I bought a Macbook a third of the price of my expensive Windows 11 Dell, and everything feels smoother and nicer (aside from the fact I'm not really used to the OS, and learning vscode is going to be a thing).
— Omar 🍋 (@ocornut) May 17, 2024
Context: Jonathan Blow and Omar Cornut are two programmers focusing on games and game engines development.
Note: I will use the word “professional” for laptops with high-end specs and components like CPUs, GPUs (which includes “Gaming” laptops), and RAM, and big battery capacity.
In the first tweet, Jonathan Blow exposes its troubles on its latest professional laptop:
In the second tweet, Omar Cornut exposes also the fact that its latest Windows laptop does not follow the same rate of performance / price compared to an half-priced Apple macintosh.
Buying a Windows laptop (or just computer hardware in general) there are two different things to differenciate:
and we can rearrange the list of complaints of the first tweet based on this.
The list of the laptop manufacturer faults:
The list of the Microsoft Windows faults:
Both seem to fault here, and we can ask ourselves how evolved the professional laptops “industry” since the last 10 years.
Note: the title of the next sections can contains spoilers about each evolution.
Today, the based price of a professional laptop is between 1000 and 1200$.
As an example, if you go to the website of the famous DELL manufacturer, you can find some XPS devices with latest
Intel chip in it, at least 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD, but no dedicated graphics card.
If you count on a GPU, then you will have to upgrade some specs (like the size of your laptop and, then, the size of
your screen) to have a basic NVIDIA RTX 4050 mobile GPU in a 16" XPS for 2500$.
4000$ for a laptop is a thing. And for this price you should get the Rolls-Royce of the modern laptops with:
So, in total, we should expect for a device that costs 4x the price of a “basic” professional laptop the best reliability ever.
But how can we compute that reliability?
As for smartphones, we can count like that:
Among the best selling devices for professional we can count on many different brands. I will only take care of four different here for my expose, and a recent one called “Framework”.
Professional laptops contain their own lot of good, bad, and weird components. The Gaming category contains maybe the most non-sense use of components among the different categories of laptops.
As an example you can find 4K panels on 14" screens, which consumes a lot of battery and is not very well different than a 2K panel for this screen size. However the “4K screen” ad bumps up the price of the hardware. As a personal opinion, I would prefer a 1080p or 2K OLED panel than a bad calibrated 4K panel… especially on a 14" device.
RGB lighting is another example of “flashy” laptops that rely mostly on its design. Except if you want to show off during a Twitch session, I don’t think this is what you really want to show working in a coffee shop on Monday morning…
Slim designs are a weird thing for Gaming laptops, as they need to cooldown heavily to avoid throttling. Slim designs reduce the space needed for components, increase the price of each component too as they have to be specifically built for a laptop model specifically, and also diminishes the repairability of the laptop. In a funny way, the most expensive laptops seem to be the slimest devices - so, more you spend money on a device and less you care about reparaibility…
Finally, the most stupid idea are coming from Razer to introduce a high-end expensive mobile GPU with a 140W power with a low TDP and power supply that can’t fully power it… So, you pay for the high-end mobile GPU and you only obtain the same power than a chipper GPU card. Razer is not the only manufacturer to blame here: the same thing happened since years about the CPU, where the cooling system was not good enough to avoid general throttling, which reduces drastically the performances of your laptop.
Talking about cooling systems, innovations about cooling systems stopped since years now, and manufacturers usually install a larger fan and a more agressive “Extreme Performance” software profile (only available when plugged).
And, finally, the CPU. CPUs had a really low increase in terms of performance on Windows laptops but are, at least, as expensive as previous generations of CPUs. They consume more and more energy to try to performance better than the previous generation but sometimes fail because of bad thermal performances and throttling. You can check the prices of new high-end laptop CPUs here, which are mostly in the same range of prices than a general business laptop.
Windows 10 has been introduced in 2015, and its end is scheduled for 2025. A majority of Windows 10 laptops, introduced in 2015, where not suitable to move to Windows 11, so most of those will just die once the EOL of Windows 10 will be claimed.
Windows 12 specs will tell us if Microsoft is forcing people to buy new hardware, or if Windows 11 was only a “step for security” as they claim.
Except DELL no one supports GNU/Linux for hardware drivers, and DELL only does this for its XPS brand, no other.
Another thing is the number of bloatwares shipped with a laptop today, and the number of background services that are running to ask you to register somewhere for whatever reason… Those applications are really annoying and come with plenty of default softwares from Windows 10/11 that slow down the overall performances of your computer.
About laptop lifespan per brand, it is very difficult to have reliable information from those manufacturers. Despite searches I only found that Microsoft released on official statement about 4 to 6 years of software support, at least, depending of your Surface device.
However, 2 years ago, a Medium user called “Greencodetech” has done its own searches on the subject and published a paper about it here.
Its own searches led him to this top 5 (according to hardware models):
A laptop without battery life is just as useful as a car without wheels: a theoritical portability.
Most professional laptops support a “good” battery component, drained very quickly by the energy-consuming components
that compose the laptop.
To avoid your battery life to end in less than 2h, Microsoft and laptop manufacturers imagine different profiles to
help components to consume less energy while reducing their performances.
So, as a result, your computer will lasts 4h but the compilation time will lasts 2x more than plugged…
Another fact is some components will be disabled on purpose to avoid waste of energy… so, as the manufacturer did not increased the capacity of your battery life (or just did not invested on improving the situation here) you will have a decent battery life but with weaker performances and disabled hardware parts.
Professional laptops are as expensive as previous generations, but they are, at best, as “ok” as the previous generations, if not weaker.
The OS and drivers support is in average 5 years but, if I am being honest here, I never found a person with a 5-years professional laptop in its hands since a while, mostly because the device died by itself, or some components stopped working well, or just the need to upgrade to better specs, which is not what you can do easily on modern professional laptops.
The fact that certain brands like Razer, DELL, or Microsoft let you buy very expensive laptops with expensive components on it that you can’t use at full speed and / or at full power is another fact that end-users are not respected.
One possible alternative is called Framework, which focuses very heavily on scalable and modular
configurations, and long-lasting hardware.
Unfortunately there is still no reliable data to know how really lasts a Framework laptop, and how reliable those modular
configurations perform.
How can we explain that our laptops have more powerful components than 10-15 years ago but software still feels “laggy”?
A simple hypothesis is our computing devices are actually busy to execute shit instead of focusing only
on user’s demands.
It is not a surprise that each new version of Windows from Microsoft is a fiasco.
However, the new mainstream thing - since Windows 10 actually - is that each new update of Windows
introduces again more bugs
(and more ways to lose your data), less useful features, more ads, and less performance!
As an example, in 2022, Tom’s Hardware performed a benchmark on running the exact same software on a classical machine running two different versions of Windows (10 and 11). Tom’s Hardware found out that each software was running between 6% and 10% slower on Windows 11 than Windows 10.
The Microsoft marketing team does seem aware of this issue as they stated, releasing Windows 11:
Both operating systems have similar security features, update processes, and compatibility with hardware and software. However, Windows 11 offers improved performance and features compared to Windows 10, making it a better choice for those looking for a more modern and efficient operating system. To get this statement, please follow this official Microsoft webpage.
Also, Microsoft did not even tried to fix one of the most noticed bug on a laptop for Windows 10 and Windows 11:
“modern standby”, which leads to a Windows laptop that wakes up suddenly in your backpack.
This is the issue Jonathan Blow stated in its tweet.
This issue has been raised by everyone, including all modern streamers and YouTubers, like Linus Tech Tips in the following
video.
Microsoft acknowledged the issue, and released several fixes that do not seem to work for everyone, as this bug is regularly reported again on some official and unofficial Windows forums.
As I said earlier the two tweets authors are working in game and game engine development, and I understand why both
authors are targeting Windows as a default / main platform for their work, despite the weird state of this OS today and
the macOS and GNU/Linux alternatives today.
First, as a game developer you may want to target the largest community of gamers as possible, and this community is 95% on… Windows.
Then, as a game developer you may want to target also the console gamers, on Xbox, PS5 and Nintendo Switch.
The main issue is that all tools from those console manufacturers, including the SDK, are exclusively built for… Windows.
Unfortunately, to target the main audience in gaming (industry / market), there is no big room for GNU/Linux or macOS.