Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/28/surprisingly-attractive-laptop.html
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That’s nice-looking. I’m glad they don’t force you to buy the “better” display to get the better GPU, as a 4K laptop display is a ludicrous waste of money and processing power.
Even if you can physically see the difference, e.g. because you’re a bald eagle, you’re spending $300 to make your computer work 4x harder to display every single frame.
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Gaming laptops: how to spend eye-watering amounts of money for the ability to burn your lap while playing demanding games away from home.
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Band name! Band name!
Actually, I don’t believe I’ve come across any gaming laptops matching that description, but they sound like a thoroughly frivolous expense anyway.
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Windows® 10 (64-bit)
That’s a dealbreaker.
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Fortunately, unlike take-it-or-leave-it Apple, Razer supports Linux.
I looked at Razer a couple years ago when I was shopping for a new personal use machine. I ended up going with something else, but only because I’d read a lot of hit-or-miss stories about their warranty support. The machine itself was quite nice when I found a store with one to check out in person. On the one hand, I understand that a company smaller than the major manufacturers by orders of magnitude doesn’t have the same resources. But uncertainty that you can get fast warranty support anywhere in the world is the deal-breaker for me.
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Boingboing is the new Skymall.
Yeah, I looked at Razer, then I looked at the price tag, then I looked at a Clevo chassis build which, while not quite as attractive, was still not bad. Plus I was going to be using this as a desktop replacement primarily, but still needed it to be portable.
First time I saw one of these laptops was at a developer conference, and I was, like, “whoa! what is that cool looking laptop?!?” — again, then I saw the price…
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thank god! the whole “gamer” aesthetic needs to die. It has put me off buying things many times just because I can’t stand the thought of looking at something so butt-ugly every day.
I’ve never met a single person that likes the design of the usual crap these companies churn out. Their excuse seems to be that it sells well, but obviously it will if that is the only option
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you can run windows and linux on a mac.
Ever tried using Boot Camp to install and run Windows? It works only marginally. And it won’t install Linux. For that you need a UEFI boot manager Apple doesn’t support, and which works worse. The reason for all of this is simple. The new OS install still has to work with the firmware. Apple tries to bridge that gap for Windows to entice Windows users to try a Mac, confident they’ll ultimately prefer Mac OS. Supporting Linux would be a waste of their developer time.
Apple hardware and software are carefully optimized to work with each other. Buying a Mac to install another OS on it is a waste of money. If you want a Mac, use Mac OS. If you don’t want to use Mac OS, don’t buy a Mac.
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Used windows on a Mac for 5 1/2 years at my previous job. Worked great. Haven’t personally done Linux, but the community seems to agree that getting Ubuntu to run isn’t much of a chore.
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If it was a good value to you, then I’m glad. But if you had to use Windows for work - and I sympathize as I do too on my work laptop - why bother spending the premium on a Mac? Or was it a case that it was your personal machine but you needed a Windows partition for work?
Personally, I’d rather use the mediocre work laptop my employer provides and keep Windows off my Linux laptop. Mac would be my distant second choice after Linux.
It came in handy in a major way at a prior job(entire lab full of iMacs that were on the wrong side of the divide, I think it was 32bit EFI, to remain among the chosen and the supported under OSX; but still just fine to run Win7 which was what we were doing at the time); but in general it’s pretty clear that Apple isn’t overly concerned with the date of bootcamp.
Not really surprising; given the comparative maturity of just virtualizing it; and the fact that they simply don’t have to care in a lot of cases; but doesn’t change the fact that Macs are way less exciting when the vendor is deliberately uninterested in delivering fine-polish details around things like trackpad drivers and power management.
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Do any of these so-called “Max-Q” laptops have the feature where you can disable the iGPU in the BIOS and use the Nvidia as a dedicated GPU w/o Optimus?
It’s the key feature for hackintosh compatibility, with Nvidia Pascal. I’m asking for a friend. 
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Are there any recent systems that do that? Nvidia’s description of the mechanism says that their early take on the concept, ‘hybrid graphics’/‘switchable graphics’ left the two systems essentially independent; but at the cost of having to actually route and switch a bunch of high bandwidth video interfaces between the integrated and discrete GPUs; which wasn’t a big hit; so now they keep the IGP alive all the time, hardwired to the outputs; and the Nvidia chip DMAs frames into its brain if it wants to display something; but has no actual video outs of its own.
Did some vendors retain the old ways because the compatibility of the fancy software shim is…perhaps less optimal…than the marketing documents suggest?
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Yeah, some of the gaming laptops with GTX 1060 or 1070 and G-sync displays have the option in the BIOS, still. Here’s a successful one:
I think sometimes it’s accomplished not with a BIOS setting but by modding ACPI SSDTs (or maybe it’s just wired that way).
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I have used Boot Camp repeatedly with zero problem.
My old 15 mbp was the most stable windows machine I had ever had.
And I have installed it on a mb air in a pinch with a free, legal copy of windows 10.
But I haven’t seen a linux that will run on them since yellowdog
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That makes sense, I don’t think Intel IGPs do g-sync, at least without deeply nonstandard bludgeoning, so actual hardware switching would be a logical thing to find in those cases.
Man. I try to forget just how ghastly ACPI is; but it’s still lurking underneath… that’s why I occasionally have to retreat to something old enough to have coreboot support, just to get the smell off.
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Wi-Fi-equipped routers are another one like that. Even though I’ll stick with a separate router and access point on general principle, it’s a nice bonus that my AP doesn’t look a robotic cockroach. If I ceiling-mounted it, it would look more like a smoke detector than anything else.
