Future Laptop Specifications: A request

[jml]

This is directed to the R&D department at System 76. I hope that Tom or one of the other System 76 staff forward this to them.

First request would be for a true laptop, (as opposed to a netbook,) with at least 3.5 - 4.0 hour battery life. The laptops offered by System 76 have great specifications except for battery life. In the real world, 1.5 - 2.o hours do not cut it when one really needs to compute off the grid. My old 12 inch Mac Powerbook got, (and still gets) over 4 hours of battery life. Current models claim over 7 hours.

Second request is for a laptop with a 12 inch screen. In my opinion, 12 inch screens are the sweet spot for traveling. Big enough to comfortably watch a movie, read web pages without a lot of horizontal scrolling, and extended typing sessions.

Third request is for a matte (non-glossy) screen. Glossy screens make using a laptop outdoors very challenging, as does a limited battery life.

Fourth and final request is to not discard the built in optical drive, (as in the Lemur.) Not everyone gets their multimedia files on line. So having a built in drive is really helpful and much more convenient than carrying around a USB drive.

I don't think these requests are unrealistic, it wouold be great if we could see System 76 offer products with these specifications. Say a 12 inch laptop, with 3.5 - 4.0 hours of battery life, with a matte screen and a built in optical drive. I know it's possible, my old PowerBook has them.

So I would be happy to hear other's opinions? Would others like a laptop with these specifications? Tom, what do you think? Is there any possibility of this happening?

Joe

[msrinath80]

I for one despise anything with a display size smaller than 14inch (15.x inch is decent, but it has the ability to make the laptop heavier and eat more battery). My eyes come first. I can't continuously squint just because I will get 6+ hours of battery life. Increasing the DPI and/or lowering the resolution are merely stop gap measures. In my opinion (and this is just my opinion), a laptop should serve two basic needs:

1. It should be light weight with reasonable processing power (preferably with integrated graphics). In my experience anything faster than roughly 700-900 MHz is not really necessary for everyday computing (i.e. web browsing incl. youtube etc., email, word processing, picture viewing, video watching, voice/video chatting, basic gaming [like openarena, torcs etc.] and so on...). Don't believe me? Try it for yourself. Clock down your CPU to the lowest possible speed and do your everyday work. Chances are you'll hardly notice the difference. If, on the other hand, you wish to run high performance computing applications or do any serious gaming, get a desktop. That's what those are built for!

What is useful is to stick to the sweet spot: Get the fastest memory available. Get at least 4 Gigs to be future safe. Get at least a 5400RPM drive (it's easy on the battery and also relatively less heat dissipating compared to higher RPM drives). Not sure how good the SSD's are, yet. So I can't comment on those.

2. Battery life of at least 2.5 hours on decent brightness levels.

In fact, both the above requirements automatically take care of many other considerations such as heat dissipation, fan noise, ease of mobility etc.

I reiterate: This is just my personal opinion. I would love to hear what others feel

[betrunkenaffe]

I concur, the battery life is the biggest issue I have with my laptop. Even if you can't get a standard battery to over 2 hours, there should be an alternative battery made available which provides additional power. (without someone buying 2 and custom building a battery with more cells )

[thomasaaron]

Thanks, Joe.
Passing it onward and upward.

[jml]

Thanks, Tom.

msrinath80, I understand your point of view. I also had some issues with the smaller screen, then I got bifocals and was actually able to see things quite clearly. Maybe I am just lazy, but when I travel to other cities, I really hate lugging one of the larger laptops around. And a netbook just does not cut it for me.

betrunkenaffe, I agree with you. The saving grace of my DARU 3 is the fact that I could buy a larger and therefore longer life battery for it. I use the small one when I need to travel light and swap in the larger one when I plan to be off the mains for any length of time.

Joe

[msrinath80]

Whatever floats your boat jml What's important is that System76 continue to offer the choice! No point in having another "Apple Inc." like approach.

[satsujinka]

• To me 13" is the smallest I would ever go, unless hard up for cash then I could see a netbook. But I'm a big enough person that a 14" laptop is the equivilent of a netbook as far as portability is concerned. So you may want to take that with a grain of salt.
• Non-glossy screens would be nice.
• I never use any optical media when I'm not at home. So for me an external CD/DVD drive is best. That way I can rip my media and take it with me (without all those disks.) But I covered this in a different thread. Perhaps, some kind of device bay that can hold hard drives, optical drives, or maybe a dedicated graphics card could be arranged. That way you could mix and match like you do for desktops.
• I'm a huge Turbo Boost fan (I hope AMD introduces their Turbo Core tech to their mobile line up too.) So having anything below an i5 doesn't make sense to me (unless you're going for ultra cheap, but then an Atom will do the job better.) Even for slim laptops i5 works, due to the ULV option.
• I don't like IGPs or even IPGs (like arrandale's graphics.) I prefer to have a dedicated card. Dedicated cards, theoretically, allow for more customization. You don't get stuck with some card that you may or may not want.
  Also a dedicated card doesn't need to take up more energy then an IGP. Dedicated cards can be underclocked/volted to save energy (no different from CPUs.) Thus a dedicated card is more flexible, it's capable of high and low performance, an IGP on the otherhand is only capable of low performance. However, graphics switching (when you have an IPG) is an acceptable hack until AMD and NVIDIA really work on powersaving for their dedicated cards.

[riseringseeker]

If (when?) they bring back the Darter, I will likely buy one. That said, having greater battery life (4-6 hours would be good, more better!) would be wonderful. I too would prefer a matte screen, and am hoping that it will come with USB 3.0 ports as well!

[hedgeborn]

The battery life issue is probably the biggest thing keeping me on the fence from pulling the trigger on a new Pangolin right now.

I love the idea of supporting System76 and having their support. Like most everything about the Pangolin. I really don't want to buy something else but 90 min - 2 hours of battery life just kills me when laptops in this class with 9 cell extended batteries are common as muck.

[bill516]

No doubt about it, battery life is a critical issue. My intuition says 4 -5 hours is where we need to be at a minimum.

I get along fine with my 15" Pangolin. Not at all certain I would purchase a laptop any smaller than that.

Different users will have different storage requirements, so options make sense.

For reference my PanP4 nvidia graphics do everything I require. I do agree that advanced gaming requires another machine entirely.

Keyboard and pointing device are critical, after all that is how we talk to the machine! My keyboard does flex a bit and I'd like to see it a bit stronger.

I really do appreciate being able to turn off the touch pad entirely when I use an eternal mouse. Hold on to that idea, please.