social.noyu.me

feels like half our time and energy and mental capacity for the past week or so has been falling into this bottomless pit of agonising over what laptop to buy and dreading having to Spend Money

good lord I fucking hate computers

actually I can't even say that “I” hate computers, I don't know who is typing this, we can't really function when we're spending half our waking hours agonising over which terrible, expensive computer to buy and the other half procrastinating on worthwhile things because computer

it's over, it's finally over, i ordered a new laptop at great expense, the all-consuming thing is over, the final decision is made, we can now breathe a sigh of relief and go back to living

i'd play guitar to celebrate but i injured my left hand playing basketball the other day

philosophically we really wanted to join the Framework club, but owning the best laptop Apple ever made has set our expectations sky-high… and we have also vowed to never again purchase an Apple product, so… the new laptop is the one Nobody Was Ever Fired For Buying™ 🔴

hmm well if we'd ordered a Framework we might have our laptop by now. Lenovo please. thank you for the Black Friday* discount though

* actually Black Week**
** actually Black Month***
*** yes that's a thing in Sweden don't you love American cultural exports

oh phew it finally shipped. our laptop is in shenzhen and allegedly will arrive on friday. the wait shall soon be over…

realised i can make my unreasonably frequent refreshing of UPS tracking updates more exciting by checking the UPS airlines flight routes on flightradar24 to try to figure out whether and how they can in fact stay on schedule

oh holy shit UPS actually have a Köln–Malmö route, and a plane for that route took off a bit under an hour ago… I can't believe it, they probably actually do have the logistics to get something from Shenzhen to southern Sweden in 72 hours… I'm used to things going via Stockholm

packidgeeee

holy shit the thinkpad x13 gen 6 is so small and so light and it looks and feels far better in person than any lenovo marketing image manages to convey

it is SO TINY. this is a funny thing to think considering it's bigger than our current laptop, a 12-inch MacBook. but it's only like 1.5cm wider despite being a 13-inch laptop! so it must be much smaller than our old 13-inch MacBook Air (2013) was… and it weighs less than 1.1kg!

also the 65W charger brick is the tiniest we've ever seen on a laptop. it can't even really be called a brick, it's smaller than the pocket power bank we carry around for recharging our phone. similar in volume to our 30W 12-inch MacBook wall wart (also small!). GaN sugoi

wait the red dot in the ThinkPad logo lights up?

MODERN TECHNOLOGY

things you can't do with a MacBook: upgrade the SSD with only a screwdriver with ordinary philips head bits, what definitely isn't a Tortex Jazz III XL 😇, and uhhh a fucked up piece of plastic that's really handy for the initial part of the prying process

ooooh Lenovo have this little plastic thing that keeps the M.2 screw captive so it's much harder to lose track of it <3

SSD swap worked! but unfortunately the fact we installed Boot Camp drivers on this Windows install (which was never inside a Mac btw! we just wanted the Mac keyboard drivers…) means it BSODs every time on this AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 350 system lmfao. this will be fun to try to fix

oh, Safe Mode worked!

couldn't find which device in safe mode device manager would be using MacHALDriver.sys, and in fact i suspect no such device exists, so in the end i just uh. moved the file out of system32 lmao. system boots now yay

because this product launched after windows 10 EOL, it didn't automatically have wifi drivers among other things, but we were able to install them (this might be the only time we've told device manager to force a specific driver on an unknown device and it's actually worked? huh)

ultrabook SoCs have come so far

the ultimate office computer

aaaah something about Windows 10 or this laptop's drivers causes infuriating bug where the screen colour calibration resets every time the active window changes or the brightness changes. it will not respect my settings. this is horrible. :( but maybe linux won't have this issue

haven't found a way to stop it resetting my settings, but turning off AMD Vari-Bright means the default settings it constantly resets to no longer look like total ass, so i'll settle for that

i wonder if AMD Vari-Bright was also why the colours looked terrible (washed out / posterised / bloom'd) on that employer-issued laptop we had that was also an all-AMD system? it's unbelievably bad. if we had to use windows and hadn't realised this was the problem we'd RMA it :(

booted up FFXIV for the first time in maybe two years and... what on earth did they do to make this game so heavy?! why does the main menu run at 13fps

anyway with Standard (Laptop) settings + FXAA + 66% resolution scale, the game can maintain a locked 30fps in this static scene

(the framerate is more like 40fps uncapped, but that would not be thermally wise and would not give good frame pacing on this laptop, it's a 60Hz panel and I don't think it has VRR)

headroom

oh wow AMD's software thinks the display on this thing supports FreeSync and we've had that turned on the whole time? it's only a 60Hz panel, but if it has VRR that might explain why everything felt smoother than it should have!

@hikari "Gezackte Ränder glätten (Anti-Aliasing)"

@hikari funny, the technology made a full loop. I have a laptop with touchscreen friendly BIOS from 1994(+-) and it looks more or less the same.

@hikari i also like how it does the gradually dimming and brightening thing while sleeping that old powerbooks and ibooks used to

@hikari i also recently got an x13 and am liking it. funny enough it's exactly the width of the old 11 inch macbook air, and slightly lighter. the 12 inch macbook is slightly tinier still, but (IME) much harder to get a working linux or freebsd going on, whereas the thinkpad Just Works

@hikari and in one piece?

@hikari I wonder what tracking shows when your package is on a plane that crashes; maybe something like this?

@rcombs hah

@rcombs until you mentioned this we had forgotten about the recent UPS plane crash

@hikari Kinda funny that we were both agonising over laptop decisions and ended up nearly going for the same solution of "sod it, ThinkPad"

I was looking at refurbished ThinkPads and at the last minute changed to a slimmer refurbished ThinkBook instead, which lacks the 🔴 but otherwise seemed to best bang for buck with *some* wiggle room for upgrades and without compromising battery life too much

(mine should be arriving today, means I can retire my old Acer c720 to being near exclusively a "reading in bed" device)

RE: Framework
Not sure if you're out of the loop, but this ended up not being a consideration for me, as even before the price excluded Framework, the whole "our CEO and PR team supports fascists and follow-up statements have doubled down on that" from the past month is...well, there's a lot of buyer's resource amongst folks on Fedi.
A shame, as upgradable, modular, open hardware was a nice goal, even if their machines were always laughably outside my price range

@erincandescent new in this case with a considerable black friday discount, but we could have spent half as much and gotten a very nice deal on a used one, albeit with half as much RAM and less CPU power

@hikari I tried my best to like my framework. The polish just isn’t there, comparatively. But it is still a solid laptop if your standards aren’t too high.

@raineer i think if their laptops were cheaper it'd be an easier sell, but if we already feel awful about spending more than a thousand euros on something, it'd better be good

@hikari In a similar boat here, with the added complication that I kept getting distracted by thoughts of "a lot of new laptops kinda suck, how viable is a portable mini-pc setup instead, or should I just shop for refurbished laptops" which turned out to be not very helpful

...I've *still* not settled on a replacement laptop yet (or even if it's a new laptop, a jailbroken chromebook, something refurbished, etc) and keep changing my mind on how much budget I "should" spend on it

@hikari@social.noyu.me i've spent months overthinking this before i upgraded my own. if you need support, feel free to reach out