Heh, didn't realize so many people had issues with the chiclet style keyboards. When I see a laptop with the classic style keyboard, it looks like they've come straight out of the 90's. From a functionality perspective, I really don't care as I've used both styles without issues, but classic keyboards just bring back memories of Windows 95 and old laptops to me.
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I think the older style keyboards have a thicker design making the overall laptop thicker.
The island/chiclet style provides for a thinner footprint and probably even better performance as far as durability since unlike desktops, it's not user replaceable. -
turqoisegirl08, Jarhead, Qing Dao and 1 other person like this.
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good point Krane!!
- Best keyboard I have ever owned (and it still works great!
My beef - the newer Rj45 jacks, I have been told that they are supposed to be very tight (the type with the spring loaded cover). On my sager it is almost impossible to remove a cord so I just leave a 2 foot cable and coupler in. -
Last edited: Dec 25, 2015Kent T likes this.
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I think you are misreading me.
I'm saying the *keyboard* is more durable.
From what I remember from taking apart my older laptop years ago, the keyboard was more of a mechanical version where each key had a separate post/spring. The newer keyboards have a membrane construction.
Just compare your older style desktop keyboard to the Apple chiclet desktop ones and that will show you the difference in thickness and construction.
The older keyboards you can pull individual keycaps off, not as easy with the island type ones, which also lends to durability (in my opinion).
And I did not say it makes *typing* performance better... although I have adjusted as I use it more.
Does anyone think it does affect thickness? -
A List from my side
Cheap, Glossy screens everywhere
Mainstream laptops are stuck on 1366x768, whereas even 16k Mobile phones sport Full HD displays
Utter lack of ports compared to yesteryears (E-sata, Expresscard, DVI,Audio Line in)
Small tinny speakers with no improvement at all (My samsung NOTE is louder than my Acer 5560)
Poor viewing angles
Wrong Positioning of Fan and vents (Total mess when laptop is used on lap)
No Direct charge USB ports (for charing Mobile when Laptop is off)
Lack of Quick play (came on very few laptops) mini OS that could play Music and small tasks with Main OS not reqired. -
As others have said the standard resolution of 1366x768 is atrocious. All 15.6" and larger laptops should have 1080p screens as the standard. Laptop screen quality overall needs to be improved; with better color reproduction, contrast, brightness and viewing angles.
Also those horrid "buttonless" touchpads. There is nothing wrong with having two mouse buttons separate from the touchpad, but everything wrong with the current integrated button trend. -
But they don't. -
-Laptops which go from thin to thick, like wedges.
-No removable (UPGRADABLE) battery
-Trash keyboard font (This is why I never got into Vizio laptops as much as I could, or the MSI GS series)
-Glossy Laptop Housing (Thank you Mac circa 2008 and HP)
-Embossed branding
-Bad power button placement
-No external mic port. -
We have a saying in industrial design.
"If I give you a glass full of clear, delicious, clean water with a single drop of urine in it, you won't drink from it. Industrial design is the same."
Referring to how I feel about the Dell XPS 15.... everything about that laptop is gorgeous, but I'm so hung up on the stupid looking keyboard font that I can't say it's a beautiful laptop.booboo12 likes this. -
Matte screens, I hate them and they seem to be coming more and more common, If i want to deal with dull colours i'll go out and by a generation one Panel, Not something that i've spent 2k+ On, I like everyone else am quite capable of moving to a low light area if i want to (and often do) Stop giving me faded out matte displays on high end laptops
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Screens on which you can't see anything the moment sun strikes, keys that are too close and too small -.-
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Matte coating does NOT shift your panel's emission spectrum. It's not physically possible (at least with normal screen coating material). If you see crappy gamut screens, blame crappy gamut screens, not the matte coating.Jarhead likes this. -
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Also I was super hung up about the Dell XPS (2013), aside from the fact that they're a little pricey for what you get, the biggest thing that was bugging me about that laptop over all was the keyboard, honestly I feel like the MacBook pro's beautiful unibody chassis is amazing, but my view of a good looking laptop isn't limited to just Mac. In all honesty without the keyboard, the XPS 15 is the perfect laptop design antithesis to the MacBook pro. I hope they get on that. -
If they used the font from the inspiron/latitude line, it'd be just fine
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk -
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Integrated track pads.
Disappearing no-numpad option on anything 15.6" and up.
The removal of the Menu key (this is an absolute deal breaker for me)
Moving keys from their conventional locations in the name of innovation and saving space.
Right arrow keys that extend into the numpad block.
Having Fn keys that show their "secondary" functions as primary over the actual Fn#.
16:9.
Side (especially right side) exhaust fans.
RAM that is not user expandable.
Hard drives that can not be removed.
The mindless emulation of smartphone design.
On the plus side, it seems that most models no longer have connections and slots on the front, or the back. But that's probably because they're eliminating as many connections and slots as they can get away with. -
Add ports on the side near the front of the notebook, say where you usually have a mouse, etc. Ports on the side are fine, but sheesh, don't put them where people are more likely to have their hands around.
Agreed on sunken hinges, it makes tilting the screen back at more than a certain angle impossible. 180 o tilt might a bit overkill, but if you can't even do 120 o, something is wrong. -
I have also only just started using Windows 8.x, and a touchscreen. It's a little like being suddenly submerged in what the fads and trends have produced since I last shopped around for a Windows laptop, which was on the eve of Windows 7.
The smartphone influence is producing mixed results.
I am finding touch compelling.Last edited: Dec 11, 2014 -
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I could be mistaken, but doesn't the post you're quoting precede my determining that I could likely upgrade both HD and RAM by breaking my way into the not-designed-for-easy-upgradability case?
Either way, requiring anything more than turning a few screws and lifting off a removable panel to access those components is definitely a "current design fad" worthy of inclusion in this thread. Especially for laptops above the least expensive price points.
The mfgs (and their apologists) can justify it all they want, and there's no reason to doubt that it does marginally lower their mfg costs, perhaps their support costs as well. That doesn't change the fact that it's a giant middle finger to the consumers whose good will the mfg's brands depend on.
RAM and HD upgradeability has gone from being a nearly taken for granted characteristic of the product category to a possible product "feature" that is increasingly simply missing. I think I mentioned this in the other thread, but I only found that the HD was considered non-consumer replaceable when a sales rep happened to mention it when I asked about the RAM. AFAICT, it is not mentioned on the mfg site or in the pdf spec sheet.
Also, non-replaceable (as described by the mfgs) batteries are also increasingly part of the feature sets of these dumbed-down, user-hostile devices. -
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* Numpads on 15" laptops - unnecessary
* Lots of branding stickers (or worse, non removable logos)
* 4K screens with GPUs not able to properly drive them
* Warranty seals that prevent you upgrading the RAM or SSD/HDD
* Unnecessary bloatware and trial versions of software pre-installed
* Manufacturers who don't retail their computers in the UK/EU and who don't even let you order from the USA for delivery in the EU (I'm looking at you Razer)
* Matte screen models only available in low-end configurations (I'm looking at you MSI)hmscott likes this. -
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I don't know. Usually, the numpad isn't the problem, but the "normal" doubling up layout of the num-lock, scroll-lock, insert keys, along with having the arrow keys in a separate block. Lots of good 14' solutions that drop those keys, or double the keys with an fn-* layout. And the arrow keys can be made smaller, the second shift key can be shrunk, etc. So then you have space enough to have a full-size num-pad on the side. Kind of wish more manufacturers started doubling the pgup-pgdwn-home-end keys on the arrow-keys+fn, for example. Putting them on the num-pad buttons when the num-pad is disabled is a good idea as well, imo.
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Some of my own:
Flimsy, bendy keyboards
Excessive thinness
Laptops with soldered RAM
Touch Screens
Flimsy construction
Any design which does not allow easy access to RAM or to hard drives and other items which require access
Tablets except for selected convertibles
Laptops which are flimsy built
Any laptop which is not business rugged at minimum
Trialware and Crapware preloaded on laptops
Poorly laid out keyboards
Audio enhancements by tone deaf rap artists -
Poor case design (flimsy) - This has been a problem for many years
Flimsy keyboards - the WORST
Chiclet keyboards should all die in a fire. -
Kent T likes this.
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One expection: MacBook's low load battery life was quite a productivity booster before the Ultrabook camp managed to catch up. Sure, you can always brute force it with swappable slice batteries, but why not have both? (We can have both nowadays, and I believe Apple played a positive role in this progress.)
Last edited: Sep 10, 2015 -
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You did. But before modern Ultrabook time, how much extra space/weight compared to MB(A/P) was required for the same near-idle battery life?
I'm only talking about very low load battery life. With high load MB batteries are crap.Last edited: Sep 10, 2015 -
Well, not a lot really. My timeline is smaller than the 15" MBP of the same era, has better battery life and performance. BUUUUUTTTTTT, I do get what you are saying. I just personally think apple is Way more hoopla than it deserves. In 2010, I switched fully to apple products, buying two iPhone 4s, a MacBook, an ipad, a mac mini with 27" cinema monitor. The best of everything was the monitor. However, the os' was absolute garbage, the phone and pad were boring at best. Apples my way or the highway of doing things was the final straw. 6 months later, I sold everything at a huge loss, just to get rid of it.
I am glad I kept my 2 acer notebooks. They were both better in every way besides my acer's 17" size and weight compared to the 17" mbp. Performance was better, the notebook itself cost about 1/3 of the MPB's price and You could get service locally. As of right now, there is no Apple service center anywhere near here. Closest is 4 hrs away.
Apple is fluff and marketing where as a company like acer is quite the opposite. No one will walk up to you and go "hey, is that the new acer?" but You will be working away at whatever your doing with lots of cash left in your pocket instead of giving it all to the apple bean counters for the "privilege" of having an apple logo on your whatever your using. -
lack of Ethernet port
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Ionising_Radiation ?v = ve*ln(m0/m1)
Absolutely terrible track-pads. More specifically, bad track-pad drivers for Windows.
I run a hackintosh, and it's incredible to see how deep the support is for track-pads in OS X, when the vendors themselves (ELAN, Synaptics, etc.) have terrible, and near-non-existent support for their Windows drivers. Oh, and the OS X drivers are open source. The track-pads on OS X are nearly as accurate and as smooth as Mac track-pads themselves, and I refer to both my current Clevo and the Samsung notebook I had before this.
VoodooPS2 driver by RehabMan (for Synaptics)
Smart Touchpad driver by EMlyDinEsH (for ELAN, FocalTech and Synaptics) -
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This is a chicken-egg problem, both a driver issue and an app issue. Smoothing scrolling requires a non-HID proprietary interface which Apple can use easily but causes resistance on the supposedly "open" Windows platform. The touchpad driver itself can be as smooth as the hardware allows, but the interface is asking to resample that input into an ugly sequence of jumps. And that's the only thing Windows apps understand.
Blame the spec if you must, which ironically was made by Microsoft initially (for mouse scroll wheel, not touchpad scroll).
BTW, the GTK guys on Linux/BSD have been doing smooth scrolling for a while by taking a "lets hack every drive there is to work for us" approach, but it's still far from standardized and only works with build-in touchpads. I'm not sure to what extent could MS copy this practice if they want to. Even if they did, existing apps would still annoy people for the years to come.Last edited: Nov 14, 2015 -
Have a like for that - it was well worth a read. Thanks!
More on topic: I'd probably nominate trackpads without physical buttons as something I'm not so keen on. Yes, you can click the bottom right part but a physical button works better for me. This feature tends-thankfully-to feature on business class laptops so it's not hard to find a system with actual trackpad buttons. -
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Ionising_Radiation ?v = ve*ln(m0/m1)
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Hot keyboards. Manufacturers seem to think it's ok to vent heat through the keyboard.
It's not. -
I hate thin, light, BGA turdbooks. I hate most of the lousy trackpads in current notebooks, in particular those that lack discrete left and right buttons and the clickable area where buttons should be also track movement. They are miserable to use.
In the opposite train of thought, I started a new thread and stickied this one and the new one. Hopefully, the OEMs and ODMs will discover and take the content of both threads to heart. Perhaps the Clevo resellers can point Clevo to them and some of the big boys like Dell/Alienware will do what Micro$loth claimed to do (tongue in cheek) and "listen" to their customers.
2016 and Beyond: What are we missing in laptops/notebooks?Kent T and Ionising_Radiation like this. -
Am I the only guy who has gotten used to taps and prefer not having physical buttons... I find tapping to be faster especially when switching quickly between typing and mousing.
Simulated click zooms are what get me mad. There's usually no feedback wahtsoever from such a feature, you only know you're tapping the wrong place when triggering a wrong action. -
Those touchpads just don't want to understand that I might use two fingers: one to move the cursor and the other to tap button 1 or 2 at the target underneath the cursor. Instead it is usually recognized as a click somewhere between of those fingers or activate some swirly twisty function I did not even know to exist
That's not so much problem with my own computers but whatever random laptop I'm currently using for my clients. Can't even throw them out of the window.Mr. Fox, ajkula66 and alexhawker like this. -
Are you using click zones like I described above?
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Yes, all six of them above and under the touchpad. However I cannot change settings on my customers laptops and I never know what waits me when I get one in my hands -
Personally, I'd love to see all laptops natively support eGpus for at least one lane to an actual (don't have to open the case) external port. Potentially with optional extra power. 16 lanes in the expensive laptops +1500-3000$ that you'd WANT to have upgradeability over time since you paid so much initially. Potentially as thunderbolt now. Or a mini pci-e port.
Also more standard form factors and less blacklisting certain components or ram in bioses. Make laptops worth it to buy over desktops basically.
OH....and get rid of bloody touch screens on laptops, they aren't phones. That's why there's a touchpad. Having a sort of ultrasonic sensor like phones do would be a nice option to put your laptop to standby or wake it up as an option to configure. More freedom in the BIOS. More ability to control your entire PC experience. Manual control of fans and less overzealous throttling in place for better cooling systems regardless of extra cost. No more one year ponies that die once their limited warranties are up. Resolutions of 720p should be standard on even netbooks.
Current design fads in laptops that you hate.
Discussion in 'Notebook Cosmetic Modifications and Custom Builds' started by TSE, Dec 28, 2011.