What's your opinion about current technology on laptops?

yzT

Looking at current high-end laptops I see specs of i7, 16 GB RAM, 512 SSD / 1TB+ HDD, 2-3GB GPU, etc. Do we really need more than that for the next 5 years? What do you think? In my opinion, if they shipped a 512 SSD and a 2TB HDD would be perfect.

wallpaper_01

Probably not, but you never know what's around the corner... The trend is the cloud so faster network speed is probably more important now. Hell I probably will run my Surface 2 Pro for the next 3 years, its fast as hell for what I do.

Everyone has different needs though. Video stuff and gaming probably will need higher specs.

edzyyy

wallpaper_01 wrote: »

Probably not, but you never know what's around the corner... The trend is the cloud so faster network speed is probably more important now. Hell I probably will run my Surface 2 Pro for the next 3 years, its fast as hell for what I do.

Everyone has different needs though. Video stuff and gaming probably will need higher specs.

x2

If all you're doing is word processing & web browsing, a laptop with those specs should last for years with proper maintenance.

no!all!

We have some of the Lenovo X1 Carbon's which have i7's, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD's. For office use I do think they're a bit of an overkill and I'm sure they'll last for quite some time. But with technology advancing so rapidly you just never know...I definitely agree with edzyyy and wallpaper though

tpatt100

The big selling point for laptops in general seems to be battery life. Battery life for general purpose customers is what I see being advertised a lot since I think people kinda stopped looking at the other specs.

I know I see "Intel i-something or other" and just move on down the list of features. Gaming was pushing technology for the longest but that seemed to have peaked years ago when it came to the average consumer and high end video card technology worked its way to the low and mid range video cards.

I have a hard time convincing myself or others to spend a lot on a laptop since so much of it is not consumer replaceable like the display or motherboard. Generally you can get new batteries and they usually just fail to hold a charge as time goes on. So spending a lot now thinking it will last you a lot longer might not really save you much money when a piece of hardware fails.

CPU though? I moved my Intel i7-2600K from a few years ago into my new PC when I rebuilt it because the next generation of CPUs seemed to be mostly energy efficiency so I got my money's worth with my CPU.

Cert Poor

I like rugged enterprise-grade laptops that can last for many years and aren't so supercompact that they don't have user-replaceable batteries and components. I do see things trending towards cloud-based storage and virtualized desktops/applications so local storage is less important. I like the TPM-modules built into many enterprise laptops and the ability to do virtual smartcards and other cool security things utilizing the TPM such as trusted/secure boot, VPN, Single Sign-On, and Full Disk Encryption. Heck, SSDs and other hard drives are trending towards hardware-based encryption instead of necessarily using software FDE like BitLocker or McAfee.

I happen to REALLY like Intel-based NICs, both for wired and WLAN, and 802.11ac was recently ratified in December 2013 (?) so I can't wait till we get closer to 7 Gigabit Wi-Fi in the enterprise (and home).

A lot of road warriors and executives tend to like their 4G cards, so many enterprise laptops have room for an internal 4G card instead of having to use a USB dongle.

Battery life is huge. Give me a 10-hour 9-cell battery and even if the battery only lasts 3 years, I'm happy with an "all-day" battery.

N2IT

I agree with battery life and along with that I like a large clear screen and a SSD and a functional keyboard not some fancy keyboard that is junk when touch typing. If I have to perform heaving lifting I just remote into my desktop and use that processing power of that beast.