It has been almost two years since I wrote a blog post talking about how my dream computing experience has almost come into fruition. Let’s check back in and see how things are going!
Thanks to the proliferation of large SSDs, I carry every movie and TV show from my library around with me. A tiny 4TB SSD sits in a pocket, and can be connected any time I want to watch anything. With my next laptop, I’ll just get a 4TB (or larger?) drive, and keep everything on the internal storage. And improvements in video codecs, like H.265 and AV1, mean that I can keep Blu-ray and Ultra Blu-ray quality videos with me in a much smaller space footprint than ever before.
This happened! Before AI ruined the ability to acquire good hardware for relatively cheap, I managed to snag a 4TB NVMe drive for a couple hundred bucks, and now everything I own goes with me everywhere I go without needing an external drive of any kind.
The biggest source of frustration is, without question, power. Under typical use of web browsing and watching videos, I can squeak out almost four hours of use before the battery drains down to zero. I am constantly fighting with power.
This is still the one area that plagues me. I can make it through a full morning, but not through a full day.
To me, all-day computing is the holy grail. 16 hours is my threshold for what I consider all-day. Other than gaming or rendering videos, I should be able to get through a full 16 hours of web browsing, listening to music, and watching videos without needing to plug in and recharge. The M-series Macs get close to this, I’m told, although I don’t think there have been massive increases between generations of M-series chips. And there’s a report out that Dell’s new XPS 16 can get 27 hours of battery life, on an Intel chip no less! That gives me hope that within the next year or two, genuine all-day computing will be a reality, and essentially standard on all new models.
Between the new ARM-based Snapdragon processors that are starting to be the default for Windows laptops, or the new extremely powerful x86 chips that Intel announced this week, it’s just a matter of time before I will be able to buy a Linux-compatible laptop that has more power than I can realistically use.
I am now at the point of having a laptop that does everything I need it to, although I suppose I’m not yet at the limit of what I would be able to realistically use. With the AMD 7640U in my Framework laptop I am able to play every video game I want at 1080p resolution, but I suppose it would be nice to play them in 4K with quality settings on ultra. And while we’re at it, doing it on a fanless system would be pretty nice. That’s nowhere near possible right now, but CPUs and GPUs are getting better faster than games are progressing, so I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility within the next decade. That being said, this is just really a “wouldn’t it be cool if” item. I think in the spirit of the original statement, I’m already there. I’m quite happy with how my laptop performs.
All in all, despite the world generally sucking and people being down on technology thanks to all the spectacular ways companies have found to enshittify everything, not to mention the insane chip prices and availability issues for new hardware, I still think it’s the best time in history for personal computing.