To be fair, this HP does seem like a fairly minimal-effort marketing exercise. It claims to be "Built for developers", but it doesn't really have any special developer-oriented features, other than maybe the keyboard and the preloaded Linux distro. Kind of reminds me of some of the early "For Gamerz!!!" products that were actually just tarted-up commodity junk.
I think the thing is that different people are commenting. People who say "needs more x, y, z" here are not the same who say "it's too heavy" or whatnot on some other thread.
Also, people who think this laptop is just fine (I don't need more than 16G of memory, and HD is fine for me too) have little to comment about, or the only comment they really have "hey, looks cool!"; which are kind of the unsubstantive comments HN discourages. So by and large, those people won't comment. But people who do have something they want to see better do have substantive things (or rants...) to post about the keyboard, screen, memory, or whatnot, so they will post them.
In short, you're 1) seeing a very biased view of what people think, and 2) HN is not a "hive mind" where everyone agrees.
This is exactly my impression reading the post on laptops/phones here the past few days.
I now understood why the manufactures doesn't really seems to care for this segment, as everyone seems to have enough dealbreakers that nothing's going to sell well.
I think it's pretty cool, right now I use the clevo-based lemur pro (I'm pretty happy with it) when mobile and would consider this for my next upgrade especially if a decent SKU exists at $1,100
my lemur with 1tb/16gb ram ended up costing around 2k I think
While I agree I'm being picky; for you, what's the minimal spec OEM machine that would still necessitate that comment?
If somebody came out today with a machine with 2GB of RAM, a 1024x600 display, and a 128GB SSD; we'd all agree that that's not a developer machine. So what's the minimum for you?
2012 MacBook Air with 8GB ram. Not ideal but I did found and bootstrap my entire startup just a few years ago using one.
With that said, there are many caveats. The most glaring is that developer needs inevitably vary depending on the project and tooling requirements. For example, at my current day job, the computer I physically use is primarily a gateway to other, more powerful computers and systems.
Doing anything at real scale leads to the eventuality that the world can't fit on and be run from a single notebook sized / spec'd machine.
My comment in this case was triggered more by the way op phrased and presented their needy needs, I interpreted it as unreasonably narrow and selfishly entitled. I've encountered enough, neigh too many odd ducks IRL who come across this way and experientially, they've been "Homer Car" types every single time.
> My comment in this case was triggered more by the way op phrased and presented their needy needs, I interpreted it as unreasonably narrow and selfishly entitled. I've encountered enough, neigh too many odd ducks IRL who come across this way and experientially, they've been "Homer Car" types every single time.
That's somewhat fair, but I did only have two criticisms, so I don't think I quite fit the homer car stereotype (although give it a few decades, and I'm sure I'll be "old man [yelling] at cloud") The rest... I couldn't critique, because we don't really have a solid spec.
Right now I'm using a laptop with 16GB of soldered on RAM; it's not the upgradability there that really concerned me, but rather the fact that they advertised 16GB as a solid selling point. 16GB these days, while respectable, isn't an impressive number. Advertising it as your base, without mentioning upgradability, seems a little out of touch. I don't use much memory myself, I'm a VIM user, and I avoid anything overly heavy, but I have colleagues who could make could use of that RAM.
As for the screen, that does come down to preference, to an extent. But, it's 2022, why has screen quality stagnated at FHD? HiDPI should have been standard half a decade ago.
Welcome to the Linux world, one of the reasons the year of the Linux desktop never came is this constant bikeshedding and bashing over other people efforts. You give them a modern desktop environment and they complain they can't run their obscure tiling window manager, you give them a modern init system and they complain their mess of ugly shell script don't work anymore, you give them a modern audio system and I don't even remember why did people hate on that. And you could go on for days.
