Except older hardware is terrible from a price/performance/power point of view. The minute you actually start to use the computer for something intensive, you'd rather have a more modern, faster, lower power-consumption laptop.
It shouldn't be too hard to find 8+ hours of battery life from a typical $700 laptop these days. Add a few more hundreds of dollars to get 12th or 13th gen Intel and/or M1 Macbooks and you'll get to all-day designs.
Laptop quality is wildly all over the place. From 'that thing is a tank' to 'the ink on the keys is coming off, and the trackpad does not work right'. QA is garbage for most of these laptops. They should be fairly dialed in at this point how to make decent ones. But not really. The ergonomics of most is junk. From poor flex on the screen and keyboard, junk keys, touchpads that are too big and impossible to not rest your palm on, to weird hot spots from poor thermal management. Most of the screens are decent though now. For a long time they were fairly crappy. But yeah if you are using a laptop older than 5-8 years. It is time to start thinking about a new one. I just recently updated my 10 year old one to something fairly new. It was night and day on performance.
There have always been terrible laptops in the market. I generally recommend the following process:
1. Go to a physical store and try out the keyboards / mousepads of the laptops you're interested in. Don't worry about specs yet.
2. Look up the service manual of that model, ensure that you can replace important parts (M.2 Drive and Battery take top priority for me) with relative ease. You can probably do this on your phone after deciding you like a particular keyboard/mouse.
3. Ask the store for the specs (CPU / GPU / RAM / SSD) you want, especially if the SSD is soldered on (though ideally, buy a replaceable M.2 slot). If not available at the store, _MAYBE_ buy online, but in my experience the Retail return model just works far better than RMA to manufacturer. So prefer retail / buying off the shelf.
--------
Normally, I start to see things worth buying at the $700 point, but with compromises of some kind (poor screen, bad mousepad, etc. etc.). Moving up to the $1000 price point, things are generally better with only one thing that's really terrible that I probably can live with (maybe soldered on SSD, a lower quality screen, or something along those lines).
Moving up to $2000 price point, I get good everything, but price sucks.
I'm pretty confident that I can find a good $700 to $1000 laptop, especially if you give me the freedom to choose a user-replaceable M.2 drive, and give me an hour or so to replace it with a $130 1TB generic drive. It won't have the best specs by modern standards, but it'd beat the pants off of any old Thinkpad from 5+ years ago. Bonus points: I probably was going to do this anyway to wipe out all that terrible crap-ware / bloatware on the laptop. So doing this _AND_ upgrading to 1TB or 2TB is just cake.
But just using the most modern chips (even of a lower-value one, like an Intel i3 or AMD Ryzen) will grossly improve battery life and have all sorts of other advantages. You really don't need to jump for the $2000+ models.
As someone with a ThinkPad from 2018, I consider general-purpose compute a problem that was solved by Intel 8th gen i5 (and higher). Bumped the RAM and SSD after I got it. Got my battery replaced a few months ago, and I'll happily replace it again if needed.
There's virtually no good reason for me personally to replace this laptop. It would be like buying a new phone because 'scroll performance is sluggish' after 6 years of constant use. Yeah, I can live with that.
Oh trust me, I know where you're coming from. I'm one of "those guys" who was really hyped up about netbooks in the 2010s.
But its performance-per-watt that people want today, which leads to smaller batteries and longer laptop-time per charge. You can't just buy low-power chips from 5 years ago and hope to keep up with today's technology, the process advantage from smaller transistors is just too powerful to keep up with.
As today's laptops reach 24+ hours per charge, its less about "compute power" and more about "battery life" for most people. The fact is, today's laptops get you both.
--------
This is actually why I'm intrigued by Intel's P+E cores. The E-cores are from the Atom-line, meaning Intel has effectively made all 12th gen / 13th gen laptops Intel Atoms to some extent. So you have the "netbook" portion of your laptop offering incredible battery life, with the P-cores if you need to run Blender, video games, or some other high-compute problem.
If you're just gonna surf the web and watch videos, the E-cores are more than sufficient and will last over 24 hours (ex: LG Gram)
And tomorrow's laptops will be even better at that compute-battery ratio! Cycling an Intel 8th gen i5 for a 12th/13th gen i5 is meaningless if 8th gen satisfies your needs.
EDIT: I suppose I should mention I use Linux, so I've already accepted performance over battery-life since power management on Linux sucks no matter what shiny new chip comes along.
In my experience, these laptops have some kind of Windows license embedded into their motherboard, so you can freely reinstall Windows from scratch.
So there's no cost-advantage to using Linux, and Windows furthermore just has better sleep behavior + GPU integration than Linux. If I need Linux, I either spin up a VM somewhere for me to VPN / SSH into, or use VMs inside of the laptop, or even use Ubuntu on Windows (which is "good enough" for many commmand-line tasks in my experience. Ex: Shift-right click to open the advanced commands for a directory, select "Open in Ubuntu Terminal" and go from there).
USB-C Hubs are like $30 and have more than enough bandwidth for most needs.
I think HDMI is the one port I use the most after that, and yes, most of these laptops these days have an HDMI adapter?
But even when I setup 4-player games, I mostly use Bluetooth these days with wireless controllers. Which adapters do you need, and why isn't USB-C good enough for that? At work, I do have to use a wired Ethernet dongle (maybe even 2 or 3 of them) but home-use WiFi is all the internet connection I need in practice.
> Changeable battery
Before buying any laptop, check the service manual. This ensures:
1. The laptop was actually designed to be worked with.
In my experience, most modern laptops (such as the Dell XPS under this topic's discussion) have replaceable RAM, M.2 drives, SATA-drives, and batteries. You may need to grab a screwdriver, but its not that hard.
Nope, they are just nonexistent in modern laptops.
> USB-C Hubs are like $30 and have more than enough bandwidth for most needs.
> why isn't USB-C good enough for that?
I don't have any USB-C device (not everybody lives in a first-world countries) but at least once per year I actually need at least all 4 of my good old USB2 ports. External USB hub will suck in stability of connect and ability to charge several devices at once.
And I do not want to grab a screwdriver for changing battery which becomes common in modern razor-thin laptops, I love long outdoor sessions with a couple of spare batteries in my backpack.
> And I do not want to grab a screwdriver for changing battery which becomes common in modern razor-thin laptops, I love long outdoor sessions with a couple of spare batteries in my backpack.
With 24+ hours per charge on a lot of these modern laptops, why do you need to carry spare batteries?
Instead of spare batteries, you should probably be looking to use equipment more recent than a Thinkpad. You get far, far more "laptop usage per watt" on a modern system than anything 5 years or older. There's just all sorts of power-saving features on a modern system (most importantly: fundamental shrinking of the transistors down to 5nm or smaller, using a small fraction of the power compared to larger 22nm or 24nm transistors)
Ex: The new "P vs E" core on Windows 11 devices. The new sleep features on DDR5. NVMe using far less power than a hard drive. Etc. etc. Modern systems use an order of magnitude less power yet offer greater compute power on the go. The drive for better transistors is strongest in the laptop form factor IMO, since smaller transistors hit the "do everything": faster, cheaper, less power usage.
On top of that are the software tweaks. I know people are pissed off about Windows 11's new GUI, but the scheduler is solid and the support for Intel's low power "E" cores, plus GPU sleeping / other power saving features, really makes a difference in terms of battery life.
> I don't have any USB-C device (not everybody lives in a first-world countries) but at least once per year I actually need at least all 4 of my good old USB2 ports. External USB hub will suck in stability of connect and ability to charge several devices at once.
USB-C is something like 4GBps.
A singular USB-C hub can support 20x USB 2.0 A devices at full speed (each around 50MBps). You have all the bandwidth you need from USB 3.0 / USB-C connectors. You just need a hub so that the port can be "split" into more physical ports.
> External USB hub will suck in stability of connect and ability to charge several devices at once.
So right now, you carry a bunch of extra laptop batteries around and USB 2.0 ports that you only use ~once per year (or so).
When instead you could be carrying around a Li-ion charging station, using more efficient laptops (to get 24+ hours per charge, negating the need for spare batteries), and using a $30 USB-C port+hub on the rare occasions you need a large number of simultaneous devices on your computer?
It sounds like what you really need is a portable Li-ion battery.
> With 24-hours per charge on a lot of these modern laptops, why do you need to carry spare batteries?
At least for ability to quickly poweroff my laptop, for example if OS is hanged down or maybe if some water spilled on the device. Also I do not want to carry laptop to a service just to change battery. Last but not least, internal batteries use to be unique per model while external batteries use to be a mass product, good luck finding spare internal battery for really old laptop.
> A singular USB-C hub can support 20x USB 2.0 A devices at full speed.
The main reason of my hate to all kinds of external hubs is that when your mobile device has a beard of hubs and adapters then some of that connections are going to lose a contact mechanically. Why not just to drill more holes in the side edges of device instead of making side edges empty?
And you told nothing about where to get a modern laptop with as comfortable keyboard as in my x220.
> Why not just to drill more holes in the side edges of device instead of making side edges empty?
Because people have largely stopped using physical connectors and instead use Bluetooth and/or WiFi ones today.
There are exceptions, but those exceptions are fixed with USB-C hubs, which again are just $30 in my experience and give you all the USB-A ports you need.
I personally still prefer wired mouse (no batteries is a big advantage), but even my active digitizer pen is bluetooth, as are my Gamepads (4 players+ support). I still use physical headset (mic/speaker), and so I still try to buy headset jacks. Then HDMI.
My Phone is mostly WiFi connections for most relevant tasks.
USB is enough for the errant DVD-drive, USB-drive, RJ45 Ethernet.
HDMI is all I use aside from that.
> Also I do not want to carry laptop to a service just to change battery.
If you have a screwdriver, then you can change the batteries yourself on most of these laptops, including the Dell XPS that is being discussed in this topic. See the guide manual I posted earlier, its really not that hard.
The key is reading the service manual _BEFORE_ buying a laptop. There's many hundreds of laptop models out there. Many suck, but many others have good service guides and good service design that can be done with just a screwdriver.
Except older hardware is terrible from a price/performance/power point of view. The minute you actually start to use the computer for something intensive, you'd rather have a more modern, faster, lower power-consumption laptop.
It shouldn't be too hard to find 8+ hours of battery life from a typical $700 laptop these days. Add a few more hundreds of dollars to get 12th or 13th gen Intel and/or M1 Macbooks and you'll get to all-day designs.