Two major choices
- Old laptop with trackpoint, dock, usually clicky keyboard, easier to open, heavier but you can find lightweight options, proprietary garbage brick as charger, 16" ones usually have useless DVD drive. In comparison they are more repairable, but their whole repairability is built on having/buying spare parts from other broken laptops.
- New laptop with stupid keyboard and having to unscrew the whole bottom plate, no dock, no optical drive, USB C charger, lighter build.
There's also third option that you can call "wrong timeline", which are laptops that have downsides of both. They are pretty common.
Optical drive, hard disk, slim but heavy, vga port, can't connect 3 things at once without a hub, bad battery life.
I might just be too old and not have luck for these devices. newer ones at least are convenient so i would probably say that i have some cool use for my laptop instead of doing the same thing on phone that is better. I usually had 6-10 year old laptop and a newer smartphone to compare, so that also had an impact on why i felt that laptops suck for what they are built.
And if i had both desktop and laptop maybe i wouldn't notice that other people don't have desktops, and didn't write this in the first place. But i already bought one new laptop that has downsides of both and it's so stupid. Buying a new laptop was the worst mistake of my life LOL. It lost its value as i grew frustrated and removed or replaced stuff that i didn't ask for. At least now i can repair everything on my own but that was wasted money as my first computer. You know, right now i would probably get something actually light and with normal battery life, but after all that i went through, they can kiss my ***. I have a laptop lying around but i don't know where the charger is so i basically don't have any right now. I know i'm stupid. Why can't we have good things? Why i can't just use someone else's old laptop?
DON'T BUY A NEW LAPTOP!!!!
fourth option
These are laptops like framework, system76, pine64 etc. They let you keep the most important upsides of both old and new laptops.
However... You buy a random desktop and it is mostly based on some standards, but for laptops the standard is that there are no open standards.
gayming laptops
And there are also "gaming" laptops that are more expensive than desktop and overheat and are loud. For when you want to play steam bestsellers at McDonald's University or Starbucks.
I had a few laptops, 2 mine and the rest were older stuff i got for free, and i also thought how awesome it is to have a laptop, but then i took it out of home only like 10 times, and i needed it only on trips when i was bored and wanted to do something productive.
It would be more useful, but most laptops are naturally tied to power brick, so it ends up being useful on longer times in buildings or train. and also on train and everyday you need a really light laptop.
Laptop is not for outdoors, it's more like indoors but outside your home. I prefer to do most things on phone and it's fine.
Yes, laptops are better than smartphones, but...
The thing i hate the most are desktop replacements. Because they don't really replace desktop. Less powerful and overheats, worse I/O, small monitor and promoting bad posture, It's a great device in principle like a smartphone, but you're supposed to use it where it fits. If you're sooooooo into minimalism, buy a used desktop and don't use these mobile devices, it's actually more healthy.
There are much more laptops than desktops sold. Many people don't have a desktop and only gaming and programming is keeping desktops popular. It slowly pushes people into being more of a consumer than creator when people don't have desktops. Laptop is just middle ground for smartphone, cloud storage and paid hosting. It's much much better to seed torrents and have storage space on desktop.
It's a middle ground and i don't understand why you would choose it for everything and limit yourself.
However, there are things that i don't want to use without smartphone like clock, portable music player, or printing. Smartphones can bring great value, but average grain eaters will replace their desktops with this abomination.
No matter how powerful smartphone cpus have become, they still overheat if full CPU and networking load stays for too long, it overheats and the battery is also pretty close to that heat. You could deal with that if not the fact that you can't just install plain linux on 99% of smartphones. I could see using server applications that are specially built for android limitations be used for basic needs though.
It stays in a funny situation where they are powerful enough for many tasks and consooming, but not for seemingly simple productivity apps.
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