Chase Christian
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The IT laptop

· Submitted · Read in about 2 min · (365 Words)
tags: · tech ·

I want the following laptop, which will never exist.

  • 15” screen with a 16:10 ratio and a vertical resolution of 1200px or greater. Retina-like PPI would be nice, but unlikely.

  • A DB9 serial port. Infinite points if it actually had a serial cable wound up inside that I could pull out and plug in and then retract when done.

  • Two gigabit ethernet NICs. Yes, two.

  • A trackpoint.

  • A touchpad, with buttons.

  • A keyboard that includes all critical keys, like Ins/Del, Home/End, PgUp/PgDn.

  • Configurable up to 16GB of RAM.

  • Latest Intel processors.

  • Dedicated GPU with reasonable gaming power, see nVidia 6xxM-series.

  • VGA, DVI, and HDMI ports.

  • The latest and greatest tech, like USB3, SATA 6Gbps, etc.

  • No optical drive. It’s unnecessary in today’s world, especially with a Zalman optical-emulating hard drive enclosure.

  • Two hard drive bays. I don’t really need this, but it would be nice to have a nice 256GB SSD and also some raw space for tossing random ISOs.

  • Four USB ports. Yes, four.

  • Three hours of battery life. I don’t expect this thing to run without juice, but just long enough to get some work done during a reasonable car ride.

  • Weight and size are negotiable. I don’t need it to be thin and light, I expect it to save me from carrying around tons of dongles and cables and extras.

I would pay a lot of money for this laptop. Unfortunately for me, the laptop manufacturer’s designs are diverging in the opposite direction. The only manufacturer making high-res screens with powerful GPUs is Apple, who doesn’t even include a single ethernet port on their laptops. The opposite side is Lenovo, who has the technical oomph but is desperate to emulate Apple’s success by dropping buttons and keys as fast as they can but without replicating the screen resolution. Creating a laptop of my own, especially with such a custom set of requirements, is impossible. I can build a desktop to any possible spec and standard that I like, but we’re locked into the laptop models offered by today’s manufacturers. Unfortunately, those manufacturers are angling to take a larger share of the consumer market, not the enterprise market, which is working against me.