…might be the one you already have. I’m sure some of you are chucking over my realization of something so obvious! Yeah, fair enough. Perhaps this will at least burnish my KDE Eco credentials a bit. Last October, the loud fan noise, poor multi-core CPU performance, and at best 4-hour battery life of my daily … Continue reading The perfect laptop →...
…might be the one you already have.
I’m sure some of you are chucking over my realization of something so obvious! Yeah, fair enough. Perhaps this will at least burnish my KDE Eco credentials a bit.
Last October, the loud fan noise, poor multi-core CPU performance, and at best 4-hour battery life of my daily driver Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga laptop were starting to become significant hindrances. It’s still a good laptop, but it just wasn’t good for me and my use cases anymore. It now belongs to my daughter.
I’ve gotten pickier over the years as I’ve discovered what I really want in a laptop, and looked for a cheap “good-enough” stop-gap that could be recycled to another family member after I located the perfect final replacement.
I found an amazing deal on a refurbished 2023 HP Pavilion Plus 14 and pulled the trigger! Here it is driving my workstation:
This basic little Pavilion is the best laptop I’ve ever used.
With a large 68 Watt-hour battery, its energy-efficient AMD 7840U CPU delivers a true 9-hour battery life with normal usage. For real! It also ramps up to do a clean build of KWin in less than 10 minutes! The laptop’s 2.8K 120Hz OLED screen is magnificent. Its keyboard and touchpad are truly the best I’ve ever used on a PC laptop. Linux compatibility is excellent too. Everything works out of the box. It’s just… great.
The problem is, it isn’t perfect. The speakers are awful, the aluminum casing is fairly thin and prone to denting while traveling, and there’s no touchscreen or fingerprint reader. USB 4 ports would also be nice, as would putting one on each side, rather than both on the right.
So I kept looking for the perfect replacement!
I still haven’t found one.
Everything out there sucks. Something important is always bad: usually the battery life, screen, or speakers. Often the keyboard layout is either bad, or just not to my liking. Other times the touchpad is laggy. Or it’s not physically rugged. Or there’s no headphone jack (what the heck). Or the palmrest is coated in some kind of gummy sticky material that will be disgusting with caked-on sweat and skin in a matter of weeks. Or Linux compatibility is poor. Or it’s absurdly expensive.
So for now, I’ll stick with the little Pavilion that could.
If only HP made this exact laptop with a thicker case and better speakers! A fingerprint reader and a touchscreen would be nice-to-haves as well. Replaceable RAM would easily be possible with a small redesign, as there’s empty space in the case. A USB 4 port on each side would be the cherry on top.
Ah well. Nothing’s perfect, and it’s good enough.