Re: everybody mentioning gaming laptops, I think that's a bit too overpowered for what I'm thinking about... desktop-grade parts running really hot isn't quite it. I mean a mainstream laptop designed for relative power users, with a solid and thoughtful OS. Workstation-lite.
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Basically, with more and more people doing video, 3d rendering, CAD and image processing applications at amateur levels, that's the gap I'm thinking of. Not stuff for pro-gamers or employees of ILM or full-time VR game designers.
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The use case is a really a new media pro: someone who might edit some longer YouTube or online course videos with a few effects, people making their own animation show, people trying to make an indie VR game, people doing photo processing.
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So I think we're looking at a light, laptop-grade Zen2 type thing with as much graphics and memory as you can pack in while still staying in the macbook pro size/weight/heating range.
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But I think the bottleneck is an OS that's not an afterthought for a cloud company (Microsoft) or a mobile device company (Apple, Google), and not linux. The computing equivalent of a decent SUV I guess.
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I was hating Windows by the time I quit it (2016) but 4 years in, I still really do not like MacOS and the frankenstein UX that's some random mix of iOS style elements, a linux shell, and legacy Mac UX that feel like they're from the 90s/00s.
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I think when I say "performance laptop" I really am not talking about bleeding-edge hardware (though you need to get close) but simply thoughtful attention to people who might be doing graphics heavy creative work that can't be easily done over a network-latency cloud connection.
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Hm, but if the OS is bad how does the cloud factor into this? You would be getting the same exact OSes on your cloud machines.
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agreed... but at least then I'm not trying to get a laptop configured the way I want it. Except I think a lot of things like video editing or 3d don't work well over a cloud connection on a lower-powered laptop.
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Well, all you need is a hardware h264 decoder and decent connection. Even clean mobile signal is enough. Been playing games this way on a relatively meh tablet for a couple of years. It only starts to get annoying when the latencies are above 50-100ms range.
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What's a "decent" h264 decoder? Can you add one externally to a regular laptop? I'm very fuzzy on the details of how these things are configured
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These days it's built into the CPUs and/or onboard GPUs. Almost anything from the 8 year old RPi to newest phones would have one, older stuff would need a real GPU inserted. If it can render full hd video without lift off on it's fans it got one.

