What's your deal breaker when buying a new laptop?

[Sven Ungerecht]

Glossy Display!!!!!!
Also shitty keyboard and track-pad a no go.

I like was Microsoft is doing with the Surface Book and Laptop. But still there lot of room for improvement.

I wold like to see, Nano Coating similar the new Pro XDR Apple Display. And finally go crazy with Resolution/PPI.
And I do not mind a few more gram weight & dimension for proper Thermal Management.

[Roy]

Glued everything, soldered everything, proprietary ports and standards, terrible build quality, non-existent after-sales service, 16:9 screens.

[123]

There's only two main deal-breakers in modern laptops, which make me still use my 10-year old Elitebook:

1. 16:9 screens.
2. Ridiculous toy-like keyboards.

[S.Yu]

Come to think of it, surprisingly little. No 3.5mm is gradually becoming an issue, and ultra thin crappy keyboards like the MacBook's, or a screen with <95% sRGB or ridiculous color accuracy that can't be corrected. I also don't buy anything ugly, which means most Lenovos and Acers, and certainly not the ODMs like Clevo, but this can't really be specified.

[Luca]

1. RJ-45 port
2. Thunderbird port
3. Easily usable arrow keys and Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDown
4. Memory slot
5. Not-soldered SATA/NVMe SSD
6. Webcam/microphone physical kill switch

[SCJ]

1. Runs too hot for laptop use; poor thermals
2. Non-upgradeable RAM and SSD
3. SATA SSDs
4. Non-user-replaceable battery
5. Lack of ports (RJ-45, HDMI, USB-A)
6. Poor customer service (Lenovo, are you reading this?)
7. Offset non-ten-key keyboards (HP, are you reading this?)
8, Excessive coil whine
9. Windows Updates
10. 16:9 aspect ratios
11. Poorly located cooling vents

[A]

Oh right, Matte screen. It was late and it slipped my mind but Matte screen is a must. I don't need not touchscreen, laptops are too heavy to use as a tablet and I'd rather just get a $100 android tablet rather than deal with window's crappy mode changes if I did want a touch screen. 

[Pierre]

Required for me :
- RJ45
- Weight <= 1.5 kg
- Silence under moderate load
- Decent keyboard

[Joel Kleppinger]

Bright Matte Screen (500+ nits)
User replaceable SSD
Multiple Type C ports + USB PD charging faster than discharge
<5 lb and <.8" thick + good battery

That's it, yet even still very very few laptops check those boxes.

[Doggo]

Apple logo.

[zitot]

NO cheap TN / 768p. Would prefer IPS 1080p or 1440p. Indoors, don't need 400 nits.
no running hot or throttling (e.g. i5 8265u running 4 cores at 3.1 GHZ instead of 3.7GHZ). Quad core preferred but if they ever come out with a 6 GHZ dual core that would be lit.
Build quality, repairability and availability of parts is important to me. Ideally it would be held together with two screws for easy upgradability/maintenance :P
Can't weigh more than 5 pounds because I walk a couple miles 4x/week and will carry textbooks
modern iGPU for playing the games i like - something like intel UHD or vega 8
Would like 1 year warranty or a cheaper price. Further warranty support questionable due to living in a small town in the middle of the ocean.
Model should be out for at least one year to catch early problems. (Lat 7390, Motile BIOS, ThinkPads bad thunderbolt firmware)
Price is important, buy refurb/used. $400 seems to be the in-practice limit for these demands (since 8th gen intel or Ryzen 2000/3000 is pretty recent). If i gave up the igpu demand i could get everything I want for $200 e.g. sum1 sold a Lat E5470 i7 6820HQ locally for $199 a few weeks ago... Is an iGPU and slightly newer laptop really worth an extra $200... I think I played myself :(

[Andrew08]

1. silent(fanless,ssd)
2. have 2 usb c port
3. thick keyboard backlight

[JohnIL]

I use a laptop on my lap, so I don't like a laptop that doesn't work well on a lap. Such as running hot because the vents are blocked, or it just doesn't stay cool and fan runs too much and is annoying watching a video. I bought a MacBook Air for the retina screen quality and the low powered duel core CPU that run cool even streaming video. After trying a Dell XPS 13 and finding it simply ran too hot to use as a laptop I chose the MacBook Air. The fan vents were also a problem with the XPS on my lap which aggravated the heat issue.

[David Gray]

For me I game with it on my lap, in same room as TV so on top of all the obvious things:
Good quality and size Screen
Nice build quality
Quite quiet
Decent graphics

I also need a CENTRAL air intake so my legs don't block it (they will be under the sides)
And the exhaust should also be at back / hinge
So the sides should not be involved in cooling system, should stay cool

I currently use Samsung Series 7 Chronos 780Z5E, nearly 7 years old, no plans to upgrade  :p 8)

[gc]

Keyboard Layout

For touch typing and text editing, I'm having a lot of trouble with keyboards that shift the right ctrl key to the left to make room for arrow keys.   My right ring finger is less flexible, and when the right ctrl key is to the left of the '/' key, my ring finger hits the key insecurely with the fingernail, which can't feel the key edges.  I frequently hit the left arrow key by mistake. I currently attach a portable external keyboard with good layout when at a desk, but would prefer that the laptop keyboard have good layout so I can more productively use it on my lap.

I also have trouble with keyboards that place a page-up key above the left arrow key.  The left-arrow key is a very frequently used key for editing typos, and while touch typing, it is far too easy to miss and hit the page-up key.  That is a productivity disaster because the cursor is moved far from its intended location and it breaks concentration to undo it.  (page-dn often only gets the cursor back into the general area, not in the same spot on the line, especially if other keys were typed before halting to fix the error.)

For editing text and spreadsheets, the home and end keys move the cursor to the beginning and end of the line, and shift-home and shift-end select the prefix or the rest of the line.  I like to be able to do these quickly with one hand, so I can position the cursor with the mouse and then shift-home or shift-end while the mouse hand is returning to the keyboard.  (Many keyboards require an Fn key chord to type home or end.  Typing  shift-fn-home is a slower, awkward operation, and requires two hands on most keyboards.)  So the home and end keys must be separate keys that are near the shift key.  The navigation column is good for this.  The home and end keys on a numberpad also good.

In stores I have tried a few notebook keyboards which satisfy the above, but the touchpad is so large or sensitive or not centered on the home keys, that when I touch type normally with corners of palm on the palm rest, the cursor jumps around because of poor palm rejection. 

Keyboard requirements:
- right ctrl key must easily reached by pinky finger while hands are in home position for touch typing.
- left-arrow key must be easily reached by pinky finger while hands are in home position for touch typing, and adjacent to no keys that move the cursor far away (such as page-up).
- end and home keys must be separate keys, and it must be easy to type shift-end and shift-home with one hand.
- both alt keys must be easily reachable by thumbs (too far and it causes repetitive strain injury).  (An overwide space bar is a bad sign.)
- touchpad must not move the cusor while touch typing with outside corner of palms resting on the palm rest.  (Test with multiple hand sizes.)

(I prefer full size arrow keys.  An overlong right-shift key and half-hight arrow keys are bad signs.)