NotebookCHECK - Notebook Forum

In my opinion, Lenovo's Thinkpad line now makes some awesome laptops. For example the T14 or P15v. They make for great refurbished laptops as well. Many laptops now have options for OLED screens and 720p webcams are (mostly) a thing of the past. On the more budget end, you've got brands like Xiaomi and Huawei introducing Macbook lookalikes for half the price, though unfortunately they're hard to get in Europe. One thing I agree that is worse now are keyboards though, very few laptops do a good job with that now.

For me, laptops have been going in the wrong direction for a good decade. I am all for making laptops lighter, but the race to make the thinnest laptop is pointless. I can understand companies making something like the LG Gram, those are fine. What isn't fine is trying to make every laptop in their lineup as LG Gram junior. The whole point of having different models is precisely to reach different needs right? Instead models have now just turned into Regular, Premium, Ultra Premium of all the same thing with a few different hardware specs. And in turn customization for laptops went out the window, you now just shop models

Even worse, these laptops are moving less and less from productivity to more and more just tablets with a keyboard. I want a proper touchpad with proper click buttons, good travel keyboard with proper keys (stop getting rid of important keys), and yes full sized arrow keys please! And of course matte screen and upgradable components(I like my 64gb ram and don't want to pay a grand for it if it is even an option)

At first we had some respite in business laptops, but even business laptops started to follow consumer laptops into being junk.

Though I personally don't care too much about having a 3.5mm port or not, unless you are doing something analog, I just attach a converter to my headphones and keep it on with the headphones. It doesn't provide too much inconvenience, a bigger inconvenience is lack of ports altogether. 2-3 usb ports is no where enough.

For me the best changes in laptops has been:

- AMD releasing APUs. I don't game on my laptop at max settings, I just need a good amount of GPU power to have gpu acceleration for browser and other stuff. Having decently powerful APUs means I don't need dedicated gpus anymore. If I ever need more gpu power, eGPU or cloud gpus will get me what I need

- USB-C, finally we have alternative ways to charge our devices in case our power port breaks. We also have ways to do video out, networking and run all our accessories on one unified port. I have enough adapters around my house to go from ground to sealing (hdmi, mini-hdmi, micro-hdmi, vga, dp, mini-dp, dvi(ones with 4 pins and ones without), mini-dvi, micro-dvi, all the barrels of different size, mini-usb, micro-usb, usb-a, usb-b, 3.5mm, sata, m2 and etc). It will still be a while before everything has a usb-c port, but at the very least I only need to usb-c adapters and not start mixing and matching multiple adapters and hope they work

Forgot to add, while APUs have been awesome, what isn't awesome is vendors pairing top end APUs with dGPUs and no option to just have the APU without the dGPU

But we still have 2 interesting options:

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 line.
And the iPad Pro 12.9 M2 with a detachable keyboard.

But if you want, you can simply use a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra in Dex mode with a monitor and a keyboard and mouse via usb-c adapter.

I concur a lot with gist of article.

It seems companies lost their ethos of doing products for clients and now have a lot of other priorities before arriving to the poor client.

For example Lenovo forces you to buy a top of the line CPU 13900 to have a 4080 or 4090 Nvidia. I wonder if Nvidia realises this prevents them selling top of the line GPU's

Then there is the whole pre historic thing that a laptop can't work fully silent while the user are seeing youtube, doing office, sending emails, seeing a movie, listening to music.
Toutatis! a mere 4Gb RAM, Snapdragon smartphone from +4 years ago can do it without any noise.

Then we have Nvidia policy of laptops GPU having less VRAM. A drastic example of this is the RTX 4070 only 8 Gb in laptops but 12 Gb in desktop. A giant difference of 50%.


 

Thats what happens when sites like notebookcheck.com hype every s*** brick that is thrown into the market.

You notebookcheck, played yourself.

While it's not ideal to be carrying a whole bunch of accessories, USB hub, Powerbank and Type C DAC should extend your options greatly

Signs are showing OEM wants to cut budget DGPU so I guess wait a while more for it for mid-low end chipset without a weak DGPU like the MX series

Author, is the 13th gen Intel or Ryzen 7040U Framework laptop not almost exactly what you're looking for? Its only weakness is battery life, though the newer models (and I suspect the AMD edition in particular) promise good improvements in that regard.

Laptop manufacturers give better design to Intel CPUs but not AMD. This does not benefit consumers since they would also like better and lightweight laptop design with AMD CPUs. Like the HP Dragonfly Pro which uses AMD but the weight of the laptop is 1.55kg. And HP still use the brand name "Dragonfly" for marketing which the laptop itself is not lightweight at all, unlike the Intel counterpart machine.

The "problem" is that for most people, a laptop is a portable desktop. You carry it from one place to another and plug it in. In fact, that's why the transition to USB-C and PD 2.0 was such a big deal on laptops - it meant that the power brick could be used for ALL your devices (most people don't use eGPUs, TBH).

So while we all feel we need 16hr 'all day' battery life, the reality is that very few of us really use all that. On the commute to/from work if you use transit - maybe on a plane (although at seat power is becoming the norm) - even going to a coffee shop - more and more of them have power rails and power by the seats for regulars, while the power bricks as getting smaller and lighter thanks to GaN tech and of course, your USB-C cable is universal.

Many budget laptops have two SODIMM slots, so upgrading memory and SSD is often an option.

Oddly, requiring USB-4/TB-4/TB-3 kind of negates the 'budget' part. That's still mainly a high end feature. Conversely if you do find a laptop with that, it's almost always going to be mid-tier to high end, so upgradable memory and SSD is very likely. Similarly, if you want a full sized keyboard - same thing, that's mid to high end.

Of course that depends on your definitions. To me, low end is US$250-US$600, mid-range is US$600-$1250, and high end is US$1250+. Over US$1750 and you're in the specialty range.

Thanks for your opinion!

Regarding ports problem - that is why I love my 2021 legion 5 - amazing value for money, 5800h offers great battery life in the range of 8-9hours when browsing.

Rtx 3070 is plenty quick for all games played in high settings in ultrawide qhd.

And port selection...? I'm able to use them all at once without ever needing an adapter ( plenty type c and type a usbs is a gift!)

I'm definitely skipping this gen  due to poor battery life and absurd price hikes. Maybe NVIDIA 5000 series Will bring something decent to the table - but probably I'll be good til series 6000 easily

Quote from: LL on May 11, 2023, 07:10:56For example Lenovo forces you to buy a top of the line CPU 13900 to have a 4080 or 4090 Nvidia. I wonder if Nvidia realises this prevents them selling top of the line GPU's

Considering how hard it is to get a top of the line CPU without a GPU it makes up for it

Quote from: Kenneth on May 11, 2023, 08:07:19Laptop manufacturers give better design to Intel CPUs but not AMD. This does not benefit consumers since they would also like better and lightweight laptop design with AMD CPUs.

Doesn't intel pay manufacturers to make designs that fit certain benchmarks?

Quote from: The Werewolf on May 11, 2023, 08:13:39if you want a full sized keyboard - same thing, that's mid to high end.

Full sized you mean number keys on the right? But some don't need that when they say not missing keys since numbers keys are in theory duplicate keys. But things like missing Home and End key, or pg up and pg down. All stuck behind the fn key

QuoteConsidering how hard it is to get a top of the line CPU without a GPU it makes up for it

? I am not talking about extremes, i don't say that 4090 card should be paired with the lowest of lowest AMD/Intel offers an i3 or so. But to have a medium level option, a 13500 or 13700 same for AMD equivalent.

And that way Nvidia would sell much more higher GPU's.

I couldn't agree more, I really despise all the ports missing, 8GB of RAM when the minimum should be 16GB, crazy high resolutions on relatively small displays, glossy screens with no option for matte ones, inefficient Intel chips and poor battery life.  Laptops are designed and built for retailers who know nothing about portable computing and make life Dickensian for everyone.

Quote from: LL on May 11, 2023, 10:23:05

QuoteConsidering how hard it is to get a top of the line CPU without a GPU it makes up for it

? I am not talking about extremes, i don't say that 4090 card should be paired with the lowest of lowest AMD/Intel offers an i3 or so. But to have a medium level option, a 13500 or 13700 same for AMD equivalent.

And that way Nvidia would sell much more higher GPU's.

I understand, but the point is that it is hard to get an i7 H or HX processor without a dgpu. So while they may be losing sales on no mid tier cpus having their gpus, they make up for it with anyone who wants a powerful cpu being forced into a gpu

Yes. It almost seems like there is a deliberate attack on everything that made computers great (not denying the overall evolution though).

- subscriptions (also things like Adobe saying "hey you remember that software you paid for 10 years ago? Now it's illegal, buy a new one")

- DLCs

- soldered components, killing ports, shortening key travel just to make the new generation 0.1mm slimmer and/or to win the Whose Laptop Looks More Like A Macbook Race

- forced updates - 15 years ago when I had 30 minutes to play, I just clicked on an icon and I could. Now I never know if 20 minutes will be spent on some update I didn't want. Same when just turning my laptop on.

- online services and cloud - so being able to listen to a song or use a file now depends on some server somewhere out there, if it breaks they owe me nothing thanks to the agreement. (Yes, I know that actually Spotify or Google Drive has a hugely lower chance of breaking down than my SSD, but still.) Also if some server is down, I can't do my work in a program that I do have installed on my laptop because verification doesn't work.

- APPS for everything. Every publisher has its app which is mandatory to just run a program. Just for gaming, we have Steam, Epic Games, Ubisoft, Battlenet, Bethesda, whatever. Same for audio plugin developers and probably all other fields as well. The app starts, looks for updates, eats up my RAM, and if I'm a basic user who doesn't know how to disable autostart, I end up with 15 apps running in the background all the time.

- Windows still not being able to decide where to store all the settings. Why does Control Panel still exist??

- Windows somehow getting worse since 7 and completely disregarding usefulness for actual people. For example I use "never combine taskbar buttons" all the time and in 11 they just removed it for no apparent reason.

- assuming that every device is just a different sized mobile phone -- dear developers: no one LIKES to do things on a 6" phone. We only do it because we can't take our PCs with us on a bus or a grocery store. Please let us enjoy a proper desktop experience once we can finally put the phone down and do things on a proper screen we actually enjoy looking at.

I'm in a similar position. Just want:

- Ryzen (Intel runs too hot/loud)
- 2x RAM sockets taking up to 64GB
- 2x NVMe slots
- 2x USB4 40Gbps sockets
- Dock with power button
- Reasonable build quality
- Reasonable price

That's it. The Ryzen built in GPU is enough for me. I keep hoping Lenovo will release something in their Thinkpad line up. A Legion might do the job but none of them have dock power button support.

As someone who happens to be shopping for a laptop to replace my 7 year old desktop right now, this article is brilliantly timed.

Particularly in the £600-£1000 bracket for Windows machines, it feels like there isn't an option at all worth buying at the moment. I don't need an OLED that kills battery life, I do need more than 8GB of RAM and I don't want to buy a middling CPU that is now a generation or even two out of date.

I'm hoping that the Acer Swift range that comes to the UK later in the year is worth a shot. 

Quote from: kuro68k on May 11, 2023, 11:17:04That's it. The Ryzen built in GPU is enough for me. I keep hoping Lenovo will release something in their Thinkpad line up. A Legion might do the job but none of them have dock power button support.

I gave up on Lenovo when they gave up on not soldering ram.

As for your power button on dock, why do you need that? You mean to turn on the computer or to switch off the dock? If it is to turn on and off the computer, you can probably do that with a usb device that wakes the computer from sleep and when pressed another time puts pc to sleep.

Quote from: A on May 11, 2023, 02:19:07I want a proper touchpad with proper click buttons, good travel keyboard with proper keys (stop getting rid of important keys), and yes full sized arrow keys please!

To me these are fundamental, and the main reason laptops are moving in the wrong direction - the keyboard and the touchpad. While I certainly agree about the other points in the article and the forum posts, I can probably live with some of them. But if I have to connect an external keyboard and mouse because the laptop keyboard and touchpad are unusable, what exactly is the point of a laptop???

Regarding the keyboard, while luckily there are still few companies (Clevo, Gigabyte and Lenovo on some models) that provide proper layout (with dedicated HOME/END/PGUP/PGDN and full-sized cursor keys), there are practically no companies that provide a touchpad with dedicated buttons anymore.

Author here. Enjoyed reading the comments, and I realize that I forgot the absence of physical click buttons completely! That is a great example of things going in the wrong direction.

The new Framework laptop is indeed just about perfect for me, but it's not shipping until Q3 2023. I will look into it later, especially if they add a glossy/full gorilla glass screen option.

Spoiler about how my laptop search ended: While I originally wanted an XPS 15 7590 and I tried to buy one on eBay, it turned out to be out of stock. I ended up getting an i7-10850 XPS 15 9500 FHD/GTX 1650Ti/1TB SSD for $560 on eBay, which was a steal. The battery life is indeed great, and it runs Linux Mint without a hitch, but the fact that there is no USB A and there are still no USB-C dongles from logitech is frustrating. For the price, though, I can't complain.

Quote from: Petar on May 11, 2023, 14:26:23To me these are fundamental, and the main reason laptops are moving in the wrong direction - the keyboard and the touchpad. [...] if I have to connect an external keyboard and mouse because the laptop keyboard and touchpad are unusable, what exactly is the point of a laptop???

Precisely, and the reason why I am buying a desktop instead of a notebook this time.

QuoteRegarding the keyboard, while luckily there are still few companies (Clevo, Gigabyte and Lenovo on some models) that provide proper layout (with dedicated HOME/END/PGUP/PGDN and full-sized cursor keys)

About right, but Clevo and clones get the arithmetic keys' layout wrong.

What disqualifies any laptop for me:
-not centered  (moved to the left) trackpad (Lenovo, Acer and many more);
-loudness (HP, Acer, MSI, Gigabyte);
-less then 90% sRGB, PWM;
-soldered RAM;
-no numeric keys (if a space allows);
-and of course, unjustified price.

Since January 2023, I have considered every of 47 notebook series with RTX 4000, except 4050. Initially, speeds were unclear but now I know that 4070 would be too slow for me and I would need at least 4080 in a notebook. Each series has failed for some of these reasons:

- Excessive greed of the manufacturer (especially Alienware outside the USA, Scar, Zephyrus, Titan and XMG).
- At most 4070 instead of also offering 4080 at medium TDP (altogether 16 series often including so called creator series).
- Too loud under GPU load in a balanced fan mode (at least 16 series and counting). Some models also have coil whine.
- 16:9 instead of at most 16:10 (6 series, of which I would have strongly considered 4 series).
- No mechanical keyboard (38 series, and their keyboards are too weak being weaker than the barely acceptable non-mechanical keyboard of Medion Akoya).
- Small arrow keys (19 series, of which I would have strongly considered 11 series).
- No numpad (15 series) or small numpad (another 15 series).
- Fewer than 4 page navigation keys (42 series).
- Missing keys or secondary key functions (especially Razer).
- Suboptimal keyboard layout in the details (badly arranged keys, mutually touching keys, small keys).
- Very hard maintenance (especially fan cleaning of Alienwares).
- Severe or frequent bugs of the system software (especially Gigabyte and Alienwares).
- Improper build quality (such as CPU pasting of Alienwares).
- Partially selling old, too heavy power bricks (especially Alienware in the USA it seems).
- Annoying permanent lights or logos (such as Alienware and Strix).
- Only OLED models with flickering (those series carrying OLED in their names for worse PR).
- Only overkill CPUs (expensive, hot, bad for battery life).
- No German keyboard ever or yet.
- Camera bump.
- Only 32GB RAM possible.
- No liquid metal on the GPU (although some is on the CPU).

The closest candidate only has 2 disadvantages (somewhat wobbly, non-mechanical keys) but I cannot stand them. I have tried - after more than a few minutes, I would want to return such a notebook. What is the purpose of a €3000 device if the manufacturer has saved €50 too much during production? Let me pay €3050 including a proper keyboard and I buy it. They won't but their greed prevails and their devices may rot.

I forgot:
- data theft by system control software (such as Gigabyte's AI mode).

You are asking for 13-14" ultrabooks to be like 15-16" ultrabooks which is simply unreasonable. Thinkpad T16 would easily settle all the gripes you found in HP Dragonfly and Asus ZenBook S 13.
Of course you will be disapointed searching for upgradable components, variety ports, cool temps, tactile keyboard, and big battery - all in a "trendy and hip" flagship 13-inch ultrabook market.

Honestly, what did you expect Douglas?

For a mobile device, I would accept every display size. Ultrabooks together with eGPU I have reflected but eventually excluded because dGPU would be my main usage so a desktop replacement should be a single device. Others may have different preferences. The ultrabooks with dGPU I have considered as described.

Without need for a fast dGPU, I would find some suitable notebook easily because then my hardware requirements are rather moderate.

Quote from: Petar on May 11, 2023, 14:26:23Regarding the keyboard, while luckily there are still few companies (Clevo, Gigabyte and Lenovo on some models) that provide proper layout (with dedicated HOME/END/PGUP/PGDN and full-sized cursor keys), there are practically no companies that provide a touchpad with dedicated buttons anymore.

Doesn't lenovo do those tiny arrow keys with tiny pg up keys? I am hoping maybe the stars align and Framework offers a touchpad with clicky buttons. But no luck so far.

Quote from: Douglas Black on May 11, 2023, 15:44:12Spoiler about how my laptop search ended: While I originally wanted an XPS 15 7590 and I tried to buy one on eBay, it turned out to be out of stock. I ended up getting an i7-10850 XPS 15 9500 FHD/GTX 1650Ti/1TB SSD for $560 on eBay, which was a steal. The battery life is indeed great, and it runs Linux Mint without a hitch, but the fact that there is no USB A and there are still no USB-C dongles from logitech is frustrating. For the price, though, I can't complain.

Is that really such a steal? It sounds slightly better in specs over the laptop I bought for a family member for $680 about 3-4 years ago. Just slightly worse cpu but better gpu. Though its battery life is probably worse but they use it on wire so it isn't a big deal. Point being 3 year old computers should cost a lot less. I'd hardly call it a steal.

Quote from: RobertJasiek on May 11, 2023, 17:30:16Precisely, and the reason why I am buying a desktop instead of a notebook this time.

I did that during covid, gave up on laptops and bought a tiny pc, loaded up 64gb ram in it and it worked well.

LOL!

My sentiments exactly!!

I'm typing this on a well used MacBookPro13 (2013) running High Sierra. Don't get me wrong - I have a 2019 version of it (NIB) however the newer model has a keyboard+trackpad that really really suck and Apple along the way decided that "32bits" was taboo so it and newer versions of their OS no longer support software I paid good hard earned cash for.

My windows boxes are of a similar vintage, many have GTX1050-1070 chips in them. I have a couple copies of the smallest Razor Blade because the 1st one I bought had a fugly 1080P screen and while the replacement has a beautiful 4K screen the Nvidia GPU is to weak to do much with. At least both have ports where I could hook up a EGPU.

While Microsoft keeps doing its part of making perfectly good computers to slow and useless with its constantly changing+updating bloatware OEM's keep tossing "more power" into these devices (to run the bloatware) while having less and less space for battery capacity.

OEM's fail to understand that portable/remote/on-the-go users want the best: screen, keyboard and battery life possible.

It seemed like 10-16hrs of use on a laptop was about "standard" but it seems that the industry has been having difficulty getting even 8hrs use of late.

Quote from: Voice of Reason on May 12, 2023, 20:48:27Apple laptops meet all your criteria, so  by dismissing them outright you're a moron. And since when is an eGPU "mobile computing"?

Did you not see the "no soldered ssd" criteria?

I'm just happy that this kind of article exists. This article should be pinned because, even though the author said it's just an opinion, for me, it's actually a real problem not only in the laptop industry, but in many others too such as phones, games, services, home appliances, and more.

These days, you need to pay for everything on a monthly basis. In the past, it was a one-time payment, but now they want easy money by the excuse of maintaining the unstable app with thousands of useless updates that will stay like this forever. Even the operating system like Windows has countless updates and, many times, it ruins the system rather than fixing it, and you need to fix the thing by yourself. I remember in the old days of Windows 95 and 98, especially Windows XP, it ran smoothly without updates, and when there was an update, it came on a CD to install.

On the laptop side, the price has gone very high, opposite to the quality, which has become very low. It seems the manufacturers don't actually look around the world, but more like they live in their own bubble of greed without any effort to be innovative or make a quality product. All we get are rubbish products for a premium price. For example, the recent topic about Asus motherboards and their irresponsibility for their own mistakes and lack of sincerity to provide a solid and trustworthy product.

And some companies make fraudulent advertisements like the monitor that has a response time of 1ms when it's far away from that. Or Apple, who claims that their recent laptop, MacBook Pro 16 M1, has 10,000 mini LED lights inside the display, but in reality, it's just 8,420 mini lights, and this fact almost most of the people are not aware of. This information was exposed by a Chinese YouTuber who opened the display and counted them, making us count them as well, and the result was really disappointing when you know a large company like Apple is making this kind of fraudulent claim against their customers.

On the other hand, some YouTubers receive free products or sponsorships, and then they keep advising people to buy each new product, saying that it can bring quality of life (this is a really laughable statement for me). They want people to consume the tech product like a food.

This kind of topic needs to be the main discussion these days. I was surprised when I first saw this article, as I always talk about this every time the tech topic arises.

I found one last month and paid £699 in uk - zenbook 14 oled screen  2880x 1800, battery 75wh, i5 1240p,  16gb ram, 500gb pcie3.0, I replaced with 1 tb pcie 4.0. Almost perfect laptop. In some tests, it performs better than i7 version. It's a shame that notebookcheck.net did not make review of this model, but I understand quite well modern world...

You dwell on the past too much. I should know - I suspect I'm well older than you. 😆

Your criteria list is wobbly. Excluding Apple silicon is cutting yourself off from a lot of the laptops that would otherwise fulfil your other criteria easily. When one considers how much better the support & user experience is with MacOS compared to other brands, it's hard to take your 'suspect business practices' caveat seriously.

That said, check out the HP Pavillion Plus.

Quote from: AHA on May 19, 2023, 20:36:41You dwell on the past too much. I should know - I suspect I'm well older than you. 😆

Your criteria list is wobbly. Excluding Apple silicon is cutting yourself off from a lot of the laptops that would otherwise fulfil your other criteria easily. When one considers how much better the support & user experience is with MacOS compared to other brands, it's hard to take your 'suspect business practices' caveat seriously.

That said, check out the HP Pavillion Plus.

But that is his needs, not YOUR needs. The macbook was discarded due to soldering everything. And not everyone likes the locked down ecosystem. For things like support, most tech users have no need for it unless the computer breaks down and personally, I'd take someone who offers inhome warranty in that case then being forced to find an Apple store and wasting a day getting there. As for user experience, that is also up for debate, I can't speak for the author but I have a recent macbook for ios development, in my opinion it is one of the worst laptops I've owned. Many x86 programs don't run properly, the touchpad is terrible due to having no buttons and MacOS is unintuitive and frustrating to use. Of course your opinion may be different, but that is life, no 2 people are the same. This is why options exist

This article kind of feels like it's a criticism of Dell's handling of its XPS line generalized onto the entire industry. Yes, there are many other bad decisions coming out of other OEMs, and it has driven me crazy too when shopping around. But there are also plenty of sensible laptops with good input and output devices, reasonable battery life, upgradable RAM and SSDs, and powerful processors and GPUs. You just need to know where to look.

So maybe the real problem is the "paradox of choice" infecting the industry that makes finding that needle in the haystack a tough problem. It's awfully confusing when each manufacturer sells half a dozen product lines each with half a dozen models, all similarly named and specced out.

I wish more manufacturers did it like Apple with 2 or 3 product lines that exhibit clear market segmentation so it's easy to figure out which one you would be best served with, and then making sure that every model gets the basics right. That way you only really need to make a few choices ("big screen or small screen?" "dedicated GPU or iGPU?" "more power or more battery life?" etc) and you're more likely to make a choice you end up happy with.

FWIW it sounds like the author would be well served by a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme or an ASUS ROG Zephyrus. These "thin and light" laptops are always compromises, and XPS models are particularly extreme examples of it.

Quote from: Nate on May 24, 2023, 22:07:31This article kind of feels like it's a criticism of Dell's handling of its XPS line generalized onto the entire industry. Yes, there are many other bad decisions coming out of other OEMs, and it has driven me crazy too when shopping around. But there are also plenty of sensible laptops with good input and output devices, reasonable battery life, upgradable RAM and SSDs, and powerful processors and GPUs. You just need to know where to look.

So maybe the real problem is the "paradox of choice" infecting the industry that makes finding that needle in the haystack a tough problem. It's awfully confusing when each manufacturer sells half a dozen product lines each with half a dozen models, all similarly named and specced out.

I wish more manufacturers did it like Apple with 2 or 3 product lines that exhibit clear market segmentation so it's easy to figure out which one you would be best served with, and then making sure that every model gets the basics right. That way you only really need to make a few choices ("big screen or small screen?" "dedicated GPU or iGPU?" "more power or more battery life?" etc) and you're more likely to make a choice you end up happy with.

FWIW it sounds like the author would be well served by a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme or an ASUS ROG Zephyrus. These "thin and light" laptops are always compromises, and XPS models are particularly extreme examples of it.

No, the biggest problem is the illusion of choice. Back in the day we actually had multiple choices. You would first pick a model that you like as a base, then customize it how you wish with plenty of options. That has changed, if you go to customize, they will let you choose a few choices at best and if you want other choices you have to opt for a different model completely. Aka, most models just because derivative models of the same thing with minor changes.

Even if you go through many models, it becomes harder as poor practices take over like crappy touchpads without buttons, thinning the laptop at expense of keyboard travel, soldering ram (pretty much almost all lenovo these days are soldered ram, X1 Extreme isn't soldered in Gen 5 but it is dated, I wouldn't be surprised if it is in Gen 6, plus no option for using the internal gpu. Not to mention the high price of 2x what the specs are worth)