Is the Pro actually worse for me?

Framework Laptop 13
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I wanted to upgrade my work laptop, and do so with a company that I feel is ideologically aligned with me, so I was looking to buy my first Framework hardware. Now, money’s not an issue: if a few hundreds was the dealbreaker I wouldn’t be buying from a premium brand.

On, paper, everything about the Pro looks like an upgrade: bigger battery? Great! Sturdier case? Good, I have dropped a laptop before, not fun. Backlit keyboard and haptic trackpad? I’m not using the built-in input peripherals 80% of the time, but the remaining 20% is a lot more than nothing. The screen?

Well, that’s the issue: the screen is, on paper, good, so good I think it may be wrapping around and becoming terrible, especially considering my work: I’m a full stack web developer for a company that’s mostly doing B2B, and I don’t expect clients to have anything close to a movie production screen, if anything, a cheap 45% NTSC display would be a more realistic portrait of what the customers are actually seeing. And then there’s the resolution. 2880x1920 are a lot of pixels, pixels the GPU needs to drive, and at 13", I don’t think I’m ever seeing the difference between that and 1080p, and I’d need UI scaling to not go blind on anything outside the comfort of my TTY.

2x scaling? Then I get 1440x960 effective surface, an oddball resoution that nobody has or supports, and it’s completely disconnected from what customers are actually using. Fractional scaling? I’m measuring gaps in pixels, fractional scaling is a non-starter. And none of that fixes the resource hog. I could drive the display at a lower than native resolution, that would fix the hog, but none of the workflow issues.

The vanilla 13’s lower end 2256x1504 sounds more workable to use as is. Not the idea resolution, that would be taller 1080p, it’s not like there’s a better option. I’d lose the touch support, which means I’ll keep writing the occasional UI for mobile just to discover my fingertip spans 3 buttons as soon as I try it on an actual phone, which is a problem. And I am landlocked out of the Ryzen 9, but it’s not like Typescript knows what a second thread is, and since I’ve been treating AAA games like pest since Destiny 1 Season Pass, I’m more worried about making a silly oversight in the custom shader pipeline that draws my GUI shell that hogs the entire GPU more than I am worried about running the latest AAA FOMO cashgrab.

“But if you’re worried about resource usage, why are you writing your sh-” Look, I write corporate UI for work. I need to work on something that’s the complete opposite to keep sane. And the extra high res of the Pro with 2x scaling is gonna make my bad shader pipeline worse.

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I’m a software engineer, and mostly I want excellent specs for a machine I use 60 hours a week. I understand the argument that this or that userbase are on mediocre machines, but if you want an effective emulation, you’d have to have a CPU with a quarter of your new power. And so on, for all of the machine’s characteristics.

I’d say no, what you should do in that case is have a spare laptop at home that you use periodically to check for user-emulated UX. Don’t have a poor user experience for the other 90% of your screen time.

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There’s also that, at viewing distance, I’ll never see the what 2880x1920 is actually doing, and I’ll pretty much have to use my O(N^2) shader pipeline at 4x the pixels assuming 2x UI scaling. Sure, a GUI shell isn’t supposed to have several emissions and particle effects animating at 60fps all the time, but if I don’t do something that’s the opposite of corporate UI I’ll go insane. And I don’t think a AA or indie game or a GBA emulator expect to run at a weird resolution.

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So, the Pro is preorder only right now. And I bought the Intel version because I’ve misread “Nov” as as “Now”!

I guess I’ll just cope with the wait and pray my current work machine doesn’t literally self destruct in the meantime? Because it really looks like it could self destruct at any moment. I guess I should minimize mechanical stress and leave it in the office instead of letting it experience more road trips.

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Okay, fine, I’ve changed my preorder to the Ryzen model: September is near after all, can’t say the same thing about November. Still gonna go with my mechanical stress reduction plan until it actually ships.

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I was happy with my AMD choice, as my 64GB RAM survived the LPCAMM2 cull. :cat_with_wry_smile:

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Those screens are painful to watch. I got headaches after using the laptops with that kind of screen in less than an hour