I think the perfect college computer is a thin & light notebook and an external GPU dock.
Take the notebook whereever you want, but back at the dorm, you plug in the external GPU dock and game to your hearts content.
I also think it could be good for a business road warrior - take the laptop to your meetings, but when you get back to the hotel room, pull out the external GPU dock and game on the TV (hopefully it’s good enough).
I know someone with this external GPU + ultra book setup - it is costly relative to a similar power desktop but very slick. If I didn’t have a free (mediocre) laptop from work I would probably go this route instead of my current laptop/desktop mix.
Not really. Thunderbolt docks still cost at minimum $300 the cheaper eGPU docks don’t include other docking stuff so you’ll need a USB3 dock too. You can build a desktop gaming computer for around $500 these days, not counting the GPU, and that’s with inflated RAM prices.
Thunderbolt docks remain a luxury option for people with very high-end laptops who want a seamless experience. Not really what I’d get for a kid until prices come down. I would get the kid a laptop with a 1050 inside.
Ugh, looks like the Matebook Pro X I was expecting to arrive this week may get pushed out to August fulfillment, severely pissing me off. It also won’t arrive in time before I visit Portland and Seattle.
I picked up a new 2017 MBA 8GB RAM 128GB SSD 13" MBA for $899 CAD though during eBay’s fake-Prime-Day event with 10% off.
Thanks for single-handedly insuring the Apple laptop lineup will refresh next month!
LOL, sooner than you expected.
It’s seriously about goddamn time. Apple took FOREVER with the coffee lake refresh. I know multiple people that gave up and bought XPS13s instead, which incidentally updated to Coffee Lake in September 2017.
Non-upgradeable eGPU. Have to love Apple, lol.
In case anyone with an ultrabook (XPS13 in my case) has issues with it not shutting off properly and whatever… I think @wumpus had an issue recently, I finally found out mine after a year.
So W10 has some new feature called “Connected Standby” where the PC turns on occasionally to check your email and whatever. The rationale is that it makes the PC start up faster on wake.
My issue was I have been using a VPN client. VPN clients cannot keep connections when asleep. So it must have been having an issue where it kept waking up and the VPN client couldn’t connect so the PC would never shut back down, and I’d have a dead battery.
The Huawei Matebook is backordered but I may still get it this August. Ugh.
Yeah, I got one of those late 2017 xps ultrabooks on refurb 3 weeks ago for my daughter.
She wanted a touch screen a lot more than gaming.
I’m kinda impressed with it overall.
The big question on many people’s minds are the keyboards: Do they resolve the reliability issues that have surfaced ever since Apple switched to butterfly mechanisms? Apple says no, that the only thing they were engineered for is being quieter. But I think only time will tell whether this is true or not. Maybe, as Apple says, the only problem they sought out to solve was the noise. But, if they also sought out to improve the reliability of the keyboards — to fix the problem where keys get stuck, among other problems — I think they would only admit to fixing the noise problem. Marketing-wise, I don’t think they would admit to a reliability problem in the existing butterfly keyboards (especially since they’re still selling second-generation keyboards in all non-TouchBar models), and legal-wise (given the fact that they’re facing multiple lawsuits regarding keyboard reliability) I don’t think they should admit to it. So whether they’ve attempted to address reliability problems along with the noise or not, I think they’d say the exact same thing today: only that they’ve made the keyboards quieter. I have no inside dope on the this (yet?), but to me the reason for optimism is that they’re calling these keyboards “third-generation”, not just a quieter version of the second-generation butterfly-switch keyboards.
Yeah, this spec bump does nothing for me personally.
I agree. For as delayed as the updates were i’m disappointed that there seemed to have been little technical reason to do so (no new form factor etc.) If it’s literally the same product + new CPU this could have been done 6-9 months ago. It’s almost like they went around in development circles behind the scenes and kind of gave up and just pushed out a silent update.
Nice! Even though the small bezels are more common these days, the XPS13 still looks gorgeous to me.
Coffee lake is a huge deal because it gets you quadcore CPUs in the 13" form-factor. Difference between 2 and 4 cores huge; 4 and 6 (at 15") not so much.
Where’d you go for that refurb? I know there are a couple companies you can buy refurb dells from outside of dell but I never remember what they are.
Maybe Apple was waiting for the B360 chipset to ship in volume, no need to pay Intel for the Z370 version?
Got this one for $900 CAD so I consider it a good discount: https://www.amazon.ca/Apple-MacBook-1-8GHz-128GB-MQD32LL/dp/B07211W6X2/
Got 22% off the MBA so i think i did better than avg edu + black friday discount i hope
Mine through Dell. Touch screen version is not cheap even on refurb, but daughter is a whiz on it and the track pad, so there ya go.