i have a Lenovo “LOQ” (budget Legion branding) with a 4050 and i absolutely love it
only gripes i can muster about it:
a) not heavy, but heavier than i’d prefer all things being equal
b) can charge by usb-c pd, but wants to use a bulkier power brick unless you get a pretty specific combination of stuff that supports what the laptop is asking for
c) the battery life is just ok
despite being pretty in love with my laptop (i’ve been using it to emulate tears of the kingdom) i still want an m-series macbook of some kind for it being significantly lighter, with a much longer battery, and for easier music stuff (i hate audio drivers on windows after playing around with mac more on this front)
to be perfectly honest, an M4 mini or MBA by itself is a reasonable purchase and if you want to play games, you can either get your hands dirty with Crossover or get an actual Windows machine instead
PCSX2 and RPCS3 work fine on Mac – but this is actually illustrative of the problem, as opposed to the 10 year period when it was worth it for indie developers to ship on multiple platforms, now most games exclusively ship on Windows, and Mac as a gaming platform is back to being like Linux, where only emulators and wrappers or streaming solutions work.
emulators and wrappers and streaming solutions are better than ever, but like I said, if you don’t already have a PC of any kind, I would just get a PC these days. they’re not as nice as laptops specifically but the alternative is too hard to recommend. I use crossover for Steam stuff on my Mac but you probably don’t want to, honestly.
i don’t have space for a desktop. i could theoretically hook it up to my TV but then i need a keyboard and a mouse and also i can’t use it in bed or on a reclining chair or whatever
my original plan was to build a PC years ago, then there was a shortage. at this point i don’t know when i’m going to have the space to have a real desktop set up and if i keep waiting it means it will probably be multiple years from now
yeah, and if you ask me, larger than 14" is too large for a laptop but they don’t put enough memory in any of the mobile GPUs for anything below a 5080 mobile to be worth buying at retail (as opposed to a 5070 Ti / 4070 Ti Super on desktop) so the whole thing is a total shit sandwich, hence why I have spent way too much on a PC desktop, an expensive router, and a macbook.
ironically, Macbooks offer more GPU memory for the money than any other computer or GPU on the market because their architecture means it’s fully shared with main memory, but this is mostly only useful for AI stuff in that performance envelope lol
i think maybe it just comes down to a gaming laptop is probably the best compromise for my situation at the moment? the feeling of “well, if i’m already spending X, i could get this much more for spending Y”
We’re just starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel for the gaming laptop conundrum with AMD and Nvidia’s desktop-class SoCs (i.e. CPU + GPU on the same package with shared memory). In the next two or three years it should be possible to get a decent $1000-$1500 notebook with a solid GPU with access to 32GB+ memory.
yeah that would be a huge improvement and I feel reasonably confident in saying there will not be tariffs by then either because the tariffs are insanely untenable and will accomplish very little other than killing American businesses in the short term. so if you’re good to wait at least a year I would say wait
Oh absolutely, and AMD has already paper-launched a pretty nice product. Nvidia has a better GPU architecture and i find ARM more attractive (thinking long term, i guess) but Windows on ARM is a near-quagmire and who knows how nvidia will handle licensing and linux support. Overall surprisingly chaotic vibe from them in this category.
Ebay now does warranties on refurbished electronics.
I find they get priced more or less by model with little accounting for selected options. My nearly max spec’d Lenovo was the same as others with a lot less in them.
last year I bought a Lenovo X1 Extreme 2nd edition (2022)
68gb of main ram
4gb discreet graphics GTX 1650 Max-Q
Core i7-9850H
1tb SSD, windows 10 license
For $700 with 2 years replacement plan.
Not that THIS is the laptop you need (I use it to run linux for work and editing videos) but there are some real deals on there.
