How about decent keyboard with not flat caps? Enough interfaces? Changeable battery, maybe RAM and CPU also?
> Enough interfaces?
USB-C Hubs are like $30 and have more than enough bandwidth for most needs.
I think HDMI is the one port I use the most after that, and yes, most of these laptops these days have an HDMI adapter?
But even when I setup 4-player games, I mostly use Bluetooth these days with wireless controllers. Which adapters do you need, and why isn't USB-C good enough for that? At work, I do have to use a wired Ethernet dongle (maybe even 2 or 3 of them) but home-use WiFi is all the internet connection I need in practice.
> Changeable battery
Before buying any laptop, check the service manual. This ensures:
1. The laptop was actually designed to be worked with.
2. You can see which parts are replaceable
For the battery: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/xps-15-9560-lapto...
> maybe RAM
In my experience, most modern laptops (such as the Dell XPS under this topic's discussion) have replaceable RAM, M.2 drives, SATA-drives, and batteries. You may need to grab a screwdriver, but its not that hard.
Just check the service manual before buying.
Nope, they are just nonexistent in modern laptops.
> USB-C Hubs are like $30 and have more than enough bandwidth for most needs.
> why isn't USB-C good enough for that?
I don't have any USB-C device (not everybody lives in a first-world countries) but at least once per year I actually need at least all 4 of my good old USB2 ports. External USB hub will suck in stability of connect and ability to charge several devices at once.
And I do not want to grab a screwdriver for changing battery which becomes common in modern razor-thin laptops, I love long outdoor sessions with a couple of spare batteries in my backpack.
With 24+ hours per charge on a lot of these modern laptops, why do you need to carry spare batteries?
Instead of spare batteries, you should probably be looking to use equipment more recent than a Thinkpad. You get far, far more "laptop usage per watt" on a modern system than anything 5 years or older. There's just all sorts of power-saving features on a modern system (most importantly: fundamental shrinking of the transistors down to 5nm or smaller, using a small fraction of the power compared to larger 22nm or 24nm transistors)
Ex: The new "P vs E" core on Windows 11 devices. The new sleep features on DDR5. NVMe using far less power than a hard drive. Etc. etc. Modern systems use an order of magnitude less power yet offer greater compute power on the go. The drive for better transistors is strongest in the laptop form factor IMO, since smaller transistors hit the "do everything": faster, cheaper, less power usage.
On top of that are the software tweaks. I know people are pissed off about Windows 11's new GUI, but the scheduler is solid and the support for Intel's low power "E" cores, plus GPU sleeping / other power saving features, really makes a difference in terms of battery life.
> I don't have any USB-C device (not everybody lives in a first-world countries) but at least once per year I actually need at least all 4 of my good old USB2 ports. External USB hub will suck in stability of connect and ability to charge several devices at once.
USB-C is something like 4GBps.
A singular USB-C hub can support 20x USB 2.0 A devices at full speed (each around 50MBps). You have all the bandwidth you need from USB 3.0 / USB-C connectors. You just need a hub so that the port can be "split" into more physical ports.
> External USB hub will suck in stability of connect and ability to charge several devices at once.
So right now, you carry a bunch of extra laptop batteries around and USB 2.0 ports that you only use ~once per year (or so).
When instead you could be carrying around a Li-ion charging station, using more efficient laptops (to get 24+ hours per charge, negating the need for spare batteries), and using a $30 USB-C port+hub on the rare occasions you need a large number of simultaneous devices on your computer?
It sounds like what you really need is a portable Li-ion battery.
