Fujitsu claims 634-gram 14-inch Core i7 laptop is world's lightest Fujitsu Japan's client computing operation claims to have seized the title of world's lightest laptop, after launching the 634-gram "FMV Zero." Manufacturers' attempts to make lightweight laptops have often resulted in compromised bills of materials. Not so with the FMV Zero, which boasts a 14-inch WUXGA (1920 x 1200) LCD. …
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"the machines' use of a keyboard that doesn't offer Japanese kana notation"
Odd that kana aren't printed on the keycaps, but everyone I know uses input converters and the two keys either side of the space bar to toggle that on and off are present.
If a westerner did get hold of one they will have a merry time leanring the location of the punctuation keys on a JIS keyboard...
以上です
I would be a very happy camper if Lenovo could now do the same thing..
I am one of the unfortunate that has to carry a laptop around everyday and am always happy to reduce a couple of 100 grams here and there. They also need to ensure that the charging brick is not compensating for the weight loss.
Even if Lenovo or another manufacturer did bring out a 600g laptop in the US, it wouldn't be a selling point.
Your problem is all the big bosses in US multinationals go from door to door in their car or more probably SUV and they think it's fine to decide on one standard laptop model which weighs over 3kg and screw over everyone else elsewhere in the world who has to carry it around everywhere on their back.
Also, well done El Reg for putting a real unit of measurement in a headline, instead the weight in grains or barleycorns or something.
Agree, unless it is priced to go.
Going through a couple of laptop procurements and not impressed with “business resellers”…
Asked for a Dell Inspiron 15 3535 with Ryzen 7 16GB 512GB SSD and W11Pro, currently on offer for £579, got back from the suppliers my clients have contracts with, stuff that was basically consumer grade or low spec business stuff carrying a higher price.
Finally, got one to quote for a “reasonable” business machine, only condition it was a “Special Order” ie. They didn’t normally stock this grade of business laptop. I conclude the sellers are wanting to sell low spec stuff that will only survive 3 years before needing to be replaced. Whereas I want stuff that helps people to work and potentially will last for 6+ years. It is scary that my £800 2020 Lenovo L15 Ryzen 7 system benchmarks higher than the laptops these business resellers are handing out to businesses.
But yes, once again Wintel playing catch-up to Apple.
I am one of the unfortunate that has to carry a laptop around everyday and am always happy to reduce a couple of 100 grams here and there. They also need to ensure that the charging brick is not compensating for the weight loss.
Would you consider a Macbook Air 13" at 1.24kg? That might not be astoundingly light in absolute terms, but the battery life *is* astounding and you may find you stop carrying a charger at all, as I have done. (And in any case, a GaN USB-C charger is very lightweight if you really need one).
I have the slightly heavier Macbook Pro M3 Pro. I do carry USB A-to-C and C-to-C cables just in case, but have never needed to use them for charging away from home.
Battery life is one of the big differentiators between intel and AMD laptops. I’ve noted that users tend to assume a laptop should be like a phone and tablet and last all day without needing to be recharged. I’ve been deploying AMD ( Zen 3 architecture) since 2020, as yet not had any one asking for a power adaptor.
One of three possibilities for "not had anyone asking for a power adaptor":
1. They have (fictional) fusion batteries which last forever and never need charging.
2. Unlike some, they actually keep the power adaptor WITH the laptop instead of losing them.
3. The never need charging because they are sitting in corners never being used.
In our environment to enable 24/7 remote endpoint management, all machines, including laptops, are meant to be left powered up.
Machines connected via wired ethernet can (usually) be remotely woken up but on WiFi, forget it.
However, that doesn't stop users from separating laptops from their power supplies and then letting them run down on battery until the battery dies or it goes to sleep (due to low battery). Then, after tracking down errant laptops it is another very annoying, waste of time, hunt to track down their PSU.
I'm sorely tempted to GLUE the bloody DC jacks into the damned things.
My power adapter tends to stay at home too, but only because the office displays are USB-C so I get a top up charge while working.
When I was doing a lot of travel I would have done almost anything (short of paying my own money) for a 650g work laptop with 14in screen.
Now I'm more sedentary I would prefer to have a 17in high res with clicky keys.
I don't want it light. I want it a) not to break, b) not be expensive, c) be powerful, d) have good battery life, e) have a screen I can see and f) actually be available.
We've dropped past the point where we're trying to lug around unreasonably heavy equipment. We passed it 20 years ago.
I want a laptop that I can put in a laptop rucksack and carry it around without dying, and which actually is robust enough to survive a few years of active use being moved around.
Let's stop this ridiculous "put things on the head of a pin" shrinkage and make the thing that's a decent, reasonable size, without undue weight, and which does FAR MORE.
Currently my only personal PC is a 17" (all I could get, I wanted 19") gaming laptop. It's portable. It can run off battery (for hours if I'm only doing casual stuff). It has a ridiculous GPU in it (which helps with the power usage!). It does EVERYTHING I throw at it - video processing, VR, mass compilations, etc. It is small enough to carry around in a backpack, strong enough to survive (metal casing) but big enough to see the damn screen and watch movies on it by preference (I have a projector, but often just the laptop next to the sofa and lying down next to it is more than enough to get the full movie experience in terms of "how much of my vision is taken up by the movie"). It has a full keyboard. It has lots of ports. It has PLENTY of oomph. And there's no real compromise there at all.
Can we stop making things smaller and lighter and start making things actually just do more without having to work out how to fit a battery in the tiniest/lightest/thinnest cases imaginable which will break far more easily?
My next laptop would be a Framework most likely. But they need a 17" or bigger screen option and a choice of GPUs.
Back when regular travelling was neccessary for my job I was really fond of netbook-sized machines. A 14" screen is almost too big for my then usecase. It was always fun to see guys struggle with their ginormous laptops (>14" screens), which were impossible to work on in the cheap seats of an airplane :D
I had a Samsung netbook and later a small 14" Lenovo. The Samsung was perfectly sized, the Lenovo almost too big. Battery life was ok (Samsung >10 hrs! Lenovo only... 8-ish), which is the second constraint I had.
I was also commuting >3hrs / day to one of my jobs, and the netbooks worked very well for that purpose.
Nowadays I care sweet FA, I only travel nationally by train, and my employer springs fro 1st class - ample space for me. And you can order your beer to your seat.
Yup, the netbook era happened to overlap with a period in my professional career where I was spending a fair bit of time visiting customer sites, and I very quickly came to appreciate not only the compact nature/relative robustness of my Aspire One which meant it was easy to a) carry it to and from sites and then b) find somewhere to plonk it down whilst onsite without being too concerned about it getting dirty/dinged, falling off its perch and down an open lift shaft etc..., but also the way it, with a third party extended battery, would happily run all day whilst also having enough spare juice to keep my phone recharged.
> work on in the cheap seats of an airplane
The 14-inch T60 was definitely well sized (slightly over 12-inch wide, yet with a 1400x1050 display), being usable both in airplanes and on trains, where the back of seat drop down tables were fitted. Although it was too large for the Pendilino seat back tables. Obviously once the iPad came out along with the keyboard cases…
Indeed. On a similar vein, the trend, until fairly recently, for wanting to make mobile phones ever thinner and lighter was one that completely baffled me, because as anyone who's ever actually used a handheld device will know, if you make something too small in one or more dimensions then it becomes difficult/uncomfortable to hold, and if you make it too light then it messes with your expectations of how heavy it ought to be when you go to pick it up, which (when combined with the difficulty in grasping it securely due to the previous point) can sometimes lead to said device being unintentionally hurled through the air. Before then being *intentionally* thrown at the nearest brick wall once you've finally grown sick and tired of having to deal with the godawful ergonomics of the damn thing...
So whilst there is still a certain level of this smaller/thinner/lighter thing going on, at least manufacturers have stopped focussing *solely* on that, and have realised there actually is a market for larger beefier phones that can therefore pack in more stuff. I mean, I *still* have to buy a decent third-party case just to deal with the annoying fad for using glass or otherwise shiny/slippery surfaces for the rear casing which makes "naked" phones still somewhat precarious to hold, but at least I'm no longer having to wrap my phones in third party cases just to bulk them out to a size that feels comfortable to hold.
I understand the appeal of light laptops, I'm typing this on a Dell XPS 13 after all, but don't overlook the downsides.
I've got a 52Wh battery, but after 3 years of heavy use it only had about 32Wh left according to HWMonitor, so about the same as this laptop.
I only got about 1.5 hours of usage out of it, with all power modes set to eco and power saving. That's borderline unusable, especially if you're on the road a lot (which light laptops are meant for imo).
Not to mention the CPU being bottlenecked big time by power and thermal restrictions.
I replaced it recently, luckily the XPS is pretty easy to take apart, not a given with these tiny laptops either (looking at you, MS Surface...).
I'm still reasonably happy with this laptop, as i generally move between places where i can charge it or use it with a USB-C dock, but my next laptop won't be a thin & light anymore.
Precisely my thought.
I'll look at buying Fujitsu when the responsible execs go to the clink and they pay restitution to each and every subpostmaster harmed by their dodgy software is compensated for their losses, both financial and mental, in full, with no lawyers siphoning off their cut.
I do have an i7 laptop, not an especially light one (around 3 kg), and when I actually use all that processing power (there is a reason I bought an i7), it gets scalding hot. The battery automatically shuts down to avoid catching fire, and stuff like that.
Tiny compact laptops with beefy CPUs are like putting a 800 hp engine in a Smart Fortwo: An exercise in futility and an accident waiting to happen.
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