Acer and Asus unveil some of the world's heaviest laptops ... and some of its lightest It was press day one at the annual consumer electronics megafest, IFA, in Berlin, when PC vendors Acer and Asus unveiled their latest hardware, from impossibly light and fast laptops to heavyweight monsters. The way it works at IFA is that two press days run ahead of the main event itself, which is Europe's largest consumer …
I've rarely seen a laptop on a lap. However most fry themselves due to bottom vents instead of edge vents if sat on a cushion, quilt, blanket, chair, settee etc. My ancient Dell i8200 had only side vents. Every netbook I've ever had could only be used on a tray or desk or would quickly overheat.
My recent Lenovo E460 can only be used on a hard surface. The stupidity of thin and ultra thin. I put a slim box under the screen end to tilt the keyboard to a better angle.
Appearance on all electronics products seems to be more important than ergonomics. A wedge with inlet, outlet and removable battery at the rear would make more sense. I was appalled to discover the E460 was the first laptop in the family with "built in" battery and no rear connectors. So as to have "thin".
Maybe I'm one of those few who do use a laptop on my lap. Then again, mine has side vents and I'm not running all the cores at max power, so no burning here. There are many times when I want to use a computer and there's no convenient surface around, such as in a train/car, auditorium without the folding tables, or house with extended family present so all furniture is being monopolized. I figured lots of people did that. Maybe it's not as common as I thought.
Yes, I do agree sparse use of laptops on laps is due to vents underneath.
The "desktops" were dying 12 years ago. A company I worked for then only bought laptops or rack mount "pizza" style unless you had some specialist application that needed a PCI or PCIe card (sometimes 4 x screen graphics not things on USB).
Obviously some gamers not into consoles kept buying desktops. All in ones are a ripoff. All the disadvantages of desktops and laptops without a built in UPS or portability. A laptop pretending to be a desktop at excessive price. Better to buy reading glasses and use a 15" laptop than a same resolution 17" or 19" All in One.
Writing this using an Acer Cloudbook which uses an Intel N3060 -- no fan at all, passive cooling -- no user maintainable parts at all in the box. Cheap, cool (pun intended!), recommended for anyone wanting a cheap, light, portable laptop. The only drawback might be that it will probably struggle with Windows 10.
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.....but no frying of user body parts!
That's why (at least in us) most are sold as notebooks and not laptops; there were a few lawsuits about people usoing laptops on top of their lap... after some ran so hot they risked burning peoples legs (and umm...lap... apparently some lucky person got like 2nd degree nut burns, supposedly with pants on) the vendors here switched their terminology unless they knew it could keep it's cool.
And... creative professional or not, $5000+ is crazy for a notebook computer.
"Writing this using an Acer Cloudbook which uses an Intel N3060 -- no fan at all, passive cooling -- no user maintainable parts at all in the box. Cheap, cool (pun intended!), recommended for anyone wanting a cheap, light, portable laptop."
I can second that. I had a Acer Chromebook 13 with Tegra K1 (quad core 2.2ghz arm (and a fifth 1ghs low power core), and roughly GTX670 GPU ), got Ubuntu onto an SDCard, even got the nvidia driver going including CUDA. 18 hour battery life.
There's something to be said about a sub-10W TDP setup (the N3060 is 6W TDP), no fan needed, just a little heat spreader. The chromebook would maybe heat up 4 or 5 degrees if I had it running all 4 cores at full load. Nice and light, and either a light battery with decent battery life, or "normal" sized battery adding a little weight but ridiculous battery life.
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