nkedel

"Convertible," or if you must "2-in-1," please; you're the first person not a marketdroid who I've heard use "laplet," and the term awful

Will be interesting to see which processors those get; if they're the U-series Skylake, it shouldn't be too bad; three generation jump from Ivy Bridge should make up for most of the clock speed difference. If they get a Core M (or a Y-series i5), even with the Skylake core, I'm not sure you're going to be happy with it -- in practice, those things with Core M are going to be more than a little bit slower than your T430s, and if they have a Skylake Y-series i5 in between, it's still going to be awfully slow for a new machine.

From my end, the reduced wattage Haswell quad cores were finally fast enough I didn't buy the fastest machine which wasn't ridiculously priced, but the thought of going down to two cores is painful.

superangrypenguin

You made me LOL. My wife says I'm a marketing sucker. Guess she's right. PS - my background was in marketing which is perhaps why I'm a sucker for stupid terms like that. I'm entirely technical now....

It's been years since I've kept up with hardware (I'm purely in software now). So thanks for the information I'm eagerly awaiting the announcements!

nkedel

*lol* I've luckily never had much to do with marketing, and there are some other good terms for it.

A question coming out of marketing is whether you approve or disapprove of the "generification" (not sure if that's a real word) of "Ultrabook" -- technically, that's a very narrowly defined trademark program of Intel, but you can see how that's been used here.

One of my regrets about my current job is that I no longer really get to work with both -- the large company I am now at is too big to extend a new hire the opportunity to be a non-specialist with fingers in a lot of different pots. At my last job, even once I ditched the responsibility for having to talk to vendors (which I hated) I got to pretty much pick the specs for everything that went into our dev/qa/perf racks, and got to say "buy this" to our helpdesk guys for our developer desktops.

I'm pretty psyched for Skylake. A reasonably light machine that can take 32gb? Pretty much what every Java developer (and plenty of other sorts) needs; 16gb doesn't go very far when you need an IDE, a running copy of your app server, possibly a second app server that you're testing an integration to, and a development DB server all running on your laptop.

Even more so if you've got to run some combination of Linux + Windows between host and VM.

superangrypenguin

The term ultrabook bothers me. It' truly is stupid. Having said that, a lot of marketers ruin the marketing profession. A true marketer actually is worth their weight in gold. A product marketer in the line I'm in owns a multi million $, or a multi billion $ scorecard - they are essentially the CEO of that product - responsible for sales, marketing - all up. They own the revenue target. Now, a marketer making $40K a year who sits around going....is this ad better in blue or red? Yeah, - they ruin the term "marketer"

As far as Linux goes...all I say is this....."hey....what's...lienux?"

tmiw

Microsoft's Surface Book was announced today. Can be upgraded to have 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a nVidia GPU for $2600; base model is $1500 for 8GB/128GB and Intel graphics. Not 32GB, but is pretty powerful in its own right. Plus you can leave the GPU/secondary battery at home when you don't need them (they're in the detachable keyboard). ^

nkedel

Not clear yet whether that's actually a quad-core CPU -- Microsoft has implied that it is but not indicated actual part numbers to confirm it.

If it is, it would be a pretty good engineering achievement on Microsoft's part (or their OEM partner's) to get a quad core into a machine than thin and light -- especially given that Intel has yet to announce any reduced-wattage Broadwell or Skylake quad cores. The announced ones are all 45W or 47W, vs the reduced-wattage 35W quads available on Haswell (the i7-4710HQ/MQ and the 4712 that replaced them.)

Not much of a laptop without a keyboard, so I suspect it's more "leave it briefly at your desk/in your bag while using it briefly in tablet mode" than leaving it at home for extended lengths of time.

On the whole, I see this as a very promising machine for people who want a beefier convertible (and don't mind the weight and pricetag), or a fairly powerful ultraportable with occasional tablet use (and don't mind the pricetag.)

It's definitely going to mean the mainstream PC guys have to up their game in those spaces -- this is going to MURDER the Yoga 3 Pro and its competitors from HP and Dell -- but it's very hard to see this making much of a dent on the workstation-replacement machines that this thread started out being about.

--

In terms of workstation replacement laptops, Dell and Lenovo have both announced theirs, and Dell has a consumer model with competitive specs.

The Dell XPS 15 (2015) and Precision 5510 (aka "Precision 15 5000-series" in their newer, awful branding) look like the closest thing to an "ultrabook" with these specs; they are 15" models but with an ultra-thin bezel making for basically a 14" class chassis. Neither one is available for ordering yet (at least via the main US web site) and more official information is out on the consumer one although it's only "loose" configuration and not detailed.

I've really enjoyed the M3800 (it's slightly larger, Haswell-based predecessor) when it's not falling apart, but until I see a teardown indicating it's sturdier, I currently plan to move back to a heavier machine -- ideally, Dell will come out with a non-workstation 14" model in the Latitude line to replace the E6440 which has a quad-core option (the E6420/30 did, but it was dropped for Haswell) as I was very happy with that form factor.

If not, the Lenovo T440p was my second choice in the Haswell generation behind the M3800 and I suspect it would have worn better (although the GPU was weak for what I wanted.)

Of the new generation, Lenovo's P50 looks to be a step thinner and lighter than the W540/541 it replaces, but it's still definitely not going to be anywhere near as compact as an ultrabook, and I really hate the offset keyboard with numeric keypad most full-size 15" notebooks have.

Will also be interesting to see about the Skylake update to the Macbook Pro 15". I wouldn't want one, but they've been at least tied for the most portable machines at their power level for a long time now.

I'd imagine we'll seem some more thin-and-light quad cores announced in the next few months, although gap from the formal Skylake announcement to availability (from anyone except a couple of the gaming manufacturers) has been being really, really frustratingly long.

timfountain

Honestly I think you are looking for a unicorn. I would not, under any stretch of the imagination, call a machine with a 14" screen, discrete graphics (can you say heat?), a 47W TDP CPU and a secondary 2.5" SSD and Ultrabook. You are looking for a desktop replacement in a small form factor...

Dodge DeBoulet

Why yes, yes I am

DenverBrian

My Galaxy S5 is an early 2000's desktop replacement in a small form factor. @:-)

Dodge will get what he wants eventually - probably in '17 or '18. Of course by then he will be demanding 128GB RAM and a 4TB SSD in the package.

nkedel

Basically, you're looking for the delayed refresh of the Thinkpad T440p, assuming the new one's GPU is adequate.

It's not clear to me that the new XPS 15 will have the capability of a 2nd SSD (I think it may be mSATA or m.2 only, no 2.5"; it's too much smaller in form factor than the last one!) but the 15"-stuffed-into-a-14"-chassis form factor looks incredible.

Minus a physical keyboard of any kind, or a screen big enough to do real work on.

I suspect one of these days, though, someone is going to come out with a smartphone powerful enough to be worth just docking into to passive "laptop" style docking station (either physically, or via some short-range high speed wireless thing like WiGig) -- for more casual users, the current generation of flagship phones may already be there. (edit: its been tried already - http://amzn.to/1FSTIui - although that was a while ago and the execution sucked.)

Would also require a much more flexible OS than either of the present main smartphone OSes.

You can get 64gb of memory and 4TB between 2x SSDs on the latest workstation laptops coming out this fall. Of course, they're still ~6 lb monsters, and I think to get 2x 2.5" drives you may need to go up to the 17" models, although 3TB ought to be enough for almost everybody -- I have 2x 1TB in mine (well, nearly - one of them is 960GB, but that's within rounding error) and haven't managed to completely fill it despite 3 operating systems and two others as VMs, and the ridiculous size of games these days (plenty of them with a 25-40gb footprint on disk!)

pseudoswede

The "hinge" area of the Surface Book is very concerning, especially considering that is where you connect/disconnect.

piper28

I think two actual 2.5" drives in anything small form factored is going to be pretty tough in general, because there's just not enough room in there to do that (and you're getting more and more of them going with onboard storage so there's not even 1). But you can get some reasonable sized msata/m.2 drives these days, so paired with a single 2.5" drive it can work well. (My xps 15 is using that combo, although I'm stuff using a conventional drive for the 2.5" one, at least until 1T ssd's come down a little more than they are now.)

A dell E7460 with a processor with 4 cores would be pretty nice. I'm finding that people in my department are really liking the size of the E7450 models. Of course, I'm still expecting at any time now dell will go to an F series of latitudes. They're probably overdue for that.

nkedel

Sure -- although they top out at 1TB vs. 2TB on laptop-usable 2.5" drives.

I'm just pleased that they're down to $300-$350 this quickly; there was a long while when the prices on SSDs just would not drop.

The E7440 and E7450 are great machines... not as small as the X1 Carbon but pretty competitive with the T440s and T450s and WAY more maintainable and upgradable than Lenovo's more recent models.

I can pretty much guarantee that they won't have a quad-core 7460 -- it's too high wattage, and the expectation with that series is the ultrabook weight and battery life... but a new model with essentially the same chassis might be possible.

My bet would be on reintroducing the quad core option for the slightly chunkier 6460 (or whatever replaces that model) if they do a 14" quad core at all; more in fitting with their older models, and with the Lenovo T440p (and hopefully T460p, if Lenovo doesn't also do some big renaming for Skylake.)

More likely, they're going to be pushing people to the 15" models as they did with Haswell (and probably to the Precisions at that -- the E6540 seemed to pretty much disappear from their marketing when it's clone, the Precision M2800, came out.)

They've dropped letter prefixes on everything else, and I expect to see them do that with this generation. Even back to the E7440, the more public branding was "Latitude 14 7000-series" (and ditto for the E7450) and I expect the 7460 to just be that.

Lot of speculation on the F-series even for Broadwell, but given the potential negative associations (unless it's a Ford truck!) I can see why they're likely skipping it.

above.the.clouds

Explain? How can you criticize something before you even see it in a store?

tmiw

Speaking of the hinge, one thing that bugs me about it is that it doesn't allow the laptop to fully close. I'm not sure how big of a problem that will be in real world use though.