11-11-2019, 11:50 PM
Finally got mine, a bit late in the day so haven't been able to do a lot of what I was hoping to on the first day. First impressions:
I'll get the negative out of the way first...
I dislike the trackpad. It has a very loud click to it that reminds me of a cheap dell laptop. In fact, right after I thought that the first time I clicked it, my wife said "that sounds like the cheapo dell laptop from my last company" out loud. She heard it across the room.
The keyboard experience is, at this point, disappointing. The delays in picking up keystrokes and the general quirkiness it exhibits combined with noticeably more chassis flex than I prefer, has me typing at greatly reduced speeds. At this point, it would not be fun to stay up late coding with it or engage in an IRC flame war. That keyboard firmware update can not come soon enough.
I also have flaky sound issues I haven't dug deep into yet. It didn't work, then it suddenly worked, and now it doesn't work again. Talking built in speakers, I haven't tried headphones yet. I'll look into that more tomorrow. When it did work, the quality was just okay. I've heard far worse laptop speakers, but I've also heard far better. I don't consider the sound quality a negative, but the working/not working part is.
Okay, initial negatives out of the way, on to the good...
The processor and RAM combo are, when you set the performance to max, a bit on the surprisingly good side compared to what I was expecting. I'm not going by benchmarks on this, I'm going by how it feels when I just use it, as that's what matters most in the day to day. It doesn't feel like some budget laptop. It's not a speed demon, but it feels like a decently powered work laptop. I would strongly recommend having PBP default to the performance setting out of the box or locked at top gigahertz setting, in order to create a really good first time use experience for people. When it's on Conservative and Power Save or whatever it was defaulted to, it's ugh. When it's on performance or even better, locked at 1.99, it's nice. It's got the oomph to work out as a daily driver. I'm convinced of that now.
The biggest and most pleasant surprise so far, even though I was already expecting it to be good based on other's feedback and the shared specs... the screen really is nice. I'm used to working on retina displays, and I'm used to thinking "ugh, this is ugly" when I find myself in front of non-retina displays... this is not ugly. The viewing angles are great, the brightness range is great, the colors look good. 1080p videos look great. Playing the same 1080p videos side by side on it and my macbook pro 15 and there was not like the massive radical difference between them like there is with other monitors and laptops I've done that with. It's really above and beyond my already high expectations. I would suggest setting the default out-of-the-box text size to like a 13 point font for best first use impact. The default 10 point font is going to be too small/a bit unpleasant for most people.
So those are my first impressions of it after about an hour of playing around with it. I'm hoping to get a lot more play time with it tomorrow.
I'll get the negative out of the way first...
I dislike the trackpad. It has a very loud click to it that reminds me of a cheap dell laptop. In fact, right after I thought that the first time I clicked it, my wife said "that sounds like the cheapo dell laptop from my last company" out loud. She heard it across the room.
The keyboard experience is, at this point, disappointing. The delays in picking up keystrokes and the general quirkiness it exhibits combined with noticeably more chassis flex than I prefer, has me typing at greatly reduced speeds. At this point, it would not be fun to stay up late coding with it or engage in an IRC flame war. That keyboard firmware update can not come soon enough.
I also have flaky sound issues I haven't dug deep into yet. It didn't work, then it suddenly worked, and now it doesn't work again. Talking built in speakers, I haven't tried headphones yet. I'll look into that more tomorrow. When it did work, the quality was just okay. I've heard far worse laptop speakers, but I've also heard far better. I don't consider the sound quality a negative, but the working/not working part is.
Okay, initial negatives out of the way, on to the good...
The processor and RAM combo are, when you set the performance to max, a bit on the surprisingly good side compared to what I was expecting. I'm not going by benchmarks on this, I'm going by how it feels when I just use it, as that's what matters most in the day to day. It doesn't feel like some budget laptop. It's not a speed demon, but it feels like a decently powered work laptop. I would strongly recommend having PBP default to the performance setting out of the box or locked at top gigahertz setting, in order to create a really good first time use experience for people. When it's on Conservative and Power Save or whatever it was defaulted to, it's ugh. When it's on performance or even better, locked at 1.99, it's nice. It's got the oomph to work out as a daily driver. I'm convinced of that now.
The biggest and most pleasant surprise so far, even though I was already expecting it to be good based on other's feedback and the shared specs... the screen really is nice. I'm used to working on retina displays, and I'm used to thinking "ugh, this is ugly" when I find myself in front of non-retina displays... this is not ugly. The viewing angles are great, the brightness range is great, the colors look good. 1080p videos look great. Playing the same 1080p videos side by side on it and my macbook pro 15 and there was not like the massive radical difference between them like there is with other monitors and laptops I've done that with. It's really above and beyond my already high expectations. I would suggest setting the default out-of-the-box text size to like a 13 point font for best first use impact. The default 10 point font is going to be too small/a bit unpleasant for most people.
So those are my first impressions of it after about an hour of playing around with it. I'm hoping to get a lot more play time with it tomorrow.