what new laptop will feel the best under my fingers?

July 13, 2018 3:51 PM

my trusty, beloved Lenovo Yoga 2 is slowly giving up the ghost and I'm starting to think about a replacement. I want something exactly like it only newer, and I need your help to find it.

basically I'm looking for a laptop which meets as many of the following criteria as possible (listed roughly in descending order of importance):

- dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDown keys
- full-size arrow keys
- 16GB RAM
- big, smooth trackpad
- Linux-friendly
- 13 or 14 inch hi-DPI screen (1920x1080 might be fine, I guess, as long as it has the video hardware to drive a 2560x1440 or higher external display)
- good battery life
- SSD preferred over rotational HDDs
- not super ugly; I don't need a weird angley gaming laptop with ridiculous pointy edges and neon lights
- I'm willing to spend, I dunno, $1800

I love the size and the keyboard of my current laptop, to the point where those features are probably the most important factors in my search. The System76 Galago Pro comes close, but I've heard bad things about its battery life and the trackpad seems flimsy. I've been checking Lenovo's website (and their factory outlet) but nothing fitting my wishlist has shown up. I've spot-checked other manufacturers, but there's ten million of them and it's getting a little tiresome so I figured I'd ask the hivemind. Where might I look to get what I want?

thanks!

posted by Old Kentucky Shark to Technology (6 answers total)

We are also Yoga addicts and they all have the same excellent form and feel.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:54 PM on July 13, 2018

Response by poster: thank you both! might you have specific names or model numbers handy? All of the Yoga laptops I currently see for sale either don't have the row of nav keys down the right-hand side, or don't have normal-sized arrow keys. I might just be looking in the wrong corners of Lenovo's website though.

I know this is probably a Thing That I Should Just Deal With, and it's possible that I'll ultimately have to, but I figured I'd ask around first.
posted by Old Kentucky Shark at 7:04 PM on July 13, 2018

I think you're not going to get your cursor keys without a tenkey keyboard, and those might be hard to find in 13-14" laptops, so I suppose that might cut your search down quite a bit. That System76 is the first I've noticed that has full-size cursor keys in a tenkeyless.
posted by rhizome at 9:00 PM on July 13, 2018

Dell XPS? I've had one for quite a few years now and am impressed with how well it has aged. Not quite full size arrow-keys, although I find them easy enough to use.
posted by bigZLiLk at 11:03 PM on July 14, 2018

I did not know that this kind of keyboard existed in a small laptop but that System76 keyboard looks perfect. Please let me know if you do find a laptop that has such a keyboard that also types well and has an excellent trackpad and good battery life.

I found that several HP laptops have almost what you want. They do have the row with pgup/pgdown/home/end keys and two full size arrow keys. It's only the up/down arrow keys that are not full size. See https://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/spectrex360/overview.html#spectre-x360-13 (but there are more HP laptops with a similar keyboard). See this review for close up pictures. In that review they dislike the layout, saying it makes it harder to hit enter and backspace.

IBM does have dedicated pgup/pgdown/home/end keys on many laptops. They're not in the one row layout, but at least better than having to use function keys. Their arrow keys are not full size, but are bigger than the arrow keys on my current laptop. Their keyboard gets very good reviews. See this review for clear pictures.
posted by blub at 3:19 AM on July 18, 2018

Response by poster: update: I was able to snag a new-in-box Yoga 900, which has the exact same keyboard layout as my old daily driver.
posted by Old Kentucky Shark at 5:54 AM on December 4, 2018