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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life
TZubiri wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
Modern software regularly takes like 1 second to load anyways.
200ms is the minimum human reaction time, so adding 100ms would only
add like 50% to the REPL user interaction. Something like 10Hz might be
quite usable while minimally contributing to lag.
The idea of having a 60Hz screen is nice, but in practice it turns out
that display refresh rate is not the bottleneck for most software.
youknownothing wrote 9 hours 11 min ago:
I'm guessing that for this to work you need to be able to selectively
refresh parts of the screen at different rates? a 1Hz refresh rate
would be rubbish just to follow the mouse cursor, so at least that part
of the screen needs to refresh faster. However, it does make sense for
the parts of the screen that are mostly static. Looking at my screen as
I type this, the only part that needs a high-refresh rate is the
text-box where I'm typing (I can type several keys per second so I
wouldn't want a refresh rate of 1 Hz). However, the rest of the screen
is not changing at all so a slow refresh is perfectly fine.
elif wrote 9 hours 4 min ago:
You're not moving your mouse 100% of the time. Probably less than 25%
of the time. Probably using your keyboard less than 25% of the time.
It doesn't need to degrade experience OR selectively refresh part of
the screen (which it certainly doesn't).
KolibriFly wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
Sure dropping toward 1Hz could be huge. But the moment you scroll,
watch video, or even have subtle UI animations, you're back in higher
refresh territory
cromka wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
How is this a but? This is exactly what you want: the screen
refreshes only when a new content appears or once a second.
jrm4 wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
Still waiting on e-ink laptops. This just seems like a no-brainer.
KolibriFly wrote 11 hours 31 min ago:
What these variable refresh panels are trying to do is kind of the
"best of both worlds"
Kaibeezy wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
Horrid website: forced cookies, invisible adverts (Mamma Mia, anyone?),
and that thing where itâs a page of garbage links when you go back. I
will never click a PC World URL again.
etothet wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
Itâs truly unusable. What a mess the web has become.
emil-lp wrote 14 hours 37 min ago:
Just activate Reader Mode immediately.
anotheryou wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
> A 1Hz panel is almost, but not quite, on the level of an e-ink panel,
which isnât the prettiest to look at.
level of what? Power consumption? dude e-ink takes 0 power between
refreshs.
And e-ink is pretty?
riobard wrote 13 hours 33 min ago:
It just proved the author knows nothing about either technology.
purpleidea wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
What's the chance this will even work on Linux with GNOME?
herodoturtle wrote 19 hours 15 min ago:
Tried to open this page on my mobile, good grief the changing advert
spam overload kills the reading experience.
lpcvoid wrote 18 hours 16 min ago:
Firefox Android + ublock origin. There's ads on the internet?
Wouldn't know.
cheeze wrote 16 hours 48 min ago:
Very weird to see people on hackernews of all places complain about
ads on the internet. We solved this like 15 years ago.
herodoturtle wrote 13 hours 16 min ago:
Hacker news attracts all sorts of curious people, including
luddites like myself! ^_^
bfivyvysj wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
Make a new phone with this please.
3836293648 wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
The real unanswered question is how much of this is the panel itself
and how much is baked into Windows.
Saving battery is nice, but I'm not leaving Linux for that misery any
time soon
sciencesama wrote 1 day ago:
imagine what it will do to neo !
jerryslm wrote 1 day ago:
Today I learned, laptop comes with backlit vs edgelit panel. And, they
have different energy consumption.
There are also mini LED laptop for creative work. Few more things to
check before buying new laptop.
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
I wouldn't get a mini LED laptop for creative work. We have a mini
LED TV, and manufacturers need to choose one of these two problems
because of physical limitations:
- The LEDs for a mostly dark region with a point source are too
bright so the point source is the correct brightness. Benchmark
sites call this "blooming" and ding displays for it, so new ones pick
the other problem:
- The LEDs for mostly dark regions with a point source are too dim so
the black pixels don't appear gray. This means that white on black
text (like linux terminals) render strangely, with the left part of
the line much brighter than the right (since it is next to the "$ ls"
and "$" of the surrounding lines). Also, it means that white mouse
pointers on black backgrounds render as dark gray.
For creative work, I'd pick pretty much any other monitor technology
(with high color gamut, of course) over mini LED. However mini-LED
is great if you have a TV that is in direct sunlight, since it can
blast watts at the brightest parts of the screen without overheating.
dizzy9 wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps it can do 50Hz, which may be beneficial for emulating PAL
systems.
Dwedit wrote 23 hours 37 min ago:
You can use CRU (custom resolution utility) to add 50Hz to most
screens.
whalesalad wrote 1 day ago:
Ostensibly any display capable of VRR should be able to operate at
any range.
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
You don't need VRR for this, but there are some step functions of
usefulness:
24Hz - now you can correctly play movies.
30Hz - NTSC (deinterlaced) including TV shows + video game
emulators.
50Hz - (24 * 2 = 50 in Hollywood. Go look it up!) Now you can
correctly play PAL and movies.
120Hz - Can play frame-accurate movies and NTSC (interlaced or
not). Screw Europe because the judder is basically unnoticeable at
120Hz.
144Hz - Can play movies + pwn n00bs or something.
150Hz - Unobtanium but would play NTSC (deinterlaced), PAL and
movies with frame level accuracy.
240Hz - Not sure why this is a thing, TBH. (300 would make
sense...)
martijnvds wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
240 = 2 x 120, or 4 x 60 (or 8 x 30)
londons_explore wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone who has accidentally snapped the controller off a working LCD
can tell you that the pixel capacitance keeps the colours approximately
correct for about 10 seconds before it all becomes a murky shadowy
mess...
So it makes sense you could cut the refresh time down to a second to
save power...
Although one wonders if it's worth it when the backlight uses far more
power than the control electronics...
ErneX wrote 1 day ago:
These are self emissive pixels.
ErneX wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
Edit: apparently not? Article says OLED with this tech will come in
2027, seems this panel itâs LCD
iAMkenough wrote 5 hours 27 min ago:
Article also says "LGâs panel also uses LED technology"
dlcarrier wrote 1 day ago:
It's for OLED screens, so there's no backlight, but also no
persistence.
mnw21cam wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
It's an LCD display.
iAMkenough wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
Are you sure? Article says:
> A 1Hz panel is almost, but not quite, on the level of an e-ink
panel, which isnât the prettiest to look at. LGâs panel also
uses LED technology, the mainstream panel technology thatâs
being overtaken at the high end by OLED panels with essentially
perfect contrast.
qnleigh wrote 1 day ago:
> That will help save enormous amounts of power: up to 48 percent on a
single charge,
Why does refresh rate have such a large impact on power consumption? I
understand that the control electronics are 60x more active at 60 Hz
than 1 Hz, but shouldn't the light emission itself be the dominant
source of power consumption by far?
veqq wrote 6 hours 22 min ago:
Really disappointing to only learn this after a decade, but on Linux
changing from 60hz to 40hz decreased my power draw by 40% in the last
hour since reading this comment.
elif wrote 9 hours 3 min ago:
Your GPU rendering 1 frame vs your GPU rendering 60 frames.
kinematikk wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
In cases where 1hz mode is feasable the gpu doesn't render 60 fps
anyways
mmcnl wrote 10 hours 4 min ago:
It doesn't. They take extreme use cases such as watching video until
the battery depletes at maximum brightness where 90% of power
consumption is the display. But in realistic use cases the fraction
of power draw consumed by the display is much smaller when the CPU is
actually doing things.
kjkjadksj wrote 9 hours 49 min ago:
For whatever reason I keep catching my macbook on max brightness.
Maybe not an unrealistic test.
alok-g wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
I used to be a display architect about 15 years back (for Qualcomm
mirasol, et al), so my knowledge of the specifics / numbers is
outdated. Sharing what I know.
High pixel density displays have disproportionately higher display
refresh power (not just proportional to the total number of pixels as
the column lines capacitances need to be driven again for writing
each row of pixels). This was an important concern as high pixel
densities were coming along.
Display needs fast refreshing not just because pixel would lose
charge, but because the a refresh can be visible or result in
flicker. Some pixels tech require flipping polarity on each refresh
but the curves are not exactly symmetric between polarities, and
further, this can vary across the panel. A fast enough refresh hides
the mismatch.
mmooss wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
> the column lines capacitances need to be driven again for writing
each row of pixels
Not my field so please forgive a possibly obvious question: That
seems true regardless of the pixel count (?), so for that process
why wouldn't power also be proportional to the pixel count?
I notice I'm saying 'pixel count' and you are saying 'pixel
density'; does it have something to do with their proximity to each
other?
alok-g wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
Total column line capacitance is impacted by the number of pixels
hanging onto it as each transistor (going to the pixel
capacitance) adds some parasitic capacitance of its own. Hope
that answers your question. You are right in the sense that a
part of the total column capacitance would depend on just the
length and width of it, irrespective of the number of pixels
hanging onto it.
I had back then developed what was perhaps the most sophisticated
system-level model for display power, including refresh,
illumination, etc., and it included all those terms for
capacitance, a simplified transistor model, pixel model, etc.
I did not carefully distinguish pixel density vs. pixel count
while writing my previous comments here, just to keep it simple.
You can perhaps imagine that increasing display size without
changing pixel count can lead to higher active pixel area
percentage, which in turn would lead to better light
generation/transmission/reflection efficiency. There are
multiple initially counter-intuitive couplings like that. So it
ultimately comes down to mathematical modeling, and the scaling
laws / derivatives depend on the actual numbers chosen.
Addition:
Another important point -- Column line capacitances do not
necessarily need full refresh going from one row of the pixels to
the next, as the image would typically have vertical
correlations. Not mentioning this is another simplification I
made in my previous comments. My detailed power model included
this as well -- so it could calculate energy spent for writing a
specific image, a random image, a statistically typical image,
etc.
mmooss wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
Thanks. It's always interesting what the actual issues and
engineering look like.
KolibriFly wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
What's interesting about these newer 1Hz claims is that they're
basically trying to sidestep the exact problems you mention
alok-g wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
Correct.
I myself have been privy to similar R&D going on for more than a
decade.
thisislife2 wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
Since you are knowledgable about this, do you have any idea what
happened to Mirasol technology? I was fascinated by those colour
e-paper like displays, and disappointed when plans to manufacture
it was shelved. Then I learnt Apple purchased it but it looks more
like a patent padding purchase than for tech development as nothing
has come out of it form Apple too. Is it in some way still being
developed or parts of its research tech being used in display
development?
alok-g wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
Being a key technology architect for it (not the core inventor),
I know all about it, and then some more!
I cannot however talk publicly about it. :-(
It has been a disappointment for me as well. I had worked on it
for nearly eight years. The idea was so interesting--using
thin-film interference for creating images is akin to shaping
Newton's rings into arbitrary images, something which even Newton
would not have imagined! The demos and comparisons we had shown
to various industry leaders and sometimes publicly were often
instantly compelling. The people/engineers in the team were
mostly the best I have ever worked with, and with whom I still
maintain a great connection. But unfortunately, there were
problems (not saying how much tech how much people) that were
recognized by some but never got (timely) addressed. And a tech
like it does not exist till date.
I do not think anything on it is being developed further.
The earliest of the patents would have expired by now.
Liquavista, Pixtronics, etc., have been alternative display
technologies that also ultimately didn't make the impact desired,
AFAIK.
Meanwhile, LCDs developed high pixel densities (which led to
pressures on mirasol tech too), Plasma got sidelined. EInk
displays have since then made good progress, though, in my
opinion, are still far from colors and speeds that mirasol had.
And of course, OLED, Quantum dots, ...
saltcured wrote 7 hours 50 min ago:
My fantasy display would be some kind of reflective-mode
display that can passively show static images like e-ink, have
partial updates like MIP LCD in wearables, response times like
modern LCD and AMOLED, and "super-real" contrast/gain.
I.e. actually do wavelength conversion to not just reflect a
narrow-pass filtered version of the ambient light, but convert
that broad spectrum energy into the desired visuals, so it
isn't always inherently dimmer than the environment. I can only
imagine this being either:
1. some wild materials science stuff that manages interference
2. some wild materials science stuff that controls multi-photon
fluorescence
3. some wild materials science stuff to fuse photoelectric and
electroemissive functions in the same panel. i.e. not really
passive but extremely low loss active system to double-convert
the ambient light that can follow the power curve of available
light
alok-g wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
>> My fantasy display would be some kind of reflective-mode
display that can passively show static images like e-ink,
have partial updates like MIP LCD in wearables, response
times like modern LCD and AMOLED, and "super-real"
contrast/gain.
What about cost? :-) It is an important factor too outside
of the fantasy world and can kill new display technologies.
The latter often suffer from yield issues (dead pixels, etc.)
during early phases of R&D which can make initial costs be
still higher as compared to already matured technologies.
>> I.e. actually do wavelength conversion to not just reflect
a narrow-pass filtered version of the ambient light, but
convert that broad spectrum energy into the desired visuals
Reflecting filtered version of the ambient light, if done
efficiently, brings the display to as bright as other
natural/common objects around. So it should be good enough
for most purposes, even in a somewhat darker ambient with
eyes adjusted.
It would not however be attention-grabbing by being brighter
than those surrounding objects. So many users, often used to
seeing brighter emissive displays, still do not pick those as
a preference.
>> I can only imagine this being either:
>> ...
Another way to make it look brighter is to reflect more light
towards the users/eyes while capturing it from broader
directions. This would compromise on viewing angle (unless
more fantasy tech is brought in), but I think this in itself
take the display to wow levels.
saltcured wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
Well, the reflectivity of color MIP LCD is not very
satisfactory. It is barely adequate, even for people like
me who are fans. This is both because of the narrow-band
RGB filtering and the inherent losses of the
polarization-based switching method. Even the "white" state
is discarding most polarizations of the ambient light, and
then the darker colors are even blocking that.
My fantasy is having the reflectivity be at least as good
as good white paper, and with deep contrast too.
It also needs to be brighter in practice than normal
objects because, no matter what, it will have to overcome
some glare from whatever protective glass and touch sensing
layers there are over the actual display.
alok-g wrote 4 hours 13 min ago:
>> Well, the reflectivity of color MIP LCD is not very
satisfactory. It is barely adequate, even for people like
me who are fans. This is both because of the narrow-band
RGB filtering and the inherent losses of the
polarization-based switching method. Even the "white"
state is discarding most polarizations of the ambient
light, and then the darker colors are even blocking that.
Yes, that's right. A typical color LCD transmits only
about 5-10% of the light for white because of all those
factors.
>> My fantasy is having the reflectivity be at least as
good as good white paper, and with deep contrast too.
That exactly was our benchmark for mirasol development.
We used to measure best-in-class color prints for color
gamut, brightness, contrast, etc.
mirasol did not use polarizers or RGB filters. An
advanced architecture (that I was leading) also avoided
RGB subpixels, something which very few alternative
technologies can do [1].
>> It also needs to be brighter in practice than normal
objects because, no matter what, it will have to overcome
some glare from whatever protective glass and touch
sensing layers there are over the actual display.
Yes.
Integrated touch-sensing helps significantly though.
There are also optical means that can nearly get rid of
glare, if cost were not an issue. I have seen demo
coatings that make the glass practically disappear -- we
would repeatedly walk into it if it were used on a glass
door.
-------
[1] Liquavista had Cyan-Magenta-Yellow subpixels
vertically stacked. A new Eink architecture uses multiple
colored pigments within the same cell but now needs
sophisticated mechanisms to control them independently.
Veedrac wrote 22 hours 47 min ago:
I think the idea is that in an always-on display mode, most of the
screen is black and the rest is dim, so circuitry power budget
becomes a much larger fraction of overhead.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
Ohh like property tax on a vacant building
jdub wrote 1 day ago:
Before OLED (and similar), most displays were lit with LEDs (behind
or around the screen, through a diffuser, then through liquid
crystals) which was indeed the dominant power draw... like 90% or so!
But the article is about an OLED display, so the pixels themselves
are emitting light.
duskdozer wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
I just wish "we" wouldn't have discarded the option to use pure
black for dark modes in favor of a seemingly ever-brightening
blue-grey...
perching_aix wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
> But the article is about an OLED display
The article is about an LCD display, actually.
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
This is an OLED display, so I don't think the control electronics are
actually any less active. (They would be for LCD, which is where
most of these low-refresh-rate optimizations make sense.)
The connection between the GPU and the display has been run length
encoded (or better) since forever, since that reduces the amount of
energy used to send the next frame to the display controller. Maybe
by "1Hz" they mean they also only send diffs between frames? That'd
be a bigger win than "1Hz" for most use cases.
But, to answer your question, the light emission and computation of
the frames (which can be skipped for idle screen regions, regardless
of frame rate) should dwarf the transmission cost of sending the
frame from the GPU to the panel.
The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. (The next step
in my analysis would involve computing the wattage requirements of
the CPU, GPU and light emission, then comparing that to the KWh of
the laptop battery + advertised battery life.
topspin wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
> This is an OLED display
The LG press release states that it's LCD/TFT.
URI [1]: https://news.lgdisplay.com/en/2026/03/lg-display-becomes-w...
thelastgallon wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
Not OLED.
> LG Display is also preparing to begin mass production of a 1Hz
OLED panel incorporating the same technology in 2027.
karlgkk wrote 1 day ago:
> The more I think about this, the less sense it makes
And yet, itâs the fundamental technology enabling always on phone
and smartwatch displays
The intent of this is to reduce the time that the CPU, GPU, and
display controller is in an active state (as well as small
reductions in power of components in between those stages).
DoctorOetker wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
for small screen sizes and low information density displays, like
a watch that updates every second this makes a lot of sense
it would make a lot of sense in situations where the average
light generating energy is substantially smaller:
pretend you are a single pixel on a screen (laptop, TV) which
emits photons in a large cone of steradians, of which a viewer's
pupil makes up a tiny pencil ray; 99.99% of the light just misses
an observer's pupils. in this case this technology seems to offer
few benefits, since the energy consumed by the link (generating a
clock and transmitting data over wires) is dwarfed by the energy
consumed in generating all this light (which mostly misses human
eye pupils)!
Now consider smart glasses / HUD's; the display designer knows
the approximate position of the viewer's eyes. The optical train
can be designed so that a significantly larger fraction of
generated photons arrive on the retina. Indeed XReal or NReal's
line of smart glasses consume about 0.5 W! In such a scenario the
links energy consumption becomes a sizable proportion of the
energy consumption; hence having a low energy state that still
presents content but updates less frequently makes sense.
One would have expected smart glasses to already outcompete
smartphones and laptops, just by prolonged battery life, or
conversely, splitting the difference in energy saved, one could
keep half of the energy saved (doubling battery life) while
allocating the other half of the energy for more intensive
calculations (GPU, CPU etc.).
blovescoffee wrote 1 day ago:
There's definitely a few reasons but one of them is that you have to
ask the GPU to do ~60x less work when you render 60x less frames
WhyNotHugo wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
PSR (panel self-refresh) lets you send a single frame from software
and tell the display to keep using that.
You donât need to render 60 times the same frame in software just
to keep that visible on screen.
TeMPOraL wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
How often is that used? Is there a way to check?
With the amount of bullshit animations all OSes come with these
days, enabled by default, and most applications being webapp with
their own secondary layer of animations, and with the typical
developer's near-zero familiarity with how floating point numbers
behave, I imagine there's nearly always some animation somewhere,
almost but not quite eased to a stop, that's making subtle color
changes across some chunk of the screen - not enough to notice,
enough to change some pixel values several times per second.
I wonder what existing mitigations are at play to prevent
redisplay churn? It probably wouldn't matter on Windows today,
but will matter with those low-refresh-rate screens.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 9 hours 31 min ago:
Android has a debug tool that flashes colors when any composed
layer changes. It's probably an easy optimization for them to
not re-render when nothing changes.
throwaway2037 wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
Normally, your posts are very coherent, but this one flies on
the rails. (Half joking: Did someone hack your account!?) I
don't understand your rant here:
> With the amount of bullshit animations all OSes come with
these days, enabled by default, and most applications being
webapp with their own secondary layer of animations, and with
the typical developer's near-zero familiarity with how floating
point numbers behave
I use KDE/GNU/Linux, and I don't see a lot of unnecessary
animations. Even at work where I use Win11, it seems fine.
"[M]ost applications being webapp": This is a pretty wild
claim. Again, I don't think any apps that I use on Linux are
webapps, and most at work (on Win11) are not.
fidotron wrote 10 hours 59 min ago:
Seriously? What is _this_ comment? TeMPOraL makes perfect
sense.
tomrod wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
LLMs learned that users have post histories? /s
Filligree wrote 1 day ago:
Why? Surely copying the same pixels out sixty times doesn't take
that much power?
topspin wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
The PCWorld story is trash and completely omits the key point of
the new display technology, which is right in the name: "Oxide."
LG has a new low-leakage thin-film transistor[1] for the display
backplane.
Simply, this means each pixel can hold its state longer between
refreshes. So, the panel can safely drop its refresh rate to 1Hz
on static content without losing the image.
Yes, even "copying the same pixels" costs substantial power.
There are millions of pixels with many bits each. The frame
buffer has to be clocked, data latched onto buses, SERDES'ed over
high-speed links to the panel drivers, and used to drive the
pixels, all while making heat fighting reactance and resistance
of various conductors. Dropping the entire chain to 1Hz is
meaningful power savings.
URI [1]: https://news.lgdisplay.com/en/2026/03/lg-display-becomes...
joecool1029 wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
So it's a Sharp MIP scaled up?
URI [1]: https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/
topspin wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
Sharp MIP makes every pixel an SRAM bit: near-zero current
and no refresh necessary. The full color moral equivalent of
Sharp MIP would be 3 DACs per pixel. TFT (Ã la LG Oxide) is
closer to DRAM, except the charge level isn't just high/low.
So, no, there is a meaningful difference in the nature of the
circuits.
snthpy wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
Thanks. Great explanation.
hacker_88 wrote 1 day ago:
Copying , Draw() is called 60 times a second .
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
It isn't for any reasonable UI stack. For instance, the
xdamage X11 extension for this was released over 20 years ago.
I doubt it was the first.
pwg wrote 10 hours 26 min ago:
It was, but xdamage is part of the composting side of the
final bitmap image generation, before that final bitmap is
clocked out to the display.
The frame buffer, at least the portion of the GPU responsible
for reading the frame buffer and shipping the contents out
over the port to the display, the communications cable to the
display screen itself, and the display screen were still
reading, transmitting, and refreshing every pixel of the
display at 60hz (or more).
This LG display tech. claims to be able to turn that last
portion's speed down to a 1Hz rate from whatever it usually
is running at.
nottorp wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
You forget that all modern UI toolkits brag about who has the
highest frame rate, instead of updating only what's changed
and only when it changes.
vlovich123 wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
Xdamage isnât a thing if youâre using a compositor for
what itâs worth. Itâs more expensive to try to
incrementally render than to just render the entire scene
(for a GPU anyway).
And regardless, the HW path still involves copying the entire
frame buffer - itâs literally in the name.
delusional wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
Thats not true. I wrote a compositor based on xcompmgr, and
there damage was widely used. It's true that it's basically
pointless to do damage tracking for the final pass on gl,
but damage was still useful to figure out which windows
required new blurs and updated glows.
groundzeros2015 wrote 23 hours 37 min ago:
Whatâs your metal model of what happens when a dirty region
is updated and now we need to get that buffer on the display?
giancarlostoro wrote 1 day ago:
At the software level yes, but it seems nobody has taken the
time to do this at the hardware level as well. This is LG's
stab at it.
y1n0 wrote 23 hours 20 min ago:
Apple has been doing this since they started having
'always-on' displays.
TeMPOraL wrote 14 hours 31 min ago:
So has Samsung, but we're talking mobile devices with
OLED displays, which is an entirely different universe
both hardware and software-wise.
perching_aix wrote 1 day ago:
I interpreted that bit as E2E system uptime being up by 48%. Sounds
more plausible to me, as there'd fewer video frames that would need
to be produced and pushed out.
nmstoker wrote 1 day ago:
Sorry, might be obvious to some, but is that rate applied to the whole
screen or can certain parts be limited to 1Hz whilst others are at a
higher rate?
The ability to vary it seems like it would be valuable as there are
significant portions of a screen that remain fairly static for longer
periods but equally there are sections that would need to change more
often and would thus mess with the ability to stick to a low rate if
it's a whole screen all-or-nothing scenario.
KolibriFly wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
Today it's mostly "all-or-nothing" at the panel level, but under the
hood there's already a lot of cleverness trying to approximate the
behavior you're describing
londons_explore wrote 1 day ago:
With current LCD controllers but new drivers/firmware you could
selectively refresh horizontal stripes of the screen at different
rates if you wanted to.
I don't think you could divide vertically though.
Don't think anyone has done this yet. You could be the first.
alok-g wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
I believe E-ink displays do this for faster updates for touch
interactivity. Updatimg the whole display as the user writes on
the touch screen would otherwise be too slow for Eink.
bracketfocus wrote 1 day ago:
From what I understand, the laptop will reduce the refresh rate (of
the entire display) to as low as 1Hz if what is being displayed
effectively âallowsâ it.
For example:
- reading an article with intermittent scrolling
- typing with periodic breaks
snailmailman wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
I think windows has a feature built in on some adaptive refresh
rate displays to dynamically shift the frame rate down (to 30, on
my screen) or up to the cap, depending on whatâs actually
happening.
I remember playing with it a bit, and it would dynamically change
to a high refresh rate as you moved the mouse, and then drop down
as soon as the mouse cursor stopped moving.
I had issues with it sometimes being lower refresh rate even when
there was motion on screen, so the frame rate swings were
unfortunately noticeable. Motion would get smoother for all content
whenever the mouse moved.
1hz is drastically fewer refreshes. I hope they have the âis this
content staticâ measurement actually worked out to a degree where
itâs not noticeable.
pier25 wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
Who âdecidesâ the frame rate? Does the gpu keep sending data
and the monitor checks to determine when pixels change?
moffkalast wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
Probably the display board, anything else would be subject to OS
and GPU driver support and it would never work anywhere.
gowld wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
Articles have animated ads, though.
pwg wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
Run uBlock Origin and you will have few (and in most cases, none)
animated ads.
goodpoint wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
not with an adblocker
f1shy wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
It would help making the ad less distracting, in some cases.
themafia wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
Ad supported content industry: "Gee, we just can't figure out
why anyone would use an ad blocker!"
msephton wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
On such an article it would not go down to 1Hz. It's checking if
the image is changing or not.
rmunn wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
Which would make me want the refresh rate to be
user-configurable. I would not mind at all if the 1 Hz refresh
rate caused parts of the page I don't care about, such as
animated ads to stutter and become unwatchable. If given the
choice between stuttering ads but longer battery life, or
smoothly-animated ads with shorter battery life, I'd choose the
unwatchable ads every time.
Ideally, I would be able to bind a keyboard shortcut to the
refresh-rate switch, so that the software doesn't have to
figure out that now I'm on Youtube so I actually want the
higher refresh rate, but now I'm on a mostly-text page so I
want the refresh rate to go back down to 1 Hz. If I can control
that with a simple Fn+F11 combination or something, that would
be the ideal situation.
Not that any laptop manufacturers are likely to see this
comment... but you never know.
Mogzol wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
I assume this will just be using Window's dynamic refresh
rate feature, which you can turn on and off in the display
settings, and when it's off you can set the refresh rate
manually. I guess the question is whether they will let you
set it as low as 1hz manually though.
nmstoker wrote 1 day ago:
Got it. Thanks!
ricardobeat wrote 1 day ago:
Apple introduced variable refresh rate back in 2015. Thatâs over a
decade ago, Iâm sure thereâs some new tech involved here, but quite
the omission.
hu3 wrote 19 hours 56 min ago:
Apple might have convinced some gullible customers that this was
something new.
But to the rest of the world variable refresh rate existed for years
by then. As is with most Apple "inventions".
In this case the patent goes back to 1982:
URI [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4511892A/en
thelastgallon wrote 23 hours 53 min ago:
Apple doesn't manufacture panels, they buy from others. I wonder how
Apple can claim they have this feature.
dlcarrier wrote 1 day ago:
And if Apple introduced it a decade ago, then it's at least five
years older than that.
What's new here is the 1 Hz minimum.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Stroke CRT displays been able to do variable refresh rate since like
the 80s, quite the omission there buddy.
stack_framer wrote 1 day ago:
I once had an external monitor with a maximum refresh rate of 30 Hz,
and mouse movements were noticeably sluggish. It was part of a
multi-monitor setup, so it was very obvious as I moved the mouse
between monitors.
I'm not sure if this LG display will have the same issue, but I won't
be an early adopter.
dghlsakjg wrote 1 day ago:
Read the article.
The display has a refresh rate of 120hz when needed. The low refresh
rate is for battery savings when there is a static image.
Variable refresh rate for power savings is a feature that other
manufacturers already have (apple for one). So you might already be
an early adopter.
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
So if a pixel is not refreshed, it doesn't use any power?
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
For sample-and-hold panel technologies like LCD and OLED, refresh is
about updating the pixel state (color). There is a process that takes
place for that even when the pixel data remains unchanged between
frames. However, the pixels still need to emit light between
refreshes, which for LCD is a backlight but for OLED are the pixel
themselves. The light emission is often regulated using PWM at a
higher frequency than the refresh rate. PWM frequency affects power
consumption as well. Higher PWM frequency is better for the eyes, but
also consumes more power.
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
OLED is fundamentally not sample and hold, because it is using PWM,
right?
Ignoring switching costs, keeping a sample-and-hold LED at 0%, 50%
and 100% brightness all cost zero energy. For an OLED, the costs
are closer to linear in the duty cycle (again, ignoring switching
costs, but those are happening much faster than the framerate for
OLED, right?)
(Also, according to another comment, the panel manufacturer says
this is TFT, not OLED, which makes a lot more sense.)
DoctorOetker wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
I don't believe LED-pixel displays use PWM. I would expect them
to use bit planes: for each pixel transform the gamma-compressed
intensity to the linear photon-proportional domain. Represent the
linear intensity as a binary number. Start with the most
significant bit, and all pixels with that bit get a current
pulse, then for the next bitplane all the pixels having the 2nd
bit set are turned on with half that current for the same
duration, each progressive bitplane sending half as much current
per pixel. After the least significant bitplane has been lit each
pixel location has emitted a total number of photons proportional
to what was requested in the linear domain.
amelius wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
So for an 8bit color display you have 24 lines of various
currents going across each row (or column) of pixels?
DoctorOetker wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
There are more efficient ways of achieving this, but you
certainly don't need a separate conductor for each bitplane,
but obviously you need separate strings for each color
channel.
So to ignore the colorwise overhead lets pretend we just have
a single color channel.
You could even arrange all LED's in series and short out
(bypass with mosfet) those LED's that should NOT be lit.
Then you can just energize an inductor until the appropriate
current is reached and then flash a certain amount of charge
through the LED string.
One can choose between reusing the same inductor for the
different currents or having separate inductors each for
their own current levels.
It would require bypass transistors for each LED, but there
are support electronics for each LCD pixel too, as a
comparison.
The 24-bit color display (3x8) would actually result in many
more bit planes after gamma deflating to the linear photon
proportional domain.
layer8 wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
PWM still counts as sample-and-hold, because it sustains the
brightness throughout the duration of a frame, resulting in
significant motion blur. The converse are impulse-driven displays
like CRT and plasma.
LED backlights using PWM likewise donât change the
sample-and-hold nature of LCD panels.
My understanding is that PWM switching costs arenât negligible,
and that this contributes to why PWM frequencies are often fairly
low.
perching_aix wrote 1 day ago:
It does, especially with LCDs like this, where the backlight is the
primary driver of the power consumption of the panel.
I'm not even sure how they got their 48% figure. Sounds like a
whole-system measurement, maybe that's the trick.
tosti wrote 1 day ago:
E-ink displays can do this. That's why they're used in ereaders.
Display in TFA OTOH emits light, so definately not.
etchalon wrote 1 day ago:
If the screen is only refreshing once per second, less energy is used
to refresh the screen. The pixel uses the same amount of power.
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
I was not under the impression that sending some control signals
took that much power.
etchalon wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
Maybe not, but doing it once a second instead of 60 times a
second is a pretty massive savings.
tokai wrote 1 day ago:
You have to compute the new frame too. I would assume that is
were most of the power use is.
MBCook wrote 1 day ago:
As soon as I saw this announced, I wondered if this is why we havenât
seen OLED MacBook Pro yet.
Apple already uses similar tech on the phones and watches.
serious_angel wrote 1 day ago:
> LGâs press release leaves several questions unanswered, including
the source of the âOxideâ name...
> Source: [1] [2026-03-23]
---
> HKC has announced a new laptop display panel that supports adaptive
refresh across a 1 to 60Hz range, including a 1Hz mode for static
content. HKC says the panel uses an Oxide (metal-oxide TFT) backplane
and its low leakage characteristics to keep the image stable even at
1Hz.
> Source: [2] [2025-12-29]
---
> History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little
every time we retell it. ~ Hilary Mantel
URI [1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3096432
URI [2]: https://videocardz.com/newz/hkc-reveals-1hz-to-60hz-adaptive-u...
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
> Oxide (metal-oxide TFT)
Ok, that makes some amount of sense. The article claims this is an
OLED display, and I haven't heard of significant power games from
low-refresh-rate OLED (since they have to signal the LED to stay on
regardless of refresh rate).
However, do TFT's really use as much power as the rest of the laptop
combined?
They're claiming 48% improvement, so the old TFT (without backlight)
has to be equivalent to backlight + wifi + bluetooth + CPU + GPU +
keyboard backlight + ...
stonogo wrote 1 day ago:
The article says this is an LED panel and LG is working toward an
OLED version.
hasperdi wrote 4 days ago:
this is just regurgitating the manufacturer's claim. I believe it when
I see it. Most of display energy use is to turn on the OLED/backlight.
They're claiming, because our display flickers less, it's 48% more
efficient now.
amiga-workbench wrote 5 days ago:
Is this materially different from panel self refresh?
saltcured wrote 4 days ago:
A low refresh rate probably still requires the same display-side
framebuffer as PSR.
With conventional PSR, I think the goal is to power off the link
between the system framebuffer and the display controller and
potentially power down the system framebuffer and GPU too. This may
not be beneficial unless it can be left off long enough, and there
may be substantial latency to fire it all back up. You do it around
sleep modes where you are expecting a good long pause.
Targeting 1 Hz sounds like actually planning to clock down the link
and the system framebuffer so they can run sustain low bandwidth in a
more steady state fashion. Presumably you also want to clock down any
app and GPU work to not waste time rendering screens nobody will see.
This seems just as challenging, i.e. having a "sync to vblank" that
can adapt all the way down to 1 Hz?
fc417fc802 wrote 1 day ago:
> This seems just as challenging, i.e. having a "sync to vblank"
that can adapt all the way down to 1 Hz?
I was under the impression that modern compositors operated on a
callback basis where they send explicit requests for new frames
only when they are needed.
saltcured wrote 1 day ago:
There are multiple problems here, coming from opposite needs.
A compositor could request new frames when it needs them to
composite, in order to reduce its own buffering. But how does it
know it is needed? Only in a case like window management where
you decided to "reveal" a previously hidden application output
area. This is a like older "damage" signals to tell an X
application to draw its content again.
But for power-saving, display-persistence scenarios, an
application would be the one that knows it needs to update screen
content. It isn't because of a compositor event demanding pixels,
it is because something in the domain logic of the app decided
its display area (or a small portion of it) needs to change.
In the middle, naive apps that were written assuming isochronous
input/process/output event loops are never going to be power
efficient in this regard. They keep re-drawing into a buffer
whether the compositor needs it or not, and they keep re-drawing
whether their display area is actually different or not. They are
not structured around diffs between screen updates.
It takes a completely different app architecture and mindset to
try to exploit the extreme efficiency realms here. Ideally, the
app should be completely idle until an async event wakes it,
causes it to change its internal state, and it determines that a
very small screen output change should be conveyed back out to
the display-side compositor. Ironically, it is the oldest display
pipelines that worked this way with immediate-mode text or
graphics drawing primitives, with some kind of targeted
addressing mode to apply mutations to a persistent screen state
model.
Think of a graphics desktop that only updates the seconds digits
of an embedded clock every second, and the minutes digits every
minute. And an open text messaging app only adds newly typed
characters to the screen, rather than constantly re-rendering an
entire text display canvas. But, if it re-flows the text and has
to move existing characters around, it addresses a larger screen
region to do so. All those other screen areas are not just
showing static imagery, but actually having a lack of application
CPU, GPU, framebuffer, and display link activities burning energy
to maintain that static state.
fc417fc802 wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
I mean sure, you raise an interesting point that at low enough
refresh rates application architectures and display protocols
begin needing to explicitly account for that fact in order for
the system as a whole to make use of the feature.
But the other side of things - the driver and compositor and
etc supporting arbitrarily low frequencies - seems like it's
already (largely?) solved in the real world. To your
responsiveness point, I guess you wouldn't want to use such a
scheme without a variable refresh rate. But that seems to be a
standard feature in ~all new consumer electronics at this
point. Redrawing the entire panel when you could have gotten
away with only a small patch is unfortunate but certainly not
the end of the world.
hyperhello wrote 4 days ago:
But why 1hz? Canât the panel just leave the pixels on the screen
for an arbitrary length of time until something triggers refresh?
Only a small amount of my screen changes as Iâm typing.
saltcured wrote 4 days ago:
When PSR or adaptive refresh rate systems suspend or re-clock the
link, this requires reengineering of the link and its controls.
All of this evolved out of earlier display links, which evolved
out of earlier display DACs for CRTs, which continuously scanned
the system framebuffer to serialize pixel data into output
signals. This scanning was synchronized to the current display
mode and only changed timings when the display mode was set,
often which a disruptive glitch and resynchronization period.
Much of this design cruft is still there, including the whole
idea of "sync to vblank".
When you have display persistence, you can imagine a very
different architecture where you address screen regions and send
update packets all the way to the screen. The screen in effect
becomes a compositor. But then you may also want transactional
boundaries, so do you end up wanting the screen's embedded
buffers to also support double or triple buffering and a
buffer-swap command? Or do you just want a sufficiently fast and
coordinated "blank and refill" command that can send a whole
screen update as a fast burst, and require the full buffer to be
composited upstream of the display link?
This persistence and selective addressing is actually a special
feature of the MIP screens embedded in watches etc. They have a
link mode to address and update a small rectangular area of the
framebuffer embedded in the screen. It sends a smaller packet of
pixel data over the link, rather than sending the whole screen
worth of pixels again. This requires different application and
graphics driver structure to really support properly and with
power efficiency benefits. I.e. you don't want to just set a
smaller viewport and have the app continue to render into
off-screen areas. You want it to focus on only rendering the
smaller updated pixel area.
jerlam wrote 5 days ago:
Haven't phones, watches and tablets been using low refresh rates to
enable battery improvements for a while?
The Apple Watch Series 5 (2019) has a refresh rate down to 1Hz.
M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable
refresh rate (2024):
URI [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2024/05/09/m4-ipad-pro-always-on-display-o...
KolibriFly wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
What LG is pitching here is basically bringing that 1Hz floor
capability to large laptop panels
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
>M4 iPad Pro lacks always-on display despite OLED panel with variable
refresh rate (2024):
Brightness, Uniformity, Colour Accuracy etc. It is hard as we take
more and more features for granted. There is also cost issues, which
is why you only see them in smaller screens.
jauntywundrkind wrote 1 day ago:
Panel Self Refresh should largely just work, and I believe has been
on laptops for a long long time. Here's Intel demo'ing it in 2011.
[1] I'm not sure that there's really anything new here? 1Hz might be
lower. Adoption might be not that good. But this might just be
iteration on something that many folks have just not really taken
good advantage of till now. There's perhaps signficiant display tech
advancements to get the Hz low, without having significant G-Sync
style screen-buffers to support it.
One factor that might be interesting, I don't know if there's a
partial refresh anywhere. Having something moving on the screen but
everything else stable would be neat to optimize for. I often have a
video going in part of a screen. But that doesn't mean the whole
screen needs to redraw.
URI [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/14/intel_demos_panel_sel...
__d wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
Iâm not an expert here, but â¦
CRTs needed to be refreshed to keep the phosphors glowing. But all
screens are now digital: why is there a refresh rate at all?
Canât we memory-map the actual hardware bits behind each pixel
and just draw directly (using PCIe or whatever)?
kbolino wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
I think you're assuming that LCDs all have framebuffers, but this
is not the case. A basic/cheap LCD does not store the state of
its pixels anywhere. It electrically refreshes them as the signal
comes in, much like a CRT. The pixels are blocking light instead
of emitting it, but they will still fade out if left unrefreshed
for long. So, the simple answer is, you can't get direct access
to something when it doesn't even exist in the first place.
withinboredom wrote 1 day ago:
Probably patent licensing shenanigans kept it holed up for awhile.
amaranth wrote 1 day ago:
Phones and watches do that with LTPO OLED which I don't believe
exists at higher screen sizes although I'm not sure why. This is
supposed to be special because it isn't OLED so should be able to get
brighter and not have to worry about burn in.
Tuna-Fish wrote 1 day ago:
LTPO has problems with uniformity of brightness, that get worse the
larger the panels are. On a phone screen, this is usually not
perceivable, but if you made a 27" screen out of it, most such
screens would be visibly brighter in some corner or other.
wffurr wrote 1 day ago:
[1] is a better article but LG is light on details of their new
proprietary display tech.
URI [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/lg-display-starts-...
SXX wrote 1 day ago:
OLED iPad dont have always on because of burn-in. Considering people
certainly use it as photo frame, notification and time daahboars,
kitchen recipe book, etc.
Less of a problem for iphones that unlikely to stay for a week in the
same place plugged in and unused.
jerlam wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
I don't think many people are spending $1k on an iPad Pro, the only
iPad with OLED, to use as a picture frame.
SXX wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
They dont buy it for this purpose. Its just end up like that for
a lot of people I know since it just weird device between iphone
and macbook that end not being used for much.
juleiie wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
Itâs a professional mobile artist bonanza idk why you claim
it isnât used much when this expensive device is more than
earning its worth
Yeah sure if you buy it as a toy it may not be used for much
lol. Check your consumerism
kakacik wrote 14 hours 18 min ago:
Yeah so pretty niche use case. No need to attack others with
snarky childish comments just because you dont like reality
out there
juleiie wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
First of all I love snark
Second, it is not a fault of the device that consumers are
brain dead, buying something they do not need and then
whine about how the device is âuselessâ. It sucks to
suck
SXX wrote 16 hours 48 min ago:
I not saying anything about device itself.
I just pointing out how quite a big part of Apple consumer
base use these devices: buy most expensive one, play with it
for a few weeks and then leave it as kitchen tablet that is
used ocassionally. You know every second housewife wants to
be an artist but very few actually use it for this beyond
first few weeks.
Providing this audience with always-on display is a sure way
to have a lot of people unhappy with burned-in OLED screens.
trvz wrote 1 day ago:
iPad Pro only goes down to 10 FPS. This may be the display of the
upcoming MacBook Pro.
MBCook wrote 1 day ago:
Yes but Iâm unaware of larger ones.
hirako2000 wrote 1 day ago:
Dell needs to sell these XPS. The AI button doesn't do the trick, so
battery life may do it.
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
What's the real-world battery life though? My mac gets 8 hours
real world; 16 in benchmarks; 24 claimed by apple.
Assuming the xps has the same size battery, and this really reduces
power consumption by 48%, I'd expect 16 hours real world, 32 in
benchmarks and 48 in some workload Dell can cherry pick.
pier25 wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
I put my MBP in low power mode when using the battery and I get
easily 12-15 hours with my full dev environment running.
k4rli wrote 17 hours 49 min ago:
Both my last two XPSes have had shit battery life. Maybe 3.5h
when new and only 2h after a few months of use. They also
experience a lot of thermal throttling (i7 12700h, 9750h) and
newer updates have removed the option of undervolting which used
to fix that.
Positive is that the battery life couldn't possibly get worse
with newer ones.
glitchcrab wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
I have a December 2024 XPS 15 and I regularly get 7-8 hours out
of a charge whilst doing a mixture of tasks. On Linux too, no
less.
adgjlsfhk1 wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
Dell has to deal with windows cuts that in half with all the slop
and spyware.
quantumink wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
Last I checked: the XPS was one of the few laptop product lines
offering native Linux (Ubuntu) as an alternative default
configuration option to order
It's how I got mine about 6-7 years back anyways, still works
great (except the battery)
...never let windows get it's claws into the machine in the
first place
Edit: to add, I realized over time that having a battery that
lasts longer just can't seem to beat my older laptop
experiences: being able to just swap an extra battery in and
have full charge at will (without soldering and all that 'ish)
In that sense I feel that the future is coming full circle to
modularity, swapability, repairability - to the point they're
becoming my primary considerations for the next portable
computing select I will need to acquire.
iknowstuff wrote 16 hours 40 min ago:
Powerbanks fill that role well. We have USB-C PD now
quantumink wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
While I concede that powerbanks may satisfy the proximal
problem - literally making charging available on demand...
Consider that it does not in any way resolve the distal
problem of having a 'portable computing device', which
heavily compromises on the 'portable' aspect - by forcing a
state of permanent battery anxiety without external life
support (i.e. no power source - dead in minutes of
intensive work)
The powerbank is a fine workaround to be fair, but as I see
it: still a workaround at best. The ability to swap a
battery without getting into things like soldering - allows
for far more flexible functionality and longevity than a
powerbank could.
That is without even mentioning the ultimate problem of
parts sustainability and longevity. When you can swap
individual components as they degrade, it's possible to use
the rest of the machine for far longer than a degraded
battery or a failing SSD would allow.
Powerbanks simply feel like treating symptoms, instead of
rehabilitating the system itself (obviously still use them
for phones and such of course)
teo_zero wrote 17 hours 43 min ago:
> Last I checked
I checked 10 seconds ago. The only models I can order in my
country with linux are Pro Max and a Precision workstation.
If I pretend to be located in the US, an XPS 13 from 2024
becomes available at 200$ more than the Windows variant, and
no OLED option.
What a weird marketing strategy from Dell...
quantumink wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
Yeah... Took a moment to look it up now:
Apparently they stopped making the Developer Edition which
came with Ubuntu in 2022-2023 (which was definitely cheaper
by 100-200 bucks or so than the Windows version with exact
same hardware, I recall the developer edition os discount
very clearly)
Now the XPS line has fallen as well, as apparently even the
SSD now gets soldered to the motherboard, no longer
possible to service with basic tools really once it starts
failing.
My old 2018-ish XPS has an M.2 slot and a battery that is
relatively simple by modern standards to replace with some
screwdrivers and careful handling (something I think is
vital for a workhorse computer, as batteries 'decimate' in
capacity within 2-3 years or so in my experience)
I don't even know what's left out there anymore among major
makers...
when I have to look again, maybe framework... Been hearing
about them for a bit now and they seem quite relevant to
the discussion - haven't seen one live yet to be fair
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