Did you purposely miss the first and last questions: Which laptop is the good value?

I never said people need to run LLMs. I said Apple dominates high-end laptops and wanted a good high-end to compare to the high-end Macbooks.

Instead of just complaining about Apple, can do what I asked? Best cheaper laptop alternative that checks the non-LLM boxes I mentioned:

If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc., the options get limited quickly.

Is there a particular model you’re thinking of? Not just the line. I usually find that Windows laptops don’t have enough cooling or make other sacrifices. If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc., the options get limited quickly.

Even the RAM cost misses some of the picture. Apple Silicon’s RAM is available to the GPU and can run local LLMs and other machine learning models. Pre-AI-hype Macs from 2021 (maybe 2020) already had this hardware. Compare that to PC laptops from the same era. Even in this era, try getting Apple’s 200-400GB/s RAM performance on a PC laptop.

PC desktop hardware is the most flexible option for any budget and is cost-effective for most budgets. For laptops, Apple dominates their price points, even pre-Apple-silicon.

The OS becomes the final nail in the coffin. Linux is great, but a lot of software still only supports Windows and Apple; Linux support for the latest/current hardware can be a hit or miss (My three-year-old, 12th-gen Thinkpad just started running well). If the choice is between Mac OS or Windows 11, is there much of a choice? Does that change if a company wants to buy, manage, and support it? Which model should we be looking at? It’s about time to replace my Thinkpad.

A hidden experimental flag isn’t “fixed.” It might be the start, but until it’s stable and usable through the normal UI, it’s not really done.

It seems you are mixing the concepts of voting systems and candidate selection. FPP nor FPP should not sound scary. As a voting systems, FPP works well enough more often than many want to admit. The name just describes it in more detail: either First Preference Plurality.

Every voting system is as bottom-up or top-down as the candidate selection process. The voting system itself doesn’t really affect whether it is top down or bottom up. Requiring approval/voting from the current rulers would be top-down. Only requiring ten signatures on a community petition is more bottom up.

The voting systems don’t care about the candidate selection process. Some require precordination for a “party”, but that could also be a party of 1. A party of 1 might not be able to get as much representation as one with more people: but that’s also the case for every voting system that selects the same number of candidates.

Voting systems don’t even need to be used for representation systems. If a group of friends are voting on where to eat, one problem might be selecting the places to vote on, but that’s before the vote. With the vote, FPP might have 70% prefer pizza over Indian food, but the Indian food vote might still win because the pizza voters had another first choice. Having more candidates often leads to minority rule/choice, and that’s not very good for food choice nor community representation.

That many steps? WindowsKey+Break > Change computer name.

If you’re okay with three steps, on Windows 10 and newer, you can right click the start menu and generally open system. Just about any version supports right clicking “My Computer” or “This PC” and selecting properties, as well.