I’m not building a PC at the moment, but this drove me nuts last time I got a laptop, and I’ve been wondering if anyone else has ideas along these lines.

I’d like to have a laptop that:

• Has a 100 Wh battery (100 Wh being the largest allowed on airplanes, so generally the limit on what one can get). I don’t mind the weight or the cost, but recently it’s been increasingly-difficult to find 100 Wh laptops. The laptops that do tend to be heavy power consumers; they’re aimed not at providing a long battery life, but managing to keep a gaming laptop running for a short period of time.

• I’d very much like to have a Thinkpad-style trackpad, with three mechanical buttons. I don’t care about the “nipple mouse” on Thinkpads. Synaptics makes these, but laptops with them are quite difficult to find these days.

• Is as upgradable as possible. I’d rather not pay an exorbitant amount to have a large amount of memory and NVMe on the thing.

• I don’t really care about heavy weight or large size (at least within the kind of weight classes that laptops have).

• I would like to have a centered keyboard, though, if the laptop is large. I don’t use a numeric keypad (I have an external USB one that I can use for the very rare times that I want to use something where it’s actually useful), and many larger laptops (which often have larger batteries) de-center the keyboard and stick a numeric keypad on the side.

• I generally favor vertical screen space (i.e. for reading documents and webpages rather than watching movies). 16:10 ratio is preferable to 16:9, and I’d take more-vertical ratios if they were available.

• It’d be nice to have so much lower bezel below the monitor that I could lie down and use the thing on my chest without my hands obstructing the view of the screen.

• I’d use Linux on it. At least with major vendors, compatibility isn’t really an issue these days, but it’s something that I do keep in mind.

• It’s not vital that I have discrete video hardware, but if I do, I’d rather go with AMD hardware rather than NVIDIA, as AMD is more Linux-friendly.

• I’d slightly-favor not getting something out of China, though that’s not a must-have.

• Having a fair number of USB C ports – which I expect to use more of moving forward – is nice, as is rapid charging.

• I’d rather not have “gamer-style” aesthetics with LEDs and a ton of decorative plastic molding all over the thing.

• I can live with an unimpressive integrated camera, though I do use the thing occasionally.

• I don’t mind doing some work on this, like spodging open a laptop to upgrade non-soldered memory and NMVe, but I don’t really want to go to the degree of 3d-printing a laptop case or something like that myself.

• I’d be willing to get a thicker laptop.

• I’d slightly favor having fan vents on the side rather than bottom, so that if I put the laptop on my chest, I’m not blocking said vents. That being said, that’s a hard ask these days with thin laptops and wanting to have a fair number of ports on the side.

• I’d like to have a wired Ethernet port, but I can live without it; a USB adapter would be okay.

• I’m not rabid about display brightness, but I’ve generally found that Thinkpads have a weak-enough backlight that it can be annoying, even at maximum power. OLED would be nice.

• I don’t mind paying somewhat-more for a laptop like that, but I’d prefer to not go more than several hundred extra, not several thousand.

Some things that I’ve looked at that hit at least some of these:

• Thinkpad T-series. This is what I’m using now; I’ve used and been relatively-happy with Thinkpads in the past. I’m generally happy with the aesthetics. It ticks the “Synaptics trackpad” box. Lenovo has no option for a large battery (my T14 has a 57 Wh battery) (whereas Thinkpads used to have available externally-accessible batteries that would extend beyond the bounds of the case; some even had a smaller backup internal battery and let a user hot-swap the larger batteries). At least on the T-series laptop I have, the components are not soldered and I had no problems spodging the thing open and upgrading them. Charging speed is okay, but isn’t mind-blowing. Bottom air vents. It’s out of China these days. Has a decent amount of bottom bezel, but not enough that I can lie down without my hands obstructing the screen. In general, I’d rather have a heavier/thicker laptop with a longer battery life than is the case for these today.

• Framework laptop. These are one of the few laptops that permit one to increase the number of USB C ports. They also have the option to get a large laptop with a centered keyboard. They don’t provide an option to have a user-replaceable trackpad, unfortunately, so no Synaptics trackpad, and they don’t provide another option for mechanical trackpad buttons. These only go up to 61 Wh battery. They specifically target working out-of-box with the base Linux kernel, no third-party drivers.

• Tuxedo Computers’s InfinityBook. These guys make a 14-inch-display laptop with a 99 Wh battery, which is an uncommon combination. No three mechanical trackpad buttons, no AMD video. They don’t extort one on hardware upgrades, though they do have a relatively-high base price. Good Linux support, as they ship with various Linux distros.

Any laptop can have the battery situation mitigated by hauling around a USB-C powerstation, which is what I do today and I suspect why laptop manufacturers are willing to scrimp on internal battery. Maybe I could set up something to disable charging unless the internal battery is low if a power station is connected…not sure if it’s possible to detect that, whether there are power stations that also communicate with the host. But I’d rather have a larger internal battery.

To solve the “hands obstructing screen when using laptop when lying down” issue, I did try picking up a head-mounted display, a used Royole Moon. This was not satisfactory; it took a lot of twitchy setup for each use, I found that it tended to fog up, it placed what I found to be uncomfortable pressure on one’s nose, and I found that if the screen wasn’t exactly right, parts of the display would appear to be out-of-focus. It also completely cuts one off from the world, which is fine for some of my use, though not a solution all the time. I don’t think that head-mounted displays are really a replacement for traditional monitors yet.

• Don’t use a laptop at all, and just use a luggable PC, maybe in a backpack or suitcase, microATX or mini-ITX with some kind of power station. External portable monitor. This opens up an enormous number of options; I can use any USB trackpad (or even other input device) and keyboard. My battery problems go away, because I can choose the size and charging speed of the powerstation backing it, could have hundreds of watt-hours. I don’t need to worry about blocking the vents. Graphics options – lots of portable OLED monitors – and upgrading the thing are good. The option is available to put the display on a stand in front of the keyboard if I’m using it with it sitting on my chest when lying down, which probably isn’t going to be an option with a laptop. However, there are also a number of downsides; it means that the components probably aren’t as focused on low power usage or dealing well with hibernation unless I want to do the investigation work that laptop vendors already will have. Less-portable and has more setup time; one probably wants to put at least a USB hub, portable monitor, keyboard, trackpad/trackball, and maybe WiFi receiver on the table/desk when being used. No “lid switch” to auto-suspend, though I expect that I can rig something up to do that or just reconfigure the power button, if all else fails. Powerstations don’t normally have a way to report remaining battery charge (though some UPSes do over USB, it’s not treated as a “battery”), which is unfortunate, as one doesn’t get things like a “time remaining” estimate onscreen.

Anyone else been in a similar situation and wanted something along those lines, has had ideas or done research?