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The original was posted on /r/amdlaptops by /u/darkbasic4 on 2023-09-07 14:25:11.

I’m looking for a laptop to be used as a developer workstation. Here are the requirements:

  1. A good quality 16" screen that can render crisp text

  2. Horizontal resolution must be around (or a multiple of) 1920: that means either 1920 or ~3840 if the screen is HiDPI (meaning that the scaling factor must be 2, not a floating point value). The aspect ration should ideally be 3:2, but 16:10 or 16:9 might be fine as well.

  3. Powerful 35W+ Phoenix APU (7940HS/7940H)

  4. At least 64GB of ram (or the possibility to upgrade it to 64GB)

  5. No Nvidia bricks whatsoever: I’m using Linux and they don’t provide open source drivers. I could make use of a discrete AMD GPU but I don’t need one: the APU alone would be enough for me.

  6. The bigger the battery, the better. Battery life is important.

  7. The slimmer the better, but I would rather pick one with an RJ45 rather than a slightly slimmer one with no useful connectivity.

  8. At least one USB4 port with full Thunderbolt support (laptop charging, PCIe lanes, etc). I’m pretty sure every Phoenix laptop has at least two of them so that shouldn’t be a problem.

  9. Good Linux support. I’m on the bleeding edge (Arch Linux) so that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish once you rule out Nvidia GPUs.

  10. Available in Italy now or soon (which leaves out the Framework).

What do you think would be the laptop to better match these requirements?

So far the only ones that I like are the ThinkPad T16 Gen 2 (but ram is soldered and the 64GB of ram variant is not being sold in Italy) and the Hp EliteBook 865 G10. The latter would be perfect: it’s cheap and I can upgrade the ram, but unfortunately only the 51 Wh variant is being sold in Italy with no sign of the 76 Wh variant ever being available. I would be willing to upgrade the battery myself but it’s unclear whether it is possible to do so or not:

Maybe someone did a similar battery upgrade to another HP laptop and can share his experience or maybe you can suggest a better alternative altogether.