Wave Ridge 14 Laptop

Details

A 14 inch laptop meant to be kept. Ten captive Phillips screws hold the base on, the battery lifts out on a connector rather than a strip of adhesive, the memory sits in two ordinary SO-DIMM slots, and every internal part has a number printed on it and a price on our site. Four cheats run through this category and this page denies all four. The first is the panel lottery: two units of the same model, bought the same week, carrying different panels from different suppliers, so one is 400 nits and wide gamut and the other is 250 nits and sRGB, and neither box says which. The second is up to: up to 400 nits, up to 12 hours, up to 65 W. The third is a battery quoted in mAh with no voltage beside it, which makes the figure arithmetically meaningless, because milliamp-hours only become energy when multiplied by volts. The fourth is soldered memory, sold as an upgrade you can make later and then discovered to be a chip on a board. One panel part number is fitted for the life of this model. If it ever has to change, the model number changes with it, and the measured figures below are from a production unit, full-screen white at the centre, not from a bright patch on a dark field.

• 14.0 inch IPS, 2880 x 1800, 120 Hz, matte. Measured 412 nits full-screen white, uniformity within 9 percent corner to centre, sRGB 99 percent and DCI-P3 92 percent by spectroradiometer, Delta E under 2 with the calibration report in the box
• DC dimming from full brightness down, percent flicker under 3 percent at every step against IEEE 1789, so there is no PWM to give you a headache at low brightness
• 60 Wh, which is four cells in series at 15.4 V nominal, 3,900 mAh. Both numbers printed, because one of them alone tells you nothing
• 9 hours 20 minutes measured at 60 Hz and 150 nits on Wi-Fi, documents and browsing with one hour of video call in it. 3 hours 40 minutes at 120 Hz and 400 nits under a sustained compile. Two numbers, two conditions, no up to
• Two SO-DIMM slots to 96 GB and two M.2 2280 slots. Nothing on this board is soldered memory or soldered storage
• Storage is TLC with an on-board DRAM cache: 4,100 MB/s into the SLC cache, sustained 1,450 MB/s after it
• Every unit is new. No returned battery, panel or mainboard is fitted into a new machine, and the cell's manufacturing week is printed on the pack so you can check you are not being sold old stock
• The honest trade is weight and thickness. Ten screws, a connector-mounted battery and socketed memory need a thicker base than a glued one, so this is 1.36 kg and 17.9 mm, not 1.1 kg and 14 mm
• There is no Shuunnya service-centre network. A warranty claim means sending the machine to us, and we do not print a turnaround time because we have not earned one yet