1 yr. ago • 81%

Comments on Trump lawyer Alina Habba's use of "gaming laptop"

First of all, this is not criticising or taking a cheap shot or really political at all. I am fascinated that a lawyer uses/brings a gaming laptop to trial and I can't help but think it was contrived as another distraction.

What do y'all think? BTW, how expensive are they generally?

You think she plays League?

73 comments

I think it's most likely she just has a beefy computer, and rog makes them. The RGB lights have a default profile unless manually disabled. She may want the compute power but not know the nerdy settings that a computer nerd would know to turn them off. I think this is completely a non story.

105
- But she's gotta lug that thing everywhere. Seems like a giant pain in the ass. Laptops can be insanely powerful and tiny, its not a "choose 1" situation I don't think 🤔
  
  -18
  
  It is heavier, but it's a minor inconvenience. The heavier models run about 6 lbs. That's certainly more than other laptops, but that is not an amount that is difficult to carry, just less than ideal.
  
  I keep my work laptop in a backpack when I'm hauling it places. It's not a heavy laptop, but the 20 lbs of other tools and miscellaneous items I also carry bump the total weight up. It's not that big of a deal, and I highly doubt she has many accessories, so she probably isn't lugging much more weight. It's probably lighter than an old briefcase full of papers.
  
  23
  
  She can get some paralegal to lug that thing around
  
  8
  
  It's also got a pretty big screen, which the trend is slowly moving away from, but is something that's nice to have. These days people favor portability over size and power. I think if the thing wasn't lit up it would go unnoticed.
  
  6
  
  Well, maybe with your weak, sick Victorian shut in arms it would be quite a task to lug it around
  
  2
They probably just wanted a powerful spec computer. That's what gamer laptops are for. They're actually not that expensive, probably just as expensive, or cheaper, then a Lenovo x1 carbon.

But also, literally who gives a fuck.

91
- Sleek powerful laptops are charged at a premium because they expect companies to buy them to look more professional
  
  7
- I gave a fuck once. I gave it to this cute girl I met at a party. She never talked to me after that. I'm never giving a fuck again.
  
  5
- My wife's X1 Carbon was the same price as my Legion 7 Pro
  
  2
Of all the things I can criticize about Trump, the type of laptop his lawyer for this week is using is far down on that list.

56
- That's why I don't really wanna dwell on that aspect. The cult of personality is always an issue with this guy and I'd prefer to stick to the substantive matters, although I have zero issue with having a silly fun sidebar for something like this.
  
  That laptop's gonna sell like crazy(er), I think. We shall see.
  
  -6
  
  You "don't really wanna dwell on that", buh you post about it?
  
  -1
Well, it's a ROG laptop, and they can go for north of $1000 USD fairly easily.

What I'm curious about is why does her law firm do byod? You'd want client files locked down with whole disk encryption - and probably domain joined. It's much more likely that you get a Thinkpad or Dell something.

35
- Almost zero chance she is with a serious firm right now. No large firm wants Trump as a client. She’s most likely operating a little boutique firm. This happens all the time when a lawyer wants the client and the firm doesn’t due to a conflict, negative attention, etc. A handful of people and maybe an office manager with no other admin staff. There’s no IT. She needed a laptop with HDMI out for presentations in court and wanted it to be fast too. She probably went to Best Buy asking for that and walked out with a gaming laptop.
  
  35
  
  Now I'm curious why a law person would need a fast computer for their job :-)
  
  I mean isn't they mostly operating spreadsheets and presentations? Not like rendering 3D worlds or Spirting or something?
  
  I mean I totally get someone want a beefy laptop and to be fair, I don't even know what the "controversy" is about.
  
  2
- It doesn't have to be BYOD. The firm might willing to procure a specific machine for her. Or she might have enough clout to make them get her what she wants.
  
  19
  
  Maybe. It's also weird because ROG has their led control app, Aura which will auto adjust your RGB based on apps/profiles. She either had a profile set up to do the flashy-lid or it was triggered by an application.
  
  Regardless, you would think a lawyer who requested such a device would know how to disable that profile and/or how to disable the light show without literally shutting the lid and covering it.
  
  6
  
  Considering how much full disk encryption can slow down a machine in daily use, she might have used that as a justification for asking for a "beefier" PC that would slowed down less by encryption.
  
  -12
- This. I have two laptops that I use daily; they're both 15", but the main difference is that one is for work, while the other is for personal stuff (Columbian fart porn, obviously).
  
  The work laptop is not only of a much more practical weight for when I'm out and about for work-related purposes, but it's also encrypted, on a domain where everything is SSO, and if it gets lost/stolen I can phone up a coworker to have him wipe it. It's a dell latitude 4something.
  
  Of course, my other laptop could have the same setup, but the fact that it's a gaming laptop makes it considerably heavier, more power hungry, and not even close to practical to haul around all the time.
  
  9
  
  Is Columbian different from Brazilian? Asking for a friend.
  
  6
- All you need for DJ and Bitlocker is a pro version of Windows. It's a 99$ upgrade if you have the home version. The laptop may have come with pro anyway because it supports more ram than the home version.
  
  1
- U think she games?
  
  0
  
  Games the system maybe.
  
  4
I once worked for a company who had an accountant who used a gaming laptop. They didn't play games, but it was the only decent one they could get with a number pad.

33
- The administrative offices in my little bro's college also use HP Omen laptops for some reason. It was a treat watching boomers one-finger-type on RGB keyboards 😂
  
  13
- See, like that is a perfectly reasonable off-label use for something like this given the context.
  
  6
So, hot take here, who cares what laptop she uses? Criticize her for the direct harm to democracy that she's doing, not the fucking rig she has. Some of y'all need to grow the fuck up.

24
- Again, the tenor of this post might be getting away from us here. This is a novel/neat thing to see since I've never seen anything like it in a courtroom at trial.
  
  There's zero moral or whatever judgement. I find it amusing and harmless and more of a conversation piece than having any implicit commentary.
  
  9
Some of my requirements for a laptop are matte screen, backlit keyboard, and a properly centered trackpad. My choices were either a Macbook or a ROG without a numpad.

21
- Do Macbooks have a matte screen?
  
  5
  
  No.
  
  9
No you all are wrong, she is using a gaming laptop bcz it is the only thing that can run stable defusion on the go which she is going to use to generate false evidence for trump

18
- You might say she's a StableDiffusionGenius
  
  Edit: excellent plot twist, I love this shit
  
  7
We have a gaming laptop at work, but there's a hand held 3d scanner attached to it and it builds the model as we scan. Only gaming laptops have a GPU good enough to do this.

13
- I use a gaming PC at work because Solidworks.
  
  2
  
  Solidworks is single threaded ancient software. It only cares about clock speed. Runs just as well on a gaming handheld as it does on a desktop computer.
  
  1
I'm so happy this distraction tactic is working and everyone is talking about a goddamn laptop instead of the actual court case.

12
You’d want a Lenovo think pad or dell. They are enterprise-grade, with enterprise support and enterprise software.

The legal industry is almost 100% Lenovo/dell/hp. All legal software runs on them, and the legal it industry collaborates on issues,testing.

Lenovo and dell can spec an enterprise laptop that would be just as good if not better than what’s on that desk.

This screams “buy me the most expensive laptop you can” but they were talking to their nephew who “knows computers”

What a clown show.

11
- I doubt any legal software requires enterprise hardware to run. You tend to go through those companies because they have the support structure setup for enterprises, otherwise the majority of what people do on their computers is pretty hardware agnostic, especially with how much is web based these days.
  
  Also with the shortages over the past couple years just getting any laptop matters more in many cases than getting a specific laptop. At the same time, at least learn to turn off the RGB for a business environment.
  
  4
  
  You’re not wrong, legal software doesn’t require special hardware to run, but when your PDF editor with its document management system plugin no longer displays more than 2 pages when viewing them in outlook’s attachment preview and it’s seemingly related to dpi and the monitor, it’s helpful if you are using hardware that is used by many other law firms with a similar combination of hardware and software.
  
  Anyone in legal IT, or even other lawyers, would laugh at you for using a gaming laptop.
  
  1
- Actually, dell and Lenovo charge a large enterprise tax.
  
  It's typically cheaper to buy a gaming laptop vs a similarly specced "enterprise" laptop.
  
  There is little difference between them, other than "enterprise drivers" (which are just signed drivers) and some virtualization differences. Neither of which are required for a lawyer.
  
  But sure, I bet a law firm has some nephew picking laptops and doesn't just allocate out laptops
  
  🙄
  
  3
- If dell is the bar for enterprise grade then that's not saying much. Everything I've seen from them in the last decade has been total ass. I'm using a 10 year old port replicator at work because I can't run 3 monitors off my laptop with any of their newer shit.
  
  3
OMG who caaaaarrrrreeeessssss

9
Bringing a gamer laptop to court? Fucking based holy hell.

8
- Normally, I don't like to think you can "buy" being based, but I'm not gonna object to this being on the record 👨‍⚖️
  
  3
  
  Yeah I can agree with your statement, I only meant that bringing an unusual laptop to a court is pretty cool.
  
  4
I think it's judging not using the right tool for a job. Legal work is usually communication and looking through tons of documents over long hours. A gaming laptop has bad battery life and has a bunch of goofy drivers required to run them which can be a security risk.

6
I don't care what kind of laptop it is. I do wonder why she doesn't turn off the rgb. That's weird and I could see it being seen as not professional due to it being a distraction during the proceedings.

5
Nice having a big keyboard

5
so i think the deal here is that she is running external monitors so trump, at least, has his own view. maybe she got it to beef up the gpu for that?

3
Respect for using a pc that actually has some use outside of running a web browser.

-1

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