I had a thinkpad last 6 years

Yeah. I definitely know a lot of people for whom this is the case. I have absolutely no idea why. Either you comps better than I do (but Dells are notoriously ****ty), take care of them better, use them way less, or don't notice all the problems that I notice.

I just feel like you live in a different world than I live in, though. PCs don't last in my world.

+1. I've been sweating this a bit and I'd definitely wait at least a week or two. It seems likely that the new 15" macbook will be announced in a week or two - right after the Intel announcement on the 23rd (or around there).

Yeah I've bitched about this before...sucks for poker players. Thankfully I got two of those.
I mean thankfully there's still the higher res 30"+ ones

I've got several laptops from last century that still operate perfectly, the oldest a Thinkpad 133Mhz pentium lol, built like a tank. The "best" is a sony vaio C1-XD, a sick ultraportable even by today's standards, but obviously next to useless given specs (pentium II 400MHz, 64mb RAM). Of course the batteries a are toast, but that vaio went everywhere with me for many years.

Both are made from metal. Seems obvious, but comparing the durability of an aluminium bodied Macbook pro with plastic Acer at 1/3 the price isn't really a fair fight.

Asus UX21 is high on my list of DO WANT right now, but it's pricey. Obv a huge bargain next to apple in the UK though, they seem to have borked currency conversions where it takes nearly £2 to make $1.

No credible review of lenovo has to be a level, right? it's formerly IBM. Some of the most solid laptops ever made. Obv look at business class if you want something hardy.

Yeah.. that's sorta my point.

Yeah.. this laptop has a really high chance of not sucking. I'm not really comfortable with that, though.

Nah. There are lots of old reviews of the old IBM machines, but had a lot of trouble finding decent information about the newer stuff. I dunno if that's because it's gotten less popular or what. And, a lot of what I found is "WTF? These things used to be good!"

+1 on IBM/Lenovo always having treated me well. Super reliable laptops. My last one was roughly 2 years ago though.

I use a Lenovo at work and so far its been v good.

My main computer is an Acer Aspire One. I've had it since December 2010 and I've never had any issues with it. I think, that after burning through HP, Compaq, and a few other brands (I've had awful luck with computers), I'll stick with Acer or maybe dive into Lenovo on my next pc.

FWIW, I ripped out 90% of the bloat* and I am using less than 20G of HD space, but I've had no real problem running Python, Postgres, Dr. Racket, Emacs, XAMPP, or Drupal. Of course, I'm still in the learning process so I've never had to build an Enterprise WEB 2.0 site or any program that required 8,000 lines of code.

*Please spare the "too much bloat argument": I've ran Ubuntu and find it to be suffocating as well, and there is no reason, I think, that I would find Mac to be any different. I just so happen to believe in pure minimalism.

Of course, the small screen sort of sucks to use, especially when I don't have contacts in, but overall, it was a decent buy for $200.

I'm also fairly obsessive with computer maintenance and stuff like that, so take my review for what it's worth. I had a ton of practice with maintenance on my old computers.

The idea of keeping a computer for 6 or 7 years is an argument I don't think holds much water. 6 or 7 years ago, most computers were kickin' with Pentium 4, and Mac just came out with the first-gen Core2Duo, and each were running 1G Memory on a premium, which are both pretty awful computers by today's standards. No less, good luck running the "latest and greatest" OS on either of those machines. I should point out that it is odd that out of one side of the mouth comes: "Maintaining for old versions of browsers, etc, suck, thus I don't want to program in it and to ****ing hell with the users if they don't like it and don't want to upgrade!" yet on the other side of the mouth: "Buy a computer that will last 6 or 7 years."

Yeah this really sucks.

Another bitch and moan is that I had to pay like $100 extra to get a matte screen on my 17" MPB. I hate using glossy screens

Here's a decent looking metal laptop, Samsung Chronos 700z - 2.2 GHz i7, 750gb hdd (+8gb ssd), 15" 1600x900 excellent screen, 2kg weight.

It's £938.10, literally half the price of a macbook pro 15" configured similarly, which comes out at £1,828.99

(+£160 for extra 4GB RAM wtf, +£120 for extra 250GB hard disk (not even a hybrid), didn't need to add the +£120 for "high res" non-glossy screen, I guess std res is lower than 1600x900 and upgraded is full hd?)

base price of the 15" macbook pro is still an eye-watering £1,549.00.

A 17" mbp with only an upgrade to the 256gb ssd and 8gb ram exceeds $4k USD, a laughable £2659

Also worth noting that macs tend to hold their value quite well. Last year, I sold my 2yr old MBP for approx 65% of its purchase price. I doubt many other laptops hold their value quite as well.

I got a laptop from Sager recently w/ 17" 1920x1080 screen (was a little miffed they didn't have x1200, but like jalex said it seems nobody does) for $1900 with 2.2ghz i7, 12gb ram, 80gb SSD primary/750gb secondary drives, and a beast of a graphics card (as far as laptops go) for games. Pretty happy with it after a couple months. Bootup is prob 10-15 seconds.

Asus K53SD-SX101V-SSD Laptop
£885
15.6" screen
8GB RAM
Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM (2.20GHz)
240GB SSD
NVIDIA GeForce 610M ( 2 GB DDR3 VRAM )
http://www.asuslaptop.co.uk/proddeta...3SD-SX101V-SSD

MacBook Pro 15-inch
£2,189
15.6" screen
8GB RAM
2.2GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
256GB SSD
AMD Radeon HD 6770M (1GB GDDR5)
http://store.apple.com/uk/configure/MD318B/A?#hardware

Option 1 is 40% the cost of the Mac Book configured with the SSD + more ram. Even if you think it's going to die in 2-3 years, who cares? Just buy another one which will be better specs by then. If I'm going to use a laptop a lot as my main computer I would plan for it to die in 2-3 year timeframe.

I really doubt a MBP can outlast 2 £1,000 laptops back to back. Buying a new laptop is an inconvenience, but even on a PC you should be formatting the whole thing and fresh installing every 1-2 years so it's just part of the lifecycle imo.

£2189 is an absurd price for a laptop with those specs. How much of a pc do you get for the same price?

The few laptops Ive had have held out pretty well, got to take care of the battery though. I never run a laptop plugged in if I don't have too. Currently the only thing I have in that direction is an EEE pc. Dont get one of those, especially if you code. MPLAB runs ok but thats about it

Just for fun I spec'd one

CPU Intel Core i7-3820 3.60GHz (Sandybridge-E)
Mobo Asrock X79 Extreme 4 Intel X79 Mobo
PSU OCZ ZX Series 1000W '80 Plus Gold'
GFX Asus HD 7970 TOP 3072MB
RAM Corsair Dominator 16GB (4x4GB)
Storage 1 OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
Storage 2Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB SATA

£1,250

£850 left over money for case, monitor, and a weekend break somewhere

All joking aside this is why I would never buy a laptop unless I absolutely needed to. If I needed a laptop and it was only for travelling/conferences or whatever, I'd just buy one for a few hundred when I needed it. All my money is going into my PC!

I didn't think that would help. Aren't you just increasing the number of charge cycles on the battery?

run laptop plugged in to the wall, battery out imo. but then you'll epic tilt if the power fluctuates and causes a reboot and you decided to forgo the inbuilt ups lol.

Things may have improved so I may be wrong, but it atleast used to be the case that if you continously had it plugged in, it continously charges your battery. The battery rests when when its not being charged (including when in use) so constantly charging it massively increases the wear and tear on the battery, which is probably why so many laptops are crap after about a year. This at least used to be the case. Goes for all batteries

Yup, you gonna have it plugged in, then remove the battery first

I don't think this is true anymore (although Im definitely not an expert).

Anyone know?

Continuously charging when plugged in isn't a problem in modern laptops anymore. They still recommend removing the battery if you are going to leave the laptop plugged in for a long time, though, because exposing it to all of that heat isn't good for it. I think HP recommends you remove the battery if you're going to spend 2 weeks with the power plugged in.

i have a lenovo thinkpad for 5 years now, model T61, its my only computer. running windows xp. only thing i've replaced was the battery which wasnt holding a long charge anymore from leaving it plugged in all the time. now i remove the battery when on outlet power

i will buy a new laptop this summer because as i get into daytrading i need more cpu power. otherwise i'd be keeping my thinkpad because it works great. i recommend them highly. obv you have to reformat/reinstall windows once a year to keep the computer running snappy, but that should be std for any computer regardless of brand

I would never buy anything but the entry level Mac for a particular model, I find the price goes up very steeply as you get the better models.

Also, I don't think you can make a fair comparison on hardware alone. Macs tend to have better screens, be lighter, have better battery life, and (in my opinion) have much better software. The newer Macs also ship with thunderbolt connections which are not available on other laptops.

I am not saying that the above covers the £900 difference, but I should think it covers a fair chunk of it.