This sums up perfectly how I look at it too.

Mmmmm I just though of an alternative to buying a laptop.

What about a netbook like the Acer Aspire One 722 (+ some 22" led monitor and maybe mouse/keyboard for the office). Mostly needs to serve as a "presentation runner" (Open Office) ideally it would run RubyMine but I could live with some superlightweight editor as well. Not going to do heavy coding on it anyways probably some quick hacks while on the train.

Never owned or used a netbook (which is kind of why I'd like to have one) so maybe it's not feasible at all. Quick Google research says that should do though.

The capacity of those tend to be very poor, so if you need any kind of performance dont do it

I'm on an Acer Aspire One right now and its been my main computer for a month or two now since my last laptop got the black screen. Havnt got a new one yet because I'm a wishful thinker and am hoping one day my big laptop will magically show images on the screen again ...

They are not that bad. ONLY drawback I have to complain about is the lack of a CD slot.

really? i thought the growing trend was AWAY from optical drives. ive heard many people getting laptops without one and i was considering it myself. you can always get an external for the rare occasion that you need it

That's cool to hear Ryan I guess I'll go that route. Lack of optical isn't a problem for me, on my last Laptop I pretty much only needed it for the install CDs and you can use USB for that

Great post by derosnec in the 'Website ownership' thread http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=2146

clown,
I'm in pretty much the same boat as you, and after doing a lot of research, I'm gonna go with a MBP. Basically, I know a billion people with MBP/MBA and they more-or-less all run great for years. Every PC I've ever bought has turned out to be a piece of ****, and I'm sick of that.

The annoying thing is that there are all these rumors flying around that Mac's going to release a new laptop in a month or so, so now I have to wait for that . SOme of the reports seem pretty damn credible as far as I can tel, though I never follow this stuff, so maybe it's total bull****? (See, for example, http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technolo...021831301.html)

The apple laptops/computers I've seen for the hardware honestly to me look really overpriced. Am I missing something about them? My friend was about to buy the best Apple Laptop for £1,800 and in the end he went for a Vaio which was £950 and had better hardware in it.

Looking at them now, the most expensive MBP:

17-inch: 2.4 GHz
2.4GHz quad-core
Intel Core i7
4GB 1333MHz
750GB 5400-rpm1
Intel HD Graphics 3000
AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 1GB GDDR5
Built-in battery (7 hours)2
In Stock
Free Delivery
£2,099.00

A laptop for over £2,000 that doesn't even have an SSD in it?!?!?! I don't know about HDD really but I was under the impression 5400 RPM is about as slow as you can buy them for nowadays as well.

Compare to this one for £840:

Asus K53SD-SX101V-SSD Laptop
Display: 15.6" HD TFT (1366x768, Color-Shine) LED Backlight
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM (2.20GHz)
Storage: OCZ SSD 240GB AGILITY 3
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 610M ( 2 GB DDR3 VRAM )
Memory: 6GB DDR3
Operating System: 64bit Windows 7 Home Premium
http://www.asuslaptop.co.uk/proddeta...3SD-SX101V-SSD

I think the ASUS one will perform comparably with the MBP AND it costs significantly less.

I don't know why MBP would run for a long time with no problems, they have exactly the same HW in them as everything else.

I am a long time mac user and would def recommend one. The battery life and portability alone make it a winner.

Re time to buy, Macrumors buyers guide http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Pro is usually a good indication.

Apple tend to refresh their product lines every 6 months, almost like clockwork. I would say that its is very likely that the next 3 months will see an update to the MBP. However, even if you wait 3 months for the newer model, the next one will only be another 6 months down the line. And, however much hype apple have around their 'new 2x speed release' (which they always do), the differences are rarely lifechanging. You actually make this point yourself "I know a billion people with MBP/MBA and they more-or-less all run great for years".

A different approach would be to buy a 2nd hand or refurbished MPB. They are just as good as a new one, come with the same warranty (I believe), and you are not paying the premium for the latest model that will no longer be the latest in 3 months time. http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

I agree that the hardware is overpriced, but I also think that the build quality of Apple computers is far superior. I know a lot of people who have 4 yr old MBPS and a few who have 6-7yr old ones, all running like clockwork. I dont think I know a single person who has a non Apple laptop older than 4yrs.

Edit: Also, you always tend to get the best value by buying the cheapest model. The more expensive models are usually geared towards power users who need a lot of ram/power for video/image editing.

Every time I buy a laptop (which I do almost once a year because they always break on me), I start out planning to buy something with really good reviews and end up buying something that's way cheaper with the same specs.

Then, I regret it because all of the things that aren't reflected in the specs end up sucking: they overheat regularly; the fans are loud; the power supplies break; the batteries lose their ability to hold charge very quickly; the ports break or work really slowly; the monitors have light leaks; etc.

These problems lead to other problems that ruin the specs. E.g., the power supply and overheating problems cause the laptop to be slow, to crash, and even corrupt parts of the HD.




I think that this all comes down to Apple's business model. I mean.. I hate a ton of things about Apple, but they effectively make two laptops. You could argue that they basically make only one laptop. A ton of people own these laptops, so when people buy them, they know what they're getting because their friends have them. Plus, people aren't just blindly buying Macs for the specs like they do with PCs. All of this gives Apple huge incentive to get things right, and since they basically only make two laptops and still have huge market share, they get tons of real-world testing to get stuff right.


Edit: FWIW, they're a bit less expensive in the US thanin the UK. I dunno if that's because all laptops are more expensive in the UK or if Apple's just not as competitively priced in Britain.

because when you buy a mac you are also buying a lot of good software.

Ya, rumors are thin 15" MBP before the summer. If you don't care about that you can jump now, but seriously, who doesn't want a 2 lb 15" MPB?

It's because every company in the world charges a lot more for UK customers lol Fwiw I've found £1 will generally buy you $1 worth of stuff.

Hell, it's probably worth an additional $500 to me just to know that I won't get a laptop that will have some surprise that comes up after a few months or a year or whatever. Like, I was considering buying Lenovo ThinkPads, which are supposed to be really really well-made. I had a really hard time finding a decent volume of credible-looking reviews of them online, and when I finally did, I learned that they have a lot of minor nuisances associated with them.

With something like the Asus Zenbook, which looks to be the best PC option that's sorta like the MBA at this point, it simply hasn't been around long enough to know if there's something about it that sucks.

Yeah.. I figured. Sucks to be you .

I get that people want good build quality and are willing to pay for more, I don't honestly know much about laptops but that makes sense I suppose. What do people think about MBP vs Alienware laptops or Dell XPS 17's? Both of those seem really nice, comparable in price but with significantly better HW.

If I was putting down decent money for a laptop no SSD would be a huge put off for me (although I know a lot come with spare drive bays you can add an SSD in for yourself)

Also in regards to laptop life, having it overheat and not work in 2-3 years seems OK to me with heavy usage, I would rather buy a new one every 2-3 years than 1 for 2x the price that lasts 5 years

Yeah. The thing that's driving me nuts is that I can't tell how credible this **** is. I'd probably have a much better sense if I were an Apple fanboy who sweats this **** all the time. Like, isn't Apple a mess right now after Jobs died, and didn't they take forever to get the latest iPhone out or something?

I really wanted to buy a new laptop, like, right now because I'm currently busy as hell, and it's annoying as hell to carry around a laptop with a jet engine attached that sometimes decides it doesn't like booting up and has a semi-corrupted HD. (1.5-year-old HP envy. **** me.) For example, I'm gonna be giving a talk to Brown undergrads in a week, and it's gonna be embarassing as hell.

So, I'm gonna be pissed if it turns out that I'm waiting for nothing.

The thing is...you can just buy a new laptop after 2 years or so since non-Apple stuff costs about half as much.

Either way I'm pretty settled on an Aspire One now. Will probably order one around the time the next Ubuntu longtime gets released (end of April) or I guess most likely a bit earlier.
Saw some videos and so forth and it looks to be enough for my needs. If it isn't I can always get a MBP or smth. later and have a nice tiny machine as a toy :P

I'm kind of hoping that the Ubuntu android phone docking station thingy becomes reality untill the end of the year. That would be extremly interesting (and kind of make my netbook obsolete)

Yeah that's kind of true compared to Windows but I'm a Linux guy. I actually think I might start a tech blog soon, might probably be a good first entry:
Aspire One+Xubuntu+Logitech R800+whatever monitor/keyboard/mouse "docking" for presentations and office stuff.

Sold material for an opener. Either go with "since you picked Brown over Harvard/Yale this is probably going to be your work laptop in the future" or with "study hard kids or this is all you can afford" :P
What are you going to lecture about?

While we're talking about laptops, can I just bitch and moan that everyone is phasing out 1920x1200 screens?

True.. but doing so is a PITA.

Much more importantly, two years is really optimistic in my experience. My laptops start sucking after a few months. Then I suffer through them for like another year and then buy a new one. That year of suffering is a huge deal for a nerd like me who spends all my time on the computer.

Even if I had to replace the Mac every 1.5 years as well, paying an extra $1k or whatever every 1.5 years is so clearly worth it for any improvement at all in the quality of my time spent on my computer. I actually think the difference wih a mac will be fairly huge, though.

I gave a talk in the Fall there about the sorta basic CS-style stuff in online poker security. Told the stories of Cereus/Cake failing to have encryption, talked about my work in the area, talked about bots, etc. I billed it as "a cautionary tail of computer security done wrong."

It went quite well IMO, but I was surprised about what they didn't know. I sorta half-assedly prepared a slide to explain the very basics of how SSL works (i.e.., site sends a certificate with public key. You verify it. You encrypt using public key a random number. Use that random number for symmetric key encryption.) It turned out that they needed me to go through that really slowly. I guess not a lot of people know stuff like that in undergrad?

I think this time I'm just gonna sorta talk about collusion. It's not a CS topic, but I think they'll like it. Plus, I already have the slides, and I think they're pretty ballin .

I'm way more annoyed and anxious than I should be about giving a talk with my computer in its current state, though. I've been borrowing friends' for such things, but I don't think I'll be able to do that this time.

Well, I'm sorta an Apple fanboy who does sweat this **** all the time and I haven't heard anything to think it's not going to happen. It's unclear if it's going to be a MBA or a thin MBP or what, but it's in the cards. Apple isn't a mess right now and they haven't delayed an iPhone. A lot of tech press got ahead of themselves on the iPhone 5 crap. If Intel hadn't delayed the chip the announcement would probably have already been made. I'd wait.

Ok.. sweet.

I owned all of my previous 3 laptops for that long -- all were totally fine. You might have reinstall your OS once or twice, but the hardware is fine. These were mostly Dells, maybe a sony in there.

My current Dell, with SSD and win7, is like 1.5 - 2 yrs now, still on the original OS install, and absolutely zero difference in performance or speed since the day I bought it.