Blerv wrote:
PS: In the event it wasn't made clear enough, laptops suck but are tolerable as a necessary evil. Expensive laptops suck more. Gaming laptops suck so bad that makers should be imprisoned for extorting money from n00bs with more credit line than sense.
Were all the laptops you've worked with
that ******?
I'm typing this from my 13 inch MacBook Air, and I can seriously say I could use this laptop all day, every day, without suffering from RSI or getting urges to jump down bridges
However, most (especially cheaper) manufacturers seem to skimp on the 3 things that matter the most, just to save a buck or two:
1. screen
2. keyboard
3. touchpad
Most laptops ship with ****** screens. They're mostly WAY too glossy, WAY too dim, the colors suck, and the person who allowed 15.6 inch notebooks to ship with just 1366x768 pixels should be thrown in prison for life. If I'm buying a BIG laptop, I want to display MORE CONTENT, not the same content, but just bigger. Good screens should be anti-glare (matte) or at least not overly glossy (my MacBook Pro can be a real mirror at times, but my MacBook Air hardly reflects, even though its display is glossy), be sufficiently bright, have decent viewing angles, decent color accuracy ( >60% of Adobe RGB would be nice), and decent resolution. My MacBook Pro has 1280x800 on 13 inch, which to me is on the low side. My MacBook Air has 1440x900 on the same 13 inch, which is actually really nice.
Most cheaper laptops have ****** keyboards. They flex as ****, have crappy layouts just to cramp in a few more keys, the keys are mushy, and non-backlit. Most of the time, the keyboard is also placed off-center, so you're never right in front of your screen. Both my Macs and every decent Thinkpad or Latitude I've worked with had a decent keyboard, often backlit (or a thinklight), centered, with good tactile feedback and a simple layout that actually makes sense.
Touchpads are mostly ******. They are too small, not very responsive, have weird 'scrolling zones' or multitouch gestures that just don't work. The buttons are mushy, and all in all they're just a pain to work with. Then there are a few manufacturers, Apple being one of them, who manage to ship notebooks that actually have decent touchpads. In fact, I hated trackpads back when I used PC laptops. After I bought my first Mac, the touchpad began to grow on me. Now, eight years later, I have Apple's Magic Trackpad on my desk, cause I like it better than a mouse (please note that Mac OSX Lion has quite a few multitouch gestures that really make things easier, but you can't do those on your Logitech mouse ).
Contrary to what most cheaper manufacturers make us believe, most of us don't need the fastest Intel quadcore CPU. My MacBook Air has an ultra-low voltage dualcore Core i7 running at a mere 1.7GHz. Certainly not Intel's fastest CPU. But it can handle everything I throw at it, from video transcoding to RAW image processing to compiling to medium-heavy virtualization. Why would I want a faster CPU, if that would mean getting a crappy display, sucky keyboard or a frustratingly small touchpad?
That being said, the best performance upgrade I've _ever_ done to my notebook is swapping out the harddisk for an SSD. Yes, they are expensive, but they're so **** fast I can't live without one now :p I still use 'spinning disks' for my 'slow storage', like movies/music/photos, but running your operating system, applications, and virtual machines off an SSD makes all the difference. It makes so much of a difference, that my boss (with his MacBook Pro with quadcore i7) actually preferred using MY laptop (MacBook Pro which only had an old Core 2 Duo, but it had an SSD).
