mobile computation

[tiedyedave]

Dear readers, I seek your collective wisdom, as I suspect that many of you know quite a bit about this topic:

I am getting a laptop. I need your advice.


Parameters of usage:

This will be my primary machine away from my desk at UT. My existing desktop is having heat and stability issues.

I will probably dock it during extended home use and use my existing display, keyboard, etc.

I have at this point given up most computer gaming. Unless something truly amazing is due to come out in the non-console world within the next 6-12 months, this does not need to be a gaming rig.


Constraints:

Minimize physical harm. Eyestrain, wrist and arm strain, back problems, etc. Excessive weight might be an issue for carrying, but I really don't know what's reasonable. As this is my first laptop, I have no idea what the typical laptop usage experience is like.

Minimize psychological harm. I am looking for high reliability and extremely good technical support. I want unconditional no-extra-cost maintenance for a minimum of 3 years, and am willing to pay a significant premium for it. This is probably where I need the most data; I'm sure many of you have had bad laptop experiences (indeed, you've even posted a few on livejournal), so I'm looking for a good picture of what to avoid.

Minimize financial harm. I have a good amount of money to work with (wrapped a new small loan into an ongoing student loan consolidation to cover this), but I would prefer not to exceed $2000 without a compelling reason.

Maximize compatibility. If it isn't a Mac, I'll dual boot Vista/Ubuntu. If it is a Mac, I need some reassurance that I'll still be able to run my stuff.

Maximize performance. I can do long-running, compute-intensive tasks on the UT machines, so raw runtime is not my primary concern. The more important issue is whether low performance will impact my ability to work. "Will Eclipse run smoothly with Firefox open and an MP3 player running?" is probably a good acid test.


Other needs: Internal wireless with good reception. Substantial battery life (again, I have no idea what's reasonable here). DVD write capability would be nice.


And thank you! This is new and mildly intimidating territory for me, so I appreciate your guidance.



Update: Looks like I'm going to get a Macbook Pro, 15" model, 2.16GHz core 2 duo, upgrade to 2GB ram, with 3 years AppleCare. After tax, even with student discount, it's still $2375, which is a serious kick in the $$$. But it seems to be worth the price. Now I just have to wait for my loan check to deposit, which will ideally happen by tomorrow. I'm also waiting to see if they have any Black Friday sales; apple.com claims that Something Good will happen, but they're awfully quiet about the specifics.

Comments

[foolmonkey.livejournal.com]

I am very happy with the macbook pro that work got for me. Though, I didn't have to buy it, which makes for fewer negatives. Lots of stuff just works right.

[ikeepaleopard]

I would say you want a mac except that the warranty may be more restrictive than you want. In my experience Apple tends to be fairly whiny abour repairing things that are obviously your fault. That said, if they do repair your machine they tend to be fairly fast and correct about it and I don't hear stories about them losing your box for months and then replacing the wrong thing, unlike say Dell. If you do decide to get a mac you probably won't have any compatibility problems and those can probably be fixed by dual booting windows once a month.

[rehana.livejournal.com]

In terms of minimizing physical harm, I suggest turning on the tap-to-click feature if you have a trackpad. Eye strain and arm strain both depend more on your habits than your hardware, though.

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

In the six months I've had my MacBook, I've downloaded and compiled somewhere around thirty Unix program distributions. Very few of them have given me any issues at all; when they have, it's been minor problems because their Mac porters decided to rely on Darwin Ports (a pre-ported set of Unix libraries that I have a strong distaste for), which is usually fixable with a few tweaks to a makefile or configure script. I can confidently say that anything you use in Ubuntu will still work under Darwin. This is true even of X programs, but you'd probably be much happier with a native Mac port of any GUI program (I eventually switched from XEmacs to GNU Emacs purely because the native port of the latter was far superior).

You can dual-boot Darwin and Vista if you get a MacBook and really need to, but I've never seriously been tempted to. Still, it comes down to your reasons for needing to dual-boot Ubuntu/Vista.

Neither Cat nor I have had any hardware problems after eight and six months of use, respectively; that's not a terribly significant sample, though. Rolf can probably give you a much better story about overall reliability and technical-service quality. At any rate, I'd say it's better than Dell, but only because I don't know a single Dell laptop user who hasn't had horrible problems at some point or another; of course, that's hearsay.

We do get inconsistent wireless reception on the exact same model of laptop, but in either case it's quite passable. We have mild reception problems at home, but I think that's our flaky router.

Performance is excellent. I've run WoW smoothly with iTunes, Emacs, and Eclipse all open in the background. Typing in Eclipse always feels sluggish to me, even running solitaire on Windows, so I can't really judge that; at any rate, it doesn't feel worse, and the non-typing aspects feel better.

If I put the screen on its dimmest (non-trivial) setting and turn off wireless, I can get a bit over two hours of battery life, which isn't great. Korell (my old Vaio) really could get up to 13 hours under similar constraints, but that's exceptional among laptops; it was fairly expensive to get, and I had to sacrifice a lot of power for that capability. Still, you shouldn't settle for anything less than two hours.

The word on the street is that IBM laptop quality has gone drastically down over the last several years.

Macs are generally about $200-$300 more expensive than comparable laptops from, say, Dell. Some of that is buying you a much better graphics subsystem — many of these low-end PC laptops don't even have specialized graphics memory, so it all comes out of core — but some of it is just the higher cost of owning a Mac.

I hope this helps.

[x77303066.livejournal.com]

I have a Thinkpad T60; among the x86 laptops the IBM stuff seems to be pretty kicking. Very solid machine, unlike my HP (do not ever get an HP lol). Gets my vote for everything except that I haven't tested the warranty yet. I have cause to do so, as I just owned my laptop and need to send it in for repairs; I'll keep you posted on whether I have any headaches from the warranty/service department.

[omega697.livejournal.com]

The answer is simple: MacBook.

You don't even have to dual boot - you can just use Parallels. Ask Igor.

[rupes.livejournal.com]

The lenovo web page appears to be hosed right now, but I believe that they offer something called Thinkpad Protection that you may be interested in for the no-extra-cost maintenance. I do not have the program myself, so I have no experience with it, but I noticed it when I was buying mine.

[rbraun.livejournal.com]

It looks like you've already decided, but I will be contrarian in case you haven't ordered.

First, the Apple laptops are, overall, not such a great value. The only compelling reason to prefer them is the ability to run some commercial software and some games alongside Unix software without dual booting. If you need the specific software and want to avoid dual booting Windows (why Vista anyway? let other people work out the bugs! XP has life left in it...) and Ubuntu, then you would have a real advantage with a Mac.

The MacBook Pro is also not necessarily a better choice than the MacBook, although a larger, more comfortable screen is hard to argue against. I lean towards less expensive hardware on the assumption that some of it will break; as others noted in this thread, the warranty is useless if they refuse to cover some damage. Because laptops are moved around, placed where they shouldn't, etc. all the time, the line between damage that can be blamed on you and normal wear-and-tear is VERY thin; I'm not talking about it getting dropped or coffee spilled on it either.

2G of RAM seems gross overkill; 512MB is adequate for most purposes, at least, and 1G would seem to be more than sufficient. You should also avoid ordering RAM from the laptop manufacturer with the product as they usually massively overcharge, and it's an easy third-party upgrade.

I think IBM/Lenovo has actually gotten better in a couple of ways; most notably for the last few years, they now provide a trackpad like everyone else, supplementing the most likely item (the trackpoint) to break in the whole laptop. I don't have a lot of recent data on quality customer service of various companies; Dell is probably still hit-or-miss and Apple has had some notable problems of their own. All of the companies, without exception, now use many of the same contract manufacturers in Taiwan and China, and the differences in quality are more likely to be a result of design than major differences in QC.

Also, I would avoid digging deeply into student loans to buy equipment; you will have to pay those back eventually.

[rbraun.livejournal.com]

Er, you'd have to sell the factory provided modules (commodity value of <= $125) for at least $75. You could save up to $50 but for the other reasons probably not worth it.

[betaphen.livejournal.com]

reading comments and even entries is hard, but from a "will it run eclipse + other things" is your litmus test, i suspect just about anything reasonable will do, just be sure it has a bunch of ram. i have a 15-month old smallest-dell-available i got for about $1400 that works quite well eclipsing, as well as eclipsing can go.

start with whatever form factor you like the most, then buy what you can afford.