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

[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.

[tiedyedave]

The battery life issue is unfortunate, as that's the first bad news (other than, of course, the price) that I've encountered about the Mac.

Do you have a MacBook Pro, or just a regular MacBook?

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

It's one of the higher-end MacBook Pros — 2G of memory, faster processor, etc. — so it's probably got a slightly larger appetite for power than normal.

I might also be giving you a bad measurement; it's very rare for me to run on battery. I just unplugged myself with a full battery while at medium brightness, and the predictor said 2:46; I lowered the brightness to the minimum and told it to optimize for "better battery performance", and the prediction changed to 3:06. I have no idea how accurate those predictions are, though — oh crap, they're probably low, because I just remembered that I'm running BitTorrent in the background, and it's probably performing a steady stream of disk traffic. Anyhow, I wouldn't put much faith in my two-hour figure.

[platypuslord.livejournal.com]

I have a Dell laptop, and have not had horrible problems with it.

Well, okay, recently the wireless has died and the hard drive usually doesn't work.
But for the most-of-my-graduate-career preceding that, the only problem I had was with the power cable.

That said, a web search for "Dell customer service" produces results that are... telling.