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

[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.

[tiedyedave]

Re: extended warranty, I took a closer look at the fine print on AppleCare, and I don't like how 'accidental damage' is left completely unqualified. I have a bit more faith that they won't be total bastards about it, but it's still bothersome.

I don't think 2GB is overkill. I would settle for 1.5, but I don't think 1GB will cut it anymore. I use Eclipse a lot, Firefox is no longer a lean vixen (if it ever was), and I'm a big fan of having umpteen things open at a time.

I take your point about third party memory being cheaper, but I'd rather not add any third-party stuff that they could use as an excuse to sleaze out of the warranty if something goes wrong. Especially not RAM, which is notorious for being flaky in unpredictable ways. The advantage of getting RAM directly from the vendor (besides not needing to crack open the laptop itself) is that they're also accepting at least some responsibility for the reliability of that RAM.

Thinkpad is my second choice.

I will also admit to a weakness for aesthetics: Macbooks look sexy. I think I will ultimately go with the Macbook if Apple has some nice Black Friday deal going on, but until then I will continue to wait and consider.


And as for digging into student loans: My current student loan debt already exceeds $65k, not even counting what I owe to my parents directly. Comparatively, this is a drop in the bucket. I have thought about this issue a lot, especially given that I hate being in debt and plan to aggressively pay it off when I graduate. But right now, a suitable laptop is sufficiently important that I'm willing to steal money from my future self, even at a poor exchange rate, to make it happen.

[rbraun.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much Firefox has ballooned since 1.0.x, but I had no trouble for a long time using it on a Linux box with 128MB of RAM with some exceptions (images over the screen size, flash), and I use tabs like a maniac. Given that 1GB is 8 times that, I doubt it would be an issue even with other software open. I don't know what you're doing with Eclipse; I assume it might use the lion's share of memory, but you should be able to find out how much you actually use pretty easily. Remember that "top" ([RES - SHR] at least) is reliable for telling you how much most software uses, but not for things like the X server where mapped video RAM is often listed.

The idea that having 1GB or 2GB of RAM is "normal" comes from IT purchasing droids like cluster managers (and the people who sell to them) who are used to spending X amount of money on equipment and don't want their budget cut because they didn't spend all they were allocated. 512MB seems normal to me these days; I could see 512MB being a little tight depending on what you do with it though.

If you do buy the RAM, though, there appears to be no point in getting it third-party. 1GB (in 2 laptop size modules of DDR2) sells for $125, while 2GB is $250, and Apple charges $175 for the upgrade, so you'd have to sell the factory provided modules for at least $50 to break even, and then you wouldn't have them to swap back in if you had to send the laptop in for service.

As far as aesthetics, the MacBook hardware -- at least the Pro version -- screams nothing louder to me than "conspicuous consumption". It is the Rolex of laptops, and the sight of a whole bunch of them in one place is frankly grating to me.

[tiedyedave]

So, it's worse than I thought. I just opened up the KDE equivalent of top, and checked my total memory consumption: 890MB. It claims that the JVM instance supporting Eclipse is responsible for 400MB of this, followed by X and Firefox at 130 each, and then everything else. I have 1GB on this machine.

Obviously, hitting the end of physical memory is not the end of the world, especially given that a lot of that memory is cold, but I still don't like being too close to the top. I'm guessing that this is even more important with a laptop, because spilling to disk increases disk usage, and therefore consumes more power.

[rbraun.livejournal.com]

This is where "free" comes in; the X memory usage is almost certainly not correct, for instance, although I could easily believe JVM and Eclipse using 400MB. You want to find out your total memory usage, so run "free" from the command line. This is on my overstuffed desktop at work:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        906816     422556     484260          0      37412     188404
-/+ buffers/cache:     196740     710076
Swap:      1542200          0    1542200

Take "used" (422556) and subtract "buffers" and "cached" (which will expand with file usage to fill much of any memory you have at all) to get 196740 actually used.

I would agree overall with Abe's statement that a cheaper laptop generally does fine as far as most tasks go. Obviously, a nice screen, warranty plan, and sufficient RAM, etc. will cost you a bit more. I don't really have a sense for going rates these days but over $2000 seems definitely on the high side.

[quindarprime]

Two things re memory:

1. Quartz used to keep the bitmap of every window in RAM. It plays more conservation tricks than it used to (e.g., compressing the bitmaps), but AIUI this is still basically true.

2. Firefox leaks a lot of RAM. My primary workload on my 1 GB PowerBook G4 is Firefox, which regularly starts swapping after it's been running for a couple weeks. (My regular tab load is ~50 open tabs.) After a month, it's swapping so badly it's hardly usable. Given that I hate shutting down Firefox (I use SessionSaver but don't trust it hugely), 1 GB isn't really sufficient. YMMV.