In the market for a laptop. Suggestions?

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calaverasgrandes
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Post by calaverasgrandes » Mon Apr 18, 2011 3:28 pm

I support both Macs and PCs at the TV station I work at.
I would not consider anything besides Lenovo Apple and Asus. HP makes junk these days. Dell I am not crazy about either.
Lenovo W series are really nice. They have some screaming specs. These are intended to be "mobile workstations". One even has the option for a 2nd slide out monitor! Negatives: firewire chipset. Nrealy every Lenovo I have seen is using the Ricoh firewire chipset.
Apple laptops are built very solidly. The apple engineers have this great principle (kinda similar to Volvo) of only updating the chassis when it needs to be done. The Mac pro towers are almost 8 years old in theri basic design. The unibody macs are about 4 years old. They have consistently refined that desing until it is a joy to work on their computers.
If I was not technically inclined I would go for the mac, for one reason. And this is not the usual reason!
In order to get the Lenovo (or Dell or HP) up to snuff for audio work you will have to dig out a ton of crap ware. HP is awful at this with all the useless stuff they install, but Lenovo are not angels.
By contrast, Apple boxes are generally crapware free. Most of their "extra" apps are useful, and the ones that arent dont run in the background, forever robbing you of CPU.
Though to be honest, if you are new to the world of Mac, buy the minimum configuration and purchase your upgraded ram and hardrive elsewhere. You can literally save hundreds of dollars, if not a thousand dollars total when you look at the price difference between apples ram and SSD drive and the retail equivalents.
Also, there are kits out there to convert a MBP into a 2 harddrive machine. OWC sell soem nice ones that come with SSD or regualr magnetic drive.

In the final analysis, between Lenovo and Apple I would give apple the nod for quality, Lenovo the nod for having the most ports. (apple only has expresscard on teh 17" MBP, most Lenovo laptops have expresscard).
It is also worht noting that Macs have 7-10 hours of battery life. No other laptops can touch them there.
??????? wrote: "everything sounds best right before it blows up."

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metanoiastudios
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Post by metanoiastudios » Mon Apr 25, 2011 7:03 am

Thanks for the comments, everyone. I went ahead and ordered an MBP (2.2ghz quad core i7, with 4gb RAM and a 500GB 7200 RPM). I'll be upgrading to 8gb RAM in the near future.

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