Apple stirs the pot
- April 9th, 2006
- Posted in Tech
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The Wife has been jonesin’ for a new laptop lately. I selfishly bought her a Dell Inspiron 5150 a couple of years ago, mostly because it sports a whoppin’ 3.2 GHz Intel CPU. Unfortunately, it’s also a boat anchor and this is what she mostly hates about it. It’d be one thing if the GPU were upgradeable, but I don’t believe it is so I’m stuck with some crappy ATI video card that won’t do games very well, which is about the only thing that would make the phat CPU worthwhile. Stupid buy on my part.
So I’m looking for a replacement laptop in the Ultraportable category (not even gonna touch the UMPC here). The Sony TX series is priced WAY out of control. The Alienware Sentia series looks interesting, but starts to get pricey when you add in the options, and the Dell M710 comes in at a good price point when you find it on sale, but is very uninspiring in just about every other category.
Except now you can get Apple hardware and dualboot XP. How cool is that? Very tempting for the gadget fetishist in me to get the nice Apple hardware yet sacrifice none of the app interop. Plus for things like movies and photos we can get the user-friendly goodness that Apple leads in. It’s going to be hard not to consider this a viable replacement laptop option moving forward. I need to run the numbers now.
It could be only a couple of months ’till we see the new iBook, probably called “MacBook”. That might be the one for you. Supposedly it will have a 13″ screen which would put it closer to the ultraportable class than the MacBook Pro.
I dare you to switch.
It’s tempting, but there are still a couple of problems with getting a Mac. First, there’s still the price premium. For the gorgeous, but somewhat underpowered (at the price) hardware, you pay a premium. Apple going Intel hasn’t seemed to lessen that. The other potential issue is how ultraportable the smaller MacBook will be. It’s gotta weigh in at less than 5 lbs since most of the Ultraportables are between 2.8 and 4.5 lbs.
If it were for me, I’d just get the lovely MacBook Pro, but size/weight are at the top of the list for The Wife.