September 3, 2010

A Personal History of Laptops

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Posted by Eric in Tech.

It’s been a long year in terms of laptops. I have sampled a great many, and I think I have finally found the one that I like the best: The 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro. This laptop does everything I could possibly ask of it. Laptops that I have owned over the last two years:

  1. 13″ Black MacBook
  2. 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro
  3. 14″ Dell Studio 14z
  4. 13″ Black MacBook
  5. 17″ Santa-Rosa MacBook Pro
  6. 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro (current)

I’m fairly sure that is all of them, although I may be missing one or two.

I liked my 13″ MacBook a lot but I just didn’t feel like they had all of the power I needed, and I felt like the screens were just a bit too small. They had the older style touchpad, and did not have a backlit keyboard. Although I didn’t like the newer style track pad at first, it has really grown on me.

The dell laptop that I had was okay, it ran linux of course, but I couldn’t get by without a multi-touch touch pad on my laptop as I had become accustomed to on my MacBook. Parts of the 14z just felt cheap and plasticky, which was tough coming from the extremely well made Apple laptops. I absolutely loved the keyboard on this machine. Shallow key-press depth, large, but not over-sized buttons. The 14z was an absolute dream to type on. The track-pad however, was an absolute nightmare. The lack of multi-touch alone was the feature that drove me back towards a macbook.

The problem with the Santa Rosa was that they keyboard’s key-press depth was just a tad too long for my taste, which caused me to miss keys often while typing. I also didn’t like the heat dissipation issues that I had with the santa rosa. I had to keep that laptop on a desk, or other hard surface if I didn’t want it to overheat. That presented some issues since I routinely use my laptop in bed.

My second 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro is a keeper. The display on the 17″ runs natively at 1920 x 1200 resolution, which is absolutely amazing to use. It feels as though you have a world of space available to you on your desktop. The 15″ display, however, runs natively at 1440 x 900. It feels a bit cramped with a few windows open, but was easy to get used to. I definitely wish that I had the higher resolution display, which is available through Apple, in this laptop. I enjoy typing on the chiclet style keyboard of the unibody MacBook Pros, it has the perfect key-press depth, and doesn’t require too much pressure to get the key down.