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Mort Walker wrote:The new Surface 3 looks good, but I don't if it will make a dent in MBA sales. It might if it came with Windows 7.
I just ordered a new 15" MacBook Pro Retina for one of my kids headed off to college, she needs a computer with more horsepower. It will run Windows 7.
^ Dell consumer line laptops (Inspiron series) are all crap and customer support is ok.
But the 'for work' laptops/workstations are top of the line with good built quality and amazing customer support with Dell ProSupport.
^^^I'm happy that Dell works for you, but it doesn't for me. I've bought their professional notebooks from 1998-2010 and I'm now done, but may go back to them as some USB 3 instrument drivers are giving me issues on my Lenovo Carbon X1. Thankfully I have a few Dell notebooks lying around to try out.
I want my kids to study and use their notebook as a tool and not waste their time on IT related issues. I bought her the best laptop on the market and it is now up to her make perfect grades, so I am closing all of the windows of excuses one by one.
Mort Walker wrote:The new Surface 3 looks good, but I don't know if it will make a dent in MBA sales. It might if it came with Windows 7.
I just ordered a new 15" MacBook Pro Retina for one of my kids headed off to college, she needs a computer with more horsepower. It will run Windows 7.
The 13" Mac Book Pro Retina does not have as capable GPU. The difference is between Intel Iris and Intel Iris Pro. The Iris Pro is capable handling CAD software and graphics better which is decent even for most medium level gaming. If you go to the MBP Retina top-of-the-line it has a dedicated NVIDIA GT750 graphics card with 2 GB DDR5 RAM, but it is $500 more. Other Windows laptops that were capable were heavy at 6+ pounds and bulky.
Mort Walker wrote:^^^I'm happy that Dell works for you, but it doesn't for me. I've bought their professional notebooks from 1998-2010 and I'm now done, but may go back to them as some USB 3 instrument drivers are giving me issues on my Lenovo Carbon X1. Thankfully I have a few Dell notebooks lying around to try out.
Would be quite a trip to visit your gadget dungeon! gawd knows what all you have lying around in the basement.
Buy a bluetooth headset.I bought one for listening to streaming radio on my phone, for skype calls with customer and at home. It works with my laptop, my phone, tablet and can also get into wired mode if it runs out of battery. No drivers needed. Will even work with bluetooth 2.1.
BBC's docudrama "Space Race" for those who haven't seen it. Episode 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcLphSY8PX0
Fascinating story of how even before world war 2 officially ended, there was a parallel US vs Russia battle going on behind the scenes to smuggle out Germany's space secrets. American rockets were built by Nazi scientists. Now when US releases annual human rights report about other countries, it is only laughable.
until nearly the end of WW2, america was still behind in hitech vs germany and england. but they had built up good production scale(like china today).
it seems GOTUS secretly encouraged upcoming US cos to break patent rights on european technology as and when needed. at the same time they also invented and patented in parallel (just as china)
The space race has another fascinating aspect to it. Hitler wanted a V2 rocket to target the US. Two German teams worked on it with different approaches. The first team, which had observed body lift in artillery shells wanted to loft a warhead in space and then glide it back at hypersonic speeds to the continental US. They realized that their biggest problem was guidance and accuracy and worked on those. The second team simply wanted to scale the boosters of V2 rocket and loft a warhead in a ballistic trajectory. Post WW2 massa captured the first team and Russia captured the second. Massa could make their warheads lower yield because that team had advanced in guidance of small boost glide maneuverable payloads. Russia on the other hand could loft heavy warheads but in an inaccurate way so they made huge heavy warheads like the tsar bomba. Also an interesting side effect was that Russia had mastered massive boosters and was the first to space.
As an aside, it was always suspected that von Braun knew about the concentration camp victims building his V2 rocket but that part of history was whitewashed by massa who needed his services.
Vis-a-vis patents. After WW2 several German companies were forced to hand over their patents and secrets and that's how Bayer lost patents for aspirin. Similarly BMW (which made aircrafts for the luftwaffe) was prevented from making fighter aircraft, their factories and personnel moved over to massa. BMW became a car company and changed its logo to the alternating blue and white which symbolizes aircraft propeller in a clear sky as a form of tribute to their origins.
Even on the jet engine tech both Khan and Ru camped off with most of the IP from german Junkers design however since the axial flow turbine in that design was not as powerful due to lack of requisite materials both had to make do with centrifugal compressor designs of Whittle and his teams, GB being a proper munna gave Unkil the entire design and technology documented to the t while the Ru had to reverse engineer the Nene engine to come up with it's own engines .
I bought a HP Envy 15 laptop, an i5 based machine with Windows 8.1, and 6GB RAM, and a 750GB HDD. Though the display was 1920 x 1080, some how it left me very unsatisfied. Plus the built-in speakers were awful. Tried to search and install the Utility that seems to address the display issue. But could not find it, and hence had to return it back to the store.
So ended up buying Lenovo Flex2, an i7 based machine with 8GB Ram, 500GB+8GB HDD. The display and quality seems to be good. Sound is awesome, but I am not sure if the keyboard functions to my liking especially the space bar.
^^ Saars plis to not touch Dell Inspiron Series and anything HP even with a barge pole. If you don't want to spend most of your free time talking to customer support and ruing the day you decided to purchase then you won't.
the cycle seats are broad and gel filled. Purists like Suraj will disapprove and demand the firm, thin road bike type seats ($10 upgrade) and a more crouched aero sitting position ($5 more). carbon fiber shock absorbing flexy seat post will come as $5 more sourced from the legendary Roubaix line of technology to handle the cobblestones of france.
there _will_ be a pedal to recharge the personal entertainment system . no pedal, no TV or personal AC airflow above.
on deplaning, passengers will be asked to carry / roll their own checked in luggage from the aircraft back to terminal.
Mort Walker wrote:The 13" Mac Book Pro Retina does not have as capable GPU. The difference is between Intel Iris and Intel Iris Pro. The Iris Pro is capable handling CAD software and graphics better which is decent even for most medium level gaming. If you go to the MBP Retina top-of-the-line it has a dedicated NVIDIA GT750 graphics card with 2 GB DDR5 RAM, but it is $500 more. Other Windows laptops that were capable were heavy at 6+ pounds and bulky.
Meh. I have a mid-2012 Sony Vaio 13, 13", 1600*900, nVidia GT640m graphics, and a full-fat Core i5-3210M. Nice and thin too.
Cost me 36k on clearance from Amazon last year.
Mort Walker wrote:The 13" Mac Book Pro Retina does not have as capable GPU. The difference is between Intel Iris and Intel Iris Pro. The Iris Pro is capable handling CAD software and graphics better which is decent even for most medium level gaming. If you go to the MBP Retina top-of-the-line it has a dedicated NVIDIA GT750 graphics card with 2 GB DDR5 RAM, but it is $500 more. Other Windows laptops that were capable were heavy at 6+ pounds and bulky.
Meh. I have a mid-2012 Sony Vaio 13, 13", 1600*900, nVidia GT640m graphics, and a full-fat Core i5-3210M. Nice and thin too.
Cost me 36k on clearance from Amazon last year.
I wonder what sort of battery life you get? Even the great Mahdi liked Sony and at one time thought about licensing OS X out to them. I've had Sony notebooks too in the past that were running XP, and although they were great from the H/W PoV, they would do some weird updates to drivers that made performance bad.
From what I understand, AAPL writes the Windows drivers for their Mac series, so that gives me confidence about a great Windows UX.
I gotta $319.- Toshiba. First one had a defective hdd and got replaced within 2 days. The replacement has been running like a charm for quite some time now.
Windows 8.1 (Update1) + 4 Gen Intel Core™ Processors gives improved battery life but sill considerably behind The MacBook.
For comparison
In 2010: ~5 hour with 85Whr Battery (1st Gen i5 and Windows 7)
In 2014: ~7 hour with 65Whr Battery (4th Gen i5 and Windows 7 and ubuntu) In 2014: > 10 hour with 65Whr Battery (4th Gen i5 and Windows 8.1)
hecky wrote:
Do SSHD (500GB+8GB) improve performance other than speeding up boot time ?
My laptop is just 2 days old. The boot up time is fast about 7 seconds. Apparent immediately . On par with my son's ASUS T100 - which has a full blown SSD. My son loaded ChessBase 12 with Big Database 14. On my older laptop (Toshiba way older) the Opening references on the ChessBase was extremely slow. However in the i7+500GB+8GB, the processing is extremely quick. The application has to scan millions of games on the HDD and do processing. I looked at the task manager as I was using the application; more percentage was spent accessing the disk than CPU processing, which leads me to believe the application makes more HDD reads than being CPU hungry. So if the application is fast, then I think HDD i/o has increased. Definitely an i7 always helps. But the i7 I have is probably a low end, not a super duper top of the notch processor.
^^^I don't think so. If you look at the high end Lenovo, like ThinkPad Carbon X1, or Dell Precision M3800, they too are not cheap. If you compare specifications, again cost is very comparable. The mid range 13" Mac Book Pro is $1500 USD.
If you can make do with something cheaper and your time isn't as valuable, then that may be the way to go, and more power to you.
btw, i was that much close to own a 15" retina this year.. but went yoga 2 pro only because of touch! I can pass this touch to my daughter next year, and go for the touch mac when it arrives perhaps with later gen intel proc.
