Preliminary laptop shopping

[dmaze]

It's been suggested that, if I don't like the way the wireless on my current laptop keeps falling over, I'd like a higher-resolution screen, and I'd like the whole thing to be lighter in general, I might consider laptop shopping again. I tend to do low-to-moderate-grade coding and playing (frequently graphics-intensive) Windows-based games. Dual-booting is a pain, but I can't deal with a pure-Windows environment. Leading contenders seem to be the 15" MacBook Pro and the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with appropriate options.

At a first glance the MacBook is significantly more expensive. A lot of this is because it's just a nicer machine, though: 2 GB of RAM vs. 1 default on the ThinkPad, a bigger hard drive, Bluetooth by default, and so on. Beefing up the ThinkPad to roughly equivalent specs brings it to within $100 of the MacBook (and I probably want the extended battery that makes up the difference). The ThinkPad has a nicer screen (1680x1050 vs. 1440x900, both 16:10 aspect ratios), the Mac is far more likely to Just Work including things like suspend support where the ThinkPad is known to be particularly bleeding-edge here.

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery? Do I care about things like Bluetooth, particularly if I think there's an iPhone in my future too? Will I be able to readily install random software libraries and compilers on the Mac?

Comments

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

I've installed all manner of strange things on my Mac without much trouble -- it's amazing what you can just apt-get once things are appropriately set up, and for things not appropriately mac-ported from the *nix world the extra work required is usually limited to fixing a few install scripts and paths and the occasional bit of command-line parsing code.

Also: I tossed my ThinkPad for a Mac in large part because the ThinkPad batteries (and power management) were garbage, but that may have improved since for all I know.

The Mac is decidedly crap for games, though, so keep that in mind.

[dmaze]

"Decidedly crap for games": as in there aren't any platform-native games, or as in the hardware/OS support isn't there? My loose assumption is that I could use Boot Camp for that, and the glossy literature seems to imply that too.

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

I don't use Boot Camp myself, but the folks I know who use it complain that the DirectX 3D stuff is gappy and stuttery and generally underpowered. Certainly that's the case on the couple of Mac-ported games I've played, so I'd be surprised if Boot Camp did better.

Probably a try-before-you-buy sort of situation, if you can find someone who does use Boot Camp on a comparable laptop.

[jered]

Boot Camp != porting or emulation, it's just a boot loader and associated tools -- think "LILO" or "Grub". The MacBook Pro has a standard NVidia or ATI chipset. Windows games will run as well as Windows games would on a comparable HP or Dell system. Apparently, several PC magazines have benchmarked the MBP as the most powerful Windows laptop, so that's a good sign.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I use Boot Camp on my new macbook pro, and it's much better/smoother/able-to-run-new-games compared to my very old desktop. This is not necessarily the most useful of comparisons, though. The thing that I find most inconvenient is the single mouse button; a lot of games bind stuff to the right mouse button, and the workarounds are inconvenient. (Were I more serious about my game playing, I'd buy a trackball for the laptop, though).

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

I play current games on my MBP with boot camp.

People who say it doesn't work well probably play them under emulation, and then complain because they don't understand emulation and/or high-performance games.

You can install pretty much whatever on a mac.