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

[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.