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.