barkingbug wrote:zeth006 wrote:barkingbug wrote:zeth006 wrote:Meh. The T410 is a heavy brick at 5.58 pounds. 13.13 x 9.41 x 1.09-1.26” dimensions means it's a quarter of an inch thicker than the MBP 13. I don't know about you, but for law school, thick and heavy are just flat out inconvenient and defeat the purpose of getting a notebook for mobility purposes. Plus the MBP 13 gets almost twice the battery life. That means I can just leave the charger at home.
Also it's pointless to rave about an i5 unless you're actually going to use its raw processing power to the fullest. I don't plan to. There are others here who may, in which case the Envy 14 may be preferred.
If I want to game, I have a desktop at home.
Hyperbole much? Do we really think that a pound and a quarter of an inch will make a laptop immobile? BTW, T410 starts at 5.0 pounds. My goal: exercise enough to lose one pound so that I can buy the T410 with dramatically better hardware at a much lower price. I suspect that i5s will be the norm at best in three years.
If weight and word processing are all that matters, there are probably better options than both MBP and Thinkpad.
The term "i5" is just a naming scheme. A moniker (albeit a confusing one) for a processor line. The initial i7s that were dispatched for the first HP Envy back in 2009 are drastically different from the current i5-540m's. The 1st generation i7-M processors produced boatloads of heating issues for HP Envy owners and rendered the Envy unable to be placed on the lap or even typed on without significant discomfort. To put things into perspective, the 1st gen HP Envy served a far more useful purpose as a frying pan than as a mobile machine. The even more surprising part is how the 2nd Gen i5-Ms despite their being "mere" i5s ended up outbenching the 1st gen i7s by leaps and bounds while solving most of the heating problems. That really should tell you that there's a lot more to a processor beyond whether it has an "i" and a "5" in the name.
The current generation i5s like all other CPUs in their time won't be "the norm" in 3 years. They'll become obsolete by future generations of processors released. Claiming otherwise would have been not much different from a Pentium I owner claiming, "Pentiums will become the norm at best in 3 years." Great. So they will. But "Pentium" is just a name for a processor line/architecture. After the Pentium I came II..then III...then IV...with each "Pentium" line differing drastically from each other in the clock speeds and technologies introduced.
As much as Intel prefer otherwise, they're still under constant pressure to upgrade their processor lines just about every year. Intel's already in the stages of releasing more details of Sandy Bridge. You can go ahead and and brag later that your i5 is the "norm" 3 years down the road. But 3 years later, your processor, like any processor 3 years before that time, will be "ancient." Before you know it, we'll be using notebooks with processors that don't rely on transistors but simply light transmission.
So you can keep on repeating the same old "far better hardware" talking points. It's as meaningful as claiming that Obama is a Socialist Communist. As long as this "far better hardware" (i.e. A newer CPU) doesn't produce any noticeable improvement in everyday applications, "far better hardware" from a practical standpoint becomes moot. It may be important to photo editors and video makers. But even the staunch gamer won't notice a major difference as devs themselves don't waste their time coding graphics processing functions for CPUs. It's inherently inefficient for CPUs to take over tasks traditionally reserved for GPUs.
P.S. For a performance machine, I see more potential in the HP Envy 14/15 line. At $999, I consider the Envy 14 far better suited for the T410's purpose. It's thin, about the same weight, and it has a real GPU that comes standard instead of a sorry Nvidia secondhand piece of junk for an extra $100. It'll be released soon and should come with the same specs as the Envy 15.
P.P.S. If it is true that 1gb (or even 2gb) is plenty enough for word-processing and internet, then it really makes me wonder again what purpose an i5 would serve beyond artificially jacking up a machine's price tag.
So, my i5 is both far too much processing power and sure to be obsolete within 3 years. How about that. Not really an issue worth debating since MBP uses i5s as well, unless you get the older processors used in 13-inch models. I've read wide praise for the i-line and little criticism. The strength, paid experts say, is in its efficiency and versatility more than max speeds.
Bottom line for me - given the choice, I'll take a faster HDD, faster, newer processor and more durable shell. If it is all a mirage and not worth the price, it is still much less than a MBP.
That said, Lenovo just launched their "green" line and more PCs like the Dell just mentioned will be out soon. I will wait until July 1.
Well, why not? You yourself "suspected" that the i5 would be the "norm" within 3 years. Well, how about that? You can wax lyrical about how your processor has an "i" and a "5" in it, but as I pointed out earlier, it's pretty meaningless for law school. In case you missed my point, it's that you're putting way too much premium on the processor--for law school applications. It’s going to get old before you know it. As Intel hires more engineers and as AMD gets its bearings back in gear, things are only going to get more intense in the CPU sphere. To be honest, I’m not all that impressed with the i-series processors. The die shrink was nice. 45nm to 32nm is respectable. But I’m waiting to hear about how Sandy Bridge plays out in real life. Combining the CPU and GPU creates more potential for thin and light notebooks.
But unless you plan to do anything CPU-intensive, take the reviews for what they'r worth--but only where it's relevant. They're not made with the average joe in mind. Every generation of CPUs has its own new technologies and gets replaced by the successive generation. The reason I wasn’t really disappointed to hear I was getting a P8600 instead of an i5 is the power draw. I’ll admit that Santa Rosa’s kind of sucked as it led to Macbooks running as hot as a frying pan. Not so with Penryn. I can put it on my lap with no problems. But as with exterior casing, the PC’s differences become apparent. I don’t get any heat on the keyboard as I do with my Asus.
And durable shell. LOL. That's a good one. Check out the Mac vs. Lenovo reviews on youtube. The Lenovo doesn't have as much flex as say, a $400 Dell. But it still has almost the same number of seams, creaks, screws, and thus similar albeit fewer avenues for quality issues. The Macbook Pro uses far fewer screws and it's made out of a single slab of aluminum. Fewer parts means fewer potential quality issues with the exterior construction. Those are the same benefits Boeing reaps with its F-18 Superhornet over the previous hornet; fewer parts means more structural rigidity. I'm not usually one to rag on "fragmented plastic portions" as the PC industry has made most of its notebooks using this method. But I’m making an exception here with my 3rd notebook.
But I will give you the faster HDD though once again--it's each to his own. If you’re going to do some hardcore multitasking or even game, 7200RPM’s almost mandatory. But a 7200RPM HDD would've also increased the noise levels on the MBP 13. Let’s face it. My MBP doesn't use ginormous fans that my Asus uses which means it's relatively silent. Plus for daily use, I don't really consider having 2-4 browser windows with 5 tabs each and Led Zeppelin playing in the background to be "hardcore." Then let’s not forget that the imminent introduction of GPU acceleration into flash apps is only going to subtract whatever extra burden my CPU takes while playing youtube vids ever so smaller.
I dunno about you, but I’m stoked with my 10 hour battery life. I’m able to do work at coffeeshops when I’m sitting far from an outlet and I can leave my power source at home. A 7200RPM speed only cuts into that battery life, and frankly, I don’t notice the difference between 7200RPM HDD on my Asus and the 5400RPM on my Mac. Both have closely similar processors but different HDD speeds. So once again, I agree. The faster HDD has its place. But it’s a bit overrated unless you’re a serious gamer or multitasker. I don’t know how you do things, but frankly, a SSD upgrade is more noteworthy in my book.
Finally, I get all the benefits of OSX and Windows on one machine with none of the downsides of Windows. I can run Boot Camp, VMWare, and Crossover for any Windows app anytime I wish. OneNote runs as snappily on my Macbook Pro via Crossover as it does on my Asus. I don’t have a registry on OSX to deal with so I don’t have to worry about extra clutter building up over. Thus reformats/reinstallations just to get rid of lingering junk become unnecessary. OSX itself compensates for whatever “hardware deficiencies" that accompany Macbooks. There's a good reason Mac owners speak of how work on OSX is done as smoothly as syrup. Low specs or not, the memory management is excellent and the OS is actually optimized for a couple of notebook/iMac lines and not for thousands of different PCs. For some strange reason, these Mac owners’ $1,000+ desktops with technology that's 2 generations newer doesn't seem to run as smoothly. You can probably chalk up roughly 50% of the user-friendly to the fact that Apple actually goes through the trouble to write their own drivers instead of relying on some 3rd party company that ends support months after the Macbook first leaves the shelves. I would say the other half is the OS’s numerous tweaks, enhancements, and refinements over the years. After I tweaked with my voltage settings, I haven’t gotten one crash. Not needing to run an anti-virus simply means I get more freed up RAM to use.
So in essence, you can brag to me that your Ford Mustang has a higher horsepower engine or even slightly higher fuel efficiency. Whoopdedoo! If it doesn’t do well on indexes such as torsional rigidity, steering precision, ride comfort, and legroom, I’m not buying it. We all know that horsepower isn't the only coefficient for all of these indexes and it won't deliver the same engaging ride experience that a G37 or a Hyundai Genesis Coupe delivers.
The same goes with notebooks. I'm not going to worry about specs if they're only peripherally relevant to the user experience. CPUs these days are so powerful that they've turned the GPU into bottlenecks for many intensive applications. The trickle down effects of higher end parts has accelerated to the point where we get all these powerful CPUs tossed at us that don't really make as much of a difference from the previous generations as they used to with the Pentium lines of the 1990s. Now, there’s more to notebooks than just interior hardware parts. If the notebook’s touchpad sucks monkey balls (a la HP DM3t), has an extremely washy screen, has flex and tons of avenues for broken parts (90%+ of all PCs), or is thick and heavy, then I can’t buy it. The MBP combines multiple strengths into one package as I stated in my review some posts back and it doesn’t rely on specs to do what it does.
