Laptops

[Bondo 440]

Any PC laptop you buy will have Win8 and metro "messtop". All I can say is good luck with that garbage. I bought it for my wife first, ( WalMart Gateway system ) For 3 months she could not stand it. After she lost all her stuff to the 8.1 update, was the last straw. I wound up going on eBay and buying her a used " refurbished' Dell i5 because that's the only way to get Win7. She gave me her system but after a few months of similar frustration I took a 3 year old HP Pavillion 17" laptop and gave Lubuntu a shot and I could not be happier.

A year ago I would probably tell you go with a $700 laptop since every 3 years it either breaks or just fades out behind newer technology so spending Big Mac money would not be practical..... But a new laptop now will actually have a mismatched hipster commercial-in-a-tablet OS on it and a lousy one at best. I'd wait and see how Win9 is received. Or just go with the mac !

 

[Gerbs]

Go Mac and don't look back. I bought a Mac in 2009 and its still working nicely. I doubt a PC would have lasted that long. I just upgraded to OS Yosemite for free with no hiccups. Downloaded the new iPhoto for free. Macs really hold up over time with software upgrades.

 

[Thedude]

I have a 1 yr old 15" macbook pro retina. Work bought it, and it's the second MBP I've had (one was from a different employer back in 2010.

The thing rocks. While I won't use an iPhone and I don't see the point in an Apple desktop, their laptops are first rate.

The trackpad alone is worth the price of admission. It's baffling that no other manufacturer can make a trackpad that's as satisfying and transformative.

The screen resolution is amazing too. It scales perfectly (unlike Windows), so you get gorgeous visuals.

Mine is a top of the line i7 with 16GB memory and a 1TB ssd. I build entire mock networks with multiple virtual machines that need to interact with one another for customer demos and to mock up special odd scenarios.

I work in Cyber security and I have extensive background with not only Unix and Linux but actually NextSTEP. I own an old Next workstation from the early 1990s. The computers and the OS were created by Jobs after he left Apple and is the basis for OS X. I generally think Jobs was a one trick pony, basically taking a vision of what computing could be and mobilizing/miniaturizing it. However, NextSTEP was some of his best work.

Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3 (1992):