Maximizer: The Replacement Laptop Dilemma

I just got back from a trip to Best Buy to fondle a wide selection of laptops. Considering they don't carry the "business" line from HP or others, there is a giant gap between the consumer laptops and the Mac Book Pro. It would be like going to a car dealer that sold Kias and BMWs (no offense to all the Kia drivers who wait with baited breath for my next awe-inspiring blog post). I spent about an hour typing on some 20 keyboards and testing the flex of the chassis and keyboard. Most were Chiclet style keyboards, which turns out to be a sub-optimal design (in my opinion) if you use more than two fingers to type.

The Toshiba Portege R705 wins the worst-keyboard-ever-manufactured-in-the-history-of-bad-keyboards award. The keys are glossy plastic and flop left to right due to the incredible amount of slop in the design. They don't depress like... well, a keyboard... they sort of click with a very unsatisfying travel distance. In fact, my 4 year-old son's toy Cars laptop from Radio Shack has a much better tactile response! The chassis was thin plastic and the keyboard, the palmrest, and the screen all flexed a great deal under only minimal force. Considering it's $900 price tag (about $1,800 with a respectable amount of RAM and an SSD), I found the keyboard and chassis to be remarkably bad.

The 13" ThinkPad Edge's newly designed chiclet version of the ThinkPad keyboard is surprisingly good, and by far the best of the chiclets I've tried. The laptop is a very nice blend of consumer features and professional construction, but it's closer in design to a consumer laptop, and I'm concerned it wouldn't hold up to the daily abuse of heavy user. The glossy screen is also a drawback for extended use as glare can be a real problem in certain environments (Best Buy doesn't carry the ThinkPad line, I tested this one at Office Depot).

And the 13" Mac Book Pro gets an admirable-job-implementing-a-sub-optimal-type-of-keyboard aware. In all honesty, I'm pretty sure I could get used to the Mac's keyboard - despite the very shallow travel of the keyboard. The Mac shines in chassis design. The MacBook unibody is a truly incredible piece of engineering. It is very rigid, light, and incorporates only minimal machining to allow for the required ports, vents, etc. In terms of pure industrial design, nothing comes close to a Mac Book Pro.

The ThinkPad x201s sports a tried and true ThinkPad design and traditional keyboard. With a 12.1" screen, it is the smallest of this group (as the x301 is now outdated, gets terrible battery life, and is absurdly expensive), but shares the same 1280x800 screen resolution of the 13" Mac Book Pro. I haven't got my hands on one of these yet, but I've seen them in the wild and they meet all the expectations of a ThinkPad. Rugged, no-frills, business focused workhorse.

It's now abundantly clear to me, there are only two choices when it comes to quality professional grade notebooks: Lenovo ThinkPad and Mac Book Pro. My second discovery is that my belief that Macs were overpriced is completely false. You can't compare a Mac to a Dell or an Acer (not even an HP consumer grade machine), you have to compare it to the top of the line Lenovo ThinkPads (T510, x201s, x301, etc.) and then, feature for feature, the Mac is competitively priced. Damn.