I really gotta get in the habit of writing blogs...
Recently I just bought a new personal laptop, to replace my venerable IBM Thinkpad T41. Thought it'd be good to share my experience:
Originally I was just going to buy the latest Thinkpad (T60 at the time); seemed like a logical choice. I was at the same time upgrading my work laptop to a T60p; good thing I waited to see how it is before buying one for my personal use. The laptop was heavier than T41, freezes half of the time whenever I undock and bring it back from sleep, or whenever I dock. It was terrible. A lot of my co-workers also had the same problem, and the IBM service rep on-site did his best (including putting a jumper on one of the docking station pins and some software option) but the freeze still happened. Nowadays I just use it like a desktop, i.e., always having it docked and remoting to it from another laptop when I need to access it, which totally defeats the purpose of having a laptop. It seems that since the acquisition by Lenovo the quality of thinkpad just went way down...
I then started looking for another brand for my personal laptop. In the end I settled for a macbook (BTW I bought it from ecomelectronics; probably the cheapest place for it). Still getting used to it; there has been lots of little things that annoyed me, like the extra small screws that need a special screw driver to open to install more memory, and the stupid bootcamp download from apple website that expires as soon as you run it (since it's part of Leopard and they don't want people using the beta one; why don't they just disable the link on their website if it's not meant to be used?). What frustrated me the most was that the drivers bootcamp installs for Vista by default conflict and whenever you play music (or game) it skips. It cost me quite a few hours before finally finding a solution (see Smaels' 1st post on the page).
Overall I'm just disappointed at the quality of laptops (and electronics in general) nowadays. Seems like companies just try to rush to market without doing enough QA; these 2 scenarios are so basic (docking and undocking a laptop; playing music after installing Vista on a macbook) that I'm apalled to see that Lenovo and Apple released their products without covering them.
For now I'm fine with the macbook. It's still not as good as my old T41 (where everything just works as expected), but probably the best laptop experience I'll get. One good thing about owning a macbook for a software developer is that you can test your web app on all 3 major browsers (IE, Firefox and Safari).
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