Notebooks through the ages (2012 edition!)

It’s been more than four years since my 2008 post recollecting the different notebooks I’ve used for the last twelve years up till that point. Right about time to do another update, since I’ve been used or owned several more machines since that point. I should clarify here too that several of these notebooks below are given to me at my workplace (though I don’t use them nearly as much as my personal machines). Here’s what the table looks like now:

Entries 11 to 16 are new from the 2008 post. Here’s the reckoning, notes, updates and whatnots for these and others:

• NEC Versa E6310: Gave it away to one of my students who needed a notebook but couldn’t afford one.
• MSI Wind U100: Purchased this towards the end of 2008, and intended mainly for Hannah’s birth in June 2009. Did all that by the minute blogging covering her birth that month! Accompanied me also for my 2009 San Francisco trip. The machine is still around right now, but I’ll likely be re-purposing it into a Linux (and secure/safe) machine for Hannah to start using when she turns four.
• Apple MacBook Pro 13: Purchased this in Oct 2009, and half-heartedly if only to silence my student and friends critiques that I dislike Apple products without owning them first. Accompanied me for the Kumamoto 2009 and Boston 2010 trips which saw heavy and mobile use. Too bad that shortly after its one year warranty expired, various parts started failing: starting with he trackpad – which I could tolerate – and then the ‘0’ key. Replacement of the keyboard would have cost several hundred dollars. No thanks. Ended up selling it away in 2012 for spare parts.
• Dell Studio XPS 16: Purchased in Oct 2010, after the Thinkpad workhorse’s VGA port died. Replaced it with this XPS 16. Since then, it’s gone on a long trip to Japan in 2010, and been my daily-use machine for two years now. Replaced the harddisk with an SSD a year ago, and the machine has flown even faster. Screen with its amazing color depth still impresses my colleagues. The power adapter died just a fortnight ago though, and while I’ve bought third party replacements, they’re somewhat finicky. Sigh.
• Apple MacBook Pro 15: Given by my school and to replace the old Thinkpads. Don’t use it much (it’s restrictive in user-rights and permissions).
• Samsung N305: Purchased it for cheap in Apr 2012 this year, and largely for a 10 day long project I was involved in. Accompanied me for the recent trips to China and Telunas too. Light and handy little machine. It’ll still be our go-to machine when we’re traveling.

The last machine in the table there is a recent order; just yesterday night in fact. The new Apple MacBook Pro Retina has been widely reviewed as the machine that sits on with the top of its peers in terms of build quality and performance, and apparently surpasses the display aspect with its Retina-class display resolution – even if many software applications are struggling to make use of that kind of uber-resolutions. Looked long and hard at so many models (nope I still do not consider Apple MacBooks as my ‘preferred’ notebooks unless there are no better alternatives), including the refreshed line of Dell XPs, Sony Vaio S series, Acer Ultrabooks and so on. Eventually decided on the rMBP largely because we’ve got some unspent reimbursement for educational tools, and also that Ling’s 3 year old desktop PC is getting real cranky. I’ll be flushing out and refreshing the XPS 16 once this rMBP arrives and passing it to Ling when the time comes.