Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Time to buy a new laptop

I'm still stuck on 4 out of 5 dentists.

I really like the Surface Pro, but damn they charge a premium for the foot print.

No Apple for me. No Surface either, as I need more USB ports and the larger screen. I'm looking at the Dell touch screens though.

I'd look at a Thinkpad, since you've put the kibosh on Macbooks.

My 2 cents:

Switched to Macs at the office, home office and laptop (15" retina MBP) about 5 years ago & there's no going back. There's a major reason that people interested in scientific computing prefer the Macs: OSX is a modern GUI built on top of a UNIX foundation, so you can do all your low-level shell work natively. These are the best machines I've every owned. So smooth, fast, intuitive, powerful. The engineering details in the fit and finish are amazing too ... absolute things of beauty. Had to upgrade my wife's computer recently, and went for a low-end Toshiba for budgetary reasons. She doesn't live on the computer like I do, and we couldn't justify a Mac. I spent most of a day just getting the adware and junk off of it. The screen is horrible -- especially off axis. The design is clunky. And having to use Windows for any amount of time drives me through the roof. The apple approach is so much more elegant, minimalistic, refined, unified, cohesive, functional ... software and hardware both. The prices are higher, but the value is there, no doubt. Pricing a Dell (for example) with comparable processors, memory, screen, and form factor is not going to save much money after all the upgrades from base configuration. Finally, I've never found the software issue to be problematic. Everything I need pretty much is available for OSX, and there's quite a bit more usable free software pre-installed, for that matter.

All, just in my opinion, of course

Funny story: I was at a high performance grid computing conference a couple of years ago in Indianapolis. During/between presentations the house/podium computer crashes. I say to the guy next to me "Is there a computer expert in the house". He says "Yes, but its probably Windows -- No one here would know what to do".

I've never had an issue with my iPhones and iPads that I've had with my other products. I'll stick with Apple.

So we are comparing high end Macs with a low-end/cheap Toshiba and wondering why the Mac looks so much nicer? SMH

In a past life all serious scientific computing was handled by many nodes in a blade server array. Mac was never on the table for anything serious.... Just teasing as I write this on an Ipad.

Sure, the Mac/Toshiba comparison is not a fair one .. we bought it because it was cheap. But I've owned high-end Dells as well, and have never, ever seen a computer anywhere that compares to the fit and finish top-to-bottom, or the quality of the user experience of the Macs. Not even close.

Right ... different types of computing ... heavy lifting is on a Linux based cluster (the really heavy hitters often choose to distribute workloads literally globally via the open science grid). I have private local access to a machine with 10 dual-quad nodes, with 16GB of RAM each and ~ 4TB of raid duplicated global disk. Actually, it's getting a little long in the tooth, but still serves well. On a laptop I need to be able to do programming, access Linux command line utilities, run lightweight jobs, write documents in LaTeX, and ssh remotely into the big machine, etc. It's not power that is vital in this case, so much as "culture". There are ports to Windows that work OK for a lot of that, but nothing really compares to having a Unix-based OS native under the hood.

A personal preference that you have to still be willing to pay for. I'm cool with that if you like it. No sweat of my back at all, so we're good...