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Toshiba Introduces A 17"-Screen Laptop
George Wright writes "Toshiba have announced a monster of a laptop with their Satellite P25. Seems they've decided to copy Apple's idea of fitting a 17" LCD on a laptop, but have ended making a true aircraft carrier in doing so. Notable "features" are the 2.8GHz P4, the 802.11a/b and the 10lb weight (!!!). Still a relatively low resolution though :("
yeah well, do you really think you get your money's worth having to carry around the EXTRA 5 lb of the Toshiba (Apple weight: 5.4 pounds, Toshiba weight: 10 pounds)
Without the damned session in the URL:
Here
They are improving. Right now I'm using a Compaq Evo 510 desktop. It's a P4 2.4 and is almost totally silent. I hear no fans or HD. They did a great job. It's also reasonably priced at $999 (when we bought them).
My Thinkpad T30 is light, fast, quiet, and very reliable. The options are out there. Notebooks like the one in the article are for those that want a portable desktop. It's popular to see notebooks as gaming rigs now. Definately not for me.... but would be handy for taking to a LAN party.
Sager has a 17" notebook that has been on powernotebooks.com for a little while now:
http://www.powernotebooks.com/products.php3?displa y_size=17
I was able to get to it from their main page...
Portables->Satellite->P25
If you don't need a DVD burner, it might be better to get this one for $1555:
powernotebooks
(I don't work for them, and I would never buy one. I'm just suggesting an alternative).
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Apple's laptop sales are increasing while desktops decrease.
In the spring of 2003 Apple's laptop sales made it to 40% of all the Macs sold. In 2001 it was 30%.
OK, so you could lug around a TEN pound Toshiba or a 6.8 pound Apple. When I am travelling on business and need a portable workstation, I know which one I want. Three lbs is a huge difference when it comes to cross country flights.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Sure it's as big as an Apple, but it's not comparable in some aspects. First, it's heavier by almost twice (10 lbs vs 5.4 lbs) and it has less than half the battery life (2.0 hrs vs 4.5 hrs) It's a nice first try.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
CPU performance in your computer product may vary from specifications under the following conditions:
use of certain external peripheral products
use of battery power instead of AC power
use of certain multimedia games or videos with special effects
use of standard telephone lines or low speed network connections
use of complex modeling software, such as high end computer aided design applications
use of computer in areas with low air pressure (high altitude >1,000 meters or >3,280 feet above sea level)
use of computer at temperatures outside the range of 5C to 35C (41F to 95 F) or >25C (77F) at high altitude (all temperature references are approximate).
CPU performance may also vary from specifications due to design configuration.
Under some conditions, your computer product may automatically shut- down. This is a normal protective feature designed to reduce the risk of lost data or damage to the product when used outside recommended conditions. To avoid risk of lost data, always make back-up copies of data by periodically storing it on an external storage medium. For optimum performance, use your computer product only under recommended conditions. Read additional restrictions under "Environmental Conditions" in your product Resource Guide. Contact Toshiba Technical Service and Support for more information.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
It looks like they caught and surpassed apple in this case.
The Toshiba would be clearly better except for the fact that the it is 3lbs heavier, has no support for 802.11g or bluetooth, is bigger in every dimension, has a tray loading drive, has no L3 cache (vs 1MB DDR on the PB), no built-in mic, 10/100 enet (vs 10/100/1000), one FireWire 400 port (vs 1 FW 800 and 1 FW 400) and less than half the battery life.
Where the Toshiba actually is better:
Price. It is expandable to 2GB Ram while the PB maxes out at 1GB. It has a bigger L2 cache (512k vs 256k). It also burns CD-Rs twice as fast (but not CD-RWs)
Unfortunately, unlike the PB, you can't buy it with any empty ram slots. You are stuck with those useless 256MB sticks if you want to upgrade. Heck, you can't even change the ram at all before purchase.
IIRC, the Pentiums used in laptops have to scale way down to meet even their meager battery life estimates, so the Mac will even be faster for non-altivec tasks. I may be wrong on this point, but the rest stands.
Oh, and the Mac has that oh-so-cool glowing keyboard with ambient light sensor.
t'nera semordnilap
A few reasons:
1) It's cheaper. If you don't have to make parts smaller, and you don't have to worry about the problems associated with high power in small areas, it makes things cheaper since you can put a larger heat sink in instead of designing a better air flow system.
2) Swapable bays. Now I haven't seen this laptop (the link is down) but if they use the swable bays, they have to change how things are controled, drives become heavier and it changes things.
3) Duability. While the powerbook and ibook durability is certainly not horrible, the thicker the laptop, generaly speaking the more durable it is (for example, the old clamshell iBooks could be dropped from fairly decent hights with no damage except maybe a busted CD rom cover.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
In my experience, IBM Thinkpads are the one's which are built like tanks.
There's nothing to really distinguish Macs from other Mac clones. Oh that's right, that's because there are no Mac clones. That's why Macs are $3000 and PCs are $500.
Not really... clones were gutting the market anyway but they are a separate issue. x86 machines are $3000 too... and for a few less features overall as well (gigE standard, Airport built-in, PCI-X (coming), Serial ATA (coming) etc.). $500 x86 machines are made from the absolute cheapest and worst parts someone can slap together. I can't in any good consicence call them computers. Macs are actually only $3000 if you buy the most expensive G5. Most Apple hardware is in the $1500-2500 range.
Actually, the worst part is that most LCDs tend to distort colours when you're even a little off of centre. New LCD panels are better, but they still distort to a certain extent. However, full-sized QWERTY and F-keys could've fit quite nicely on that laptop, along with arrow and navigation keys, but instead they attached a keyboard from any other small laptop onto it. A laptop keyboard that I don't have to mistype on the first time I use it would be much nicer, IMO.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.