Thursday, April 29, 2010

Notes on notebooks

BTW, have you noticed that manufacturers are not calling them "laptops" anymore? Since people burned their thighs, they are legally covering their butts by calling them "notebooks" now. That's what I hear.

Note one on the books: they really need to find some space-age materials to make 'em from. I just digged out my 15-inch MacBook Pro, and gawd, is it a monster! We need something as strong/stiff as aluminium, but 25% the weight at most.
(Heck, even my old 12-inch Powerbook seems big and heavy after dealing for a while with the Airbook and the Pad.) (Note: "Powerbook" has a PowerPC processor, and "MacBook" (whether pro or not) has an Intel processor. The latter are newer and much better.)

Second note: if you have a notebook that you're not using regularly, or which is always plugged in, I recommend that you once a month or so let the battery run down and charge it up again. It keeps it alive. I'd neglected this too long with my 15-incher, and now the bat is dead! dead! dead! It's so dead the machine reports "no battery found"!

1 comment:

Bruce said...

There's Apple's MacBook Air. There are also several Windows competitors making computers of similar size and shape, including MSI. They all weigh around three pounds. That's quite a bit less than the current 15" MacBook pro, which weighs 5.6 pounds. Even the 13 inch MacBook Pro is 4.5 pounds. The 12 inch Powerbooks are 4.6 pounds.