aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, February 16, 2008
The perfet laptop. (Hint: It’s not from Apple)
Apple builds a slick machine and I love my MacBook Pro but I’m telling you it is overrated and overpriced. Mine cost $3,000 and the one on my buy list comes in at $4,000 but every single day Safari crashes many, many, many times (in the crash reports I dutifully send to Apple I write, “Safari sucks!!!!").
To those of you who suggest I use Firefox instead my answer is, I do. And it crashes too. (I don’t send the same missive in the Firefox crash reports.)
Parallels will not run—I have the wrong version, a license issue. 
Shrook crashes.
Keynote crashes.
Notes crashes.
Everything in the Adobe Design Premium package crashes.
Mail crashes.
Preview will not save changes to pdf documents.
I could go on. And on. And on. I’ll spare you.
The students tell me I’m a power user. I’m not. I’m a heavy user and my machine should be able to stand up to that.
I like my Mac and am scheduled to buy another. They’re masterful marketers at Apple and I’m subject to it. That’s the world I live in. But I am no fan of many Apple practices and my world may change.
Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought IBM’s PC business. BusinessWeek reports on their effort to build the perfect laptop:
“Phyllis! Get me one of those interoffice mail envelopes!”
It was just after lunchtime on Jan. 15, and Peter Hortensius was storming through the cubicles at Lenovo Group’s offices in Morrisville, N.C., shouting for his secretary. Hortensius, senior vice-president in charge of laptops, had just heard that Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs had unveiled the supersvelte, aluminum-clad MacBook Air by declaring it the “world’s thinnest notebook” and dramatically pulling it out of an interoffice envelope. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300 notebook was due out in February, after a year and a half in development, and Hortensius was alarmed that it could be upstaged before it even made its debut.
His secretary, Phyllis Arrington-McGee, ransacked filing cabinets until she found one of the envelopes. She handed it to Hortensius, who gingerly slipped the X300 inside. “It fits! It fits!” he shouted.
Perhaps no one was more relieved than David Hill, Lenovo’s chief designer, who stopped by Hortensius’ office right after the envelope experiment. It had been his idea to create the superthin X300, which was originally code-named Kodachi. Hill shared a laugh about the test with Hortensius and later couldn’t resist a poke at Jobs’ latest creation. “I’m a bit tired of looking at silver computers,” said Hill. “I’d never wear a silver business suit.”
The X300 will be officially unveiled on February 26. It is a full-featured, high-end, ultra-thin laptop I’m unlikely to buy (but I may suggest it for my boss). Their goal is a “halo” product to positively reinforce the corporate brand. Walt Mossberg’s got a sneak peak:
[U]nlike the Apple, Lenovo’s new skinny ThinkPad comes with a hefty complement of ports and features, some of the very things critics complained Apple left out. It has a built-in DVD drive, removable battery, three USB ports, and a wired Ethernet networking jack. Inside, in addition to Wi-Fi, it can be ordered with a built-in cellphone modem and even GPS. It comes with either Windows Vista or Windows XP.
Sporting the traditional ThinkPad black slab design, the X300 isn’t as skinny or sexy as the Apple, but it’s still very slender and attractive, at under an inch thick. Also, unlike the Apple, most of the ThinkPad’s configurations are a bit heavier than the 3-pound weight that traditionally denotes a subnotebook. But it still feels very light to carry around, at 3.12 pounds with the standard battery and DVD drive.
The biggest downsides to the new ThinkPad X300 are price and limited storage capacity. Unlike the Apple, which can be ordered with a higher-capacity, lower-priced hard disk, the new ThinkPad will only be available with the expensive, limited capacity solid-state drive. So it will start at between $2,500 and $2,800–up to $1,000 more than the Apple’s base price–and will be limited to a paltry 64 gigabytes of storage.
The BusinessWeek Cover Story podcast adds that sexier colors may be expected in the future. Endgadget’s got a specsheet, a chart comparing it to the Macbook Air, and the X300 splayed in detail.
