What brand laptop to get?

I wouldn’t suggest the Macbook Air unless you really, really need a thin notebook. Because while the thing is pretty and very cool looking, as usual Apple thought of aesthetic design first and functionality last. :(

There is a great review of the Macbook Air in the February 11th edition of Business Week magazine, but I’ll give you a quick summary…

On the plus size the Macbook Air has a 13.3” screen and full sized keyboard. It also has a pretty powerful processor and decent ram BUT Apple uses a hard drive that is smaller than the one in a Ipod classic!! It only gives you 80 gigs of storage space and the drive itself is kind of slow compared to full size hard drives or even larger laptop drives.

Another bad design feature and probably one of the worst aspects of the machine is the connection port on the side. When you lift up a little door, you have access to the external monitor port, a headphone jack and ONE freaking USB port. Which may not seem like a big deal until you realize that there’s no CD/DVD drive and so if you want to use an external one you have to use that USB port, Which of course means that unless you buy an adapter or a USB splitter or hub, you can’t use any other USB device (ie: mouse or printer) at the same time.

The battery is another issue as it’s sealed inside the case. So you can’t have one charging while using a second one to power the machine and thus keep your Macbook Air alive for virtually unlimited time. Even if you get the full 5 hours of battery time that Mac claims, you’ll still be hard pressed to not have it die on you after a good day of use.

There’s also the problem of connectivity. The Macbook Air uses wi-fi exclusively. There’s no ethernet port, and no place for a broadband wireless card. (cellular wireless express card) So you’re stuck with using a USB wireless modem if you can’t get a wi-fi signal and again, god forbid you want to use another USB device while using that.

All in all, I think Mac made a beautiful product but I think as usual they made some poor choices between design and functionality. I mean come on guys EVERYONE hates that darn one button mouse. :)

It really comes down to what you need in a laptop. Even more so than with a desktop machine, you really need to decide what is it you’ll be using your laptop for before you buy. Laptops manufacturers HAVE to make some compromises simply because they can’t cram everything into such a small case. Thus knowing what you expect from the machine will go a long way towards making a decision on which one best suits your needs.

Once you’ve decided what exactly you need the machine to do, then check out some of the links here:

http://www.consumersearch.com/www/computers/laptops/reviews.html

. The reviews there should help you decide which of the laptops on the market are in your price range and have the options you need.

Hope this help,

• SN2S