The "New Toys" Thread

We already have one. Also, there's nothing wrong with Dell business laptops.
 
We already have one. Also, there's nothing wrong with Dell business laptops.

This...

I have used Dell business laptops they suck nowhere near Apple in quality not to mention the crap OS...

I've owned two Latitude laptops and had hands on experience with the entire early E-series range and most of the D-series. There's nothing cheap feeling about them in the slightest IMO. My D630 is nearly 7 years old and has survived years of college use/abuse. While its no longer the prettiest thing around, I still use it to this day. The only reason why I don't have my E6420 was due to me fubaring the Failturn...

If I had a consumer laptop, it'd be irreversibly broken by now for sure.

I've no doubt that Apple builds a great laptop, I love their design, but I can do things on the Latitude that I can't on a Mac like easily replace the screen hinge or replace the battery.

Comparing my D630 to a R61 Thinkpad that my school district got via a grant and the D series system feels significantly higher quality. While the Lenovo feels robust, the plastic feels cheap compared to the metal exterior of the Dell. The metal latch on the dell has held up better than the dual plastic larches on the Lenovo as well.

Granted, the R series is a step below the T series...which would be the D630's direct competitor...but I have used extensively a T61 via my college library and it too felt cheap.

Edit: that's not to say I don't like the thinkpad line..I wouldn't mind trying a T400s and the Thinkpad Edge I have at work is nice for a SMB laptop

Edit 2: funnily enough, at the job where I worked with the early E series systems, they were also deploying equivalent HP EliteBook systems.

I liked the EliteBooks more than those early E's.. They were disappointing both from a materials standpoint as well as style. The E xx00 line in particular felt like they were trying to ape the ThinkPad with their all black/dark brushed metal and square look but failed

It was IMO a step back from the D series days. It wasn't until the E xx20 line before Dell got their groove back.
 
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I just ended my tenure with a MacBook Air. Whilst it's a very nice device, I didn't find it useful for anything beyond consuming media.

It was utterly useless for spreadsheet or presentation work.
 
It was utterly useless for spreadsheet or presentation work.
... what?

I can do things on the Latitude that I can't on a Mac like easily replace the screen hinge or replace the battery.

If you think replacing a laptop hinge is easy, swapping a Macbook battery is going to be a walk in the park. As for the screen hinge, I don't think there's anyone out there that's ever had to replace one. :p
 
Ah, you're that kind of user. I get it.

Yeah, Office 2011 is not really on par with the windows version, but I use it on a daily basis and IMO it's fine for what I need from an office suite. And for what it's worth, It's really easy to make custom keyboard shortcuts for any menu item in OS X.

Microsoft is supposedly releasing a new version this year. It's going to be interesting because it feels like MS is starting to pay attention to other platforms again. Having a quality office product on Windows isn't necessarily enough when the customer also likes to do work on their Macbook and iPad (for instance). The new Mac and iOS stuff they've put out recently is nice.
 
Yeah, a user who wants actual usability out of his computer. :p

That's what annoys me about nicjasno's iMac too. You have to trick it to do things you want to do.
 
Yeah, a user who wants actual usability out of his computer. :p

That's what annoys me about nicjasno's iMac too. You have to trick it to do things you want to do.

Ha.
 
So this thing arrived today:

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this was the box it arrived in:
 
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:thumbsup:

At this point, it's pointless to even consider spinning drives for anything other than storage.
 
I've owned two Latitude laptops and had hands on experience with the entire early E-series range and most of the D-series. There's nothing cheap feeling about them in the slightest IMO. My D630 is nearly 7 years old and has survived years of college use/abuse. While its no longer the prettiest thing around, I still use it to this day. The only reason why I don't have my E6420 was due to me fubaring the Failturn...
We use the Dell business ultrabooks at work, they are all made out of plastic, about as thick as my old style MacBook Pro, keyboard is crap, touchpad is worse.



I've no doubt that Apple builds a great laptop, I love their design, but I can do things on the Latitude that I can't on a Mac like easily replace the screen hinge or replace the battery.
Because you don't need to... No seriously... I got a nearly 4 year old MBP, wife has a 5+ year old aluminum MB, hinges are perfectly fine on both and hers has been dropped about 20 times already (including once this morning). Battery on her is easily replaced and was recently, on mine needs a special screw driver but get this its still got good capacity, somewhere around 3-4 hours (used to be around 5).

I don't want to sound like an Apple fanboi, which I realize I do right now but my point is more along the lines that no Dell is not similar in build quality even for their business line and their battery life is nowhere near what Apple manages.

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Excel is an abomination to use on Mac OS. No shortcuts work, half the inputs are menu only and my macros are screwed up.

Whatchu smoking? I've used it on Mac all the shortcuts work just fine, just need to use the command key instead of alt/ctrl. Some shortcuts are a bit turned about but that's more because of how the OS deals with shortcuts I guess.

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Yeah, a user who wants actual usability out of his computer. :p

That's what annoys me about nicjasno's iMac too. You have to trick it to do things you want to do.
Different tools for different jobs know what I'm saying? A lot of people seem to like the Mac for development work, even those who don't code for OS X or iOS. I got a friend who works in a DC where all their workstations are Macs, they support all *nix servers and it's convenient to have an OS with a built in terminal instead of having to screw around with Putty.

There are also a lot of cool things you can do with things like Apple scripts, for example back when I had a workspace at home I had a dock for my laptop with a wired connection. I had it set to turn of wi-fi and run wired only as soon as it got a wired connection and vice versa. You can do all kinds of location aware things with them like say have it automount network shares and printers when you are in the Office.
 
You don't want a Dell... ever...

Cuz they suck?

I don't know man.. I've owned two Latitudes and two Optiplexes.. One of each are still running, and all were built like tanks.

We use the Dell business ultrabooks at work, they are all made out of plastic, about as thick as my old style MacBook Pro, keyboard is crap, touchpad is worse.

Whatchu smoking? I've used it on Mac all the shortcuts work just fine, just need to use the command key instead of alt/ctrl. Some shortcuts are a bit turned about but that's more because of how the OS deals with shortcuts I guess.

Different tools for different jobs know what I'm saying? A lot of people seem to like the Mac for development work, even those who don't code for OS X or iOS. I got a friend who works in a DC where all their workstations are Macs, they support all *nix servers and it's convenient to have an OS with a built in terminal instead of having to screw around with Putty.

There are also a lot of cool things you can do with things like Apple scripts, for example back when I had a workspace at home I had a dock for my laptop with a wired connection. I had it set to turn of wi-fi and run wired only as soon as it got a wired connection and vice versa. You can do all kinds of location aware things with them like say have it automount network shares and printers when you are in the Office.

Hipsters who only work webdev and only ever need to SSH into real machines can live on OSX. People who actually write real software that said servers run (like say, the kernel or the webservers) from the ground up tend to prefer either Linux or Windows, depending on what they're building for. OSX just hides too much underlying functionality to work properly for that sort of workflow. Not to mention outdated fucking everything and a severe disparity between what we run on servers and what we run locally. If you need a VM to do development, you should probably reconsider your main OS.
 
I don't know man.. I've owned two Latitudes and two Optiplexes.. One of each are still running, and all were built like tanks.
I got a still running XPS but running is a strong word for it...

Hipsters who only work webdev and only ever need to SSH into real machines can live on OSX.
I think a lot of people at Google would disagree with you calling them hispters ;)
People who actually write real software that said servers run (like say, the kernel or the webservers) from the ground up tend to prefer either Linux or Windows, depending on what they're building for. OSX just hides too much underlying functionality to work properly for that sort of workflow. Not to mention outdated fucking everything and a severe disparity between what we run on servers and what we run locally. If you need a VM to do development, you should probably reconsider your main OS.

That is true if you are coding for Windows it makes little sense to develop on OS X ;) Linux blows as a desktop OS though, I have that on my work machine (we are not allowed to run Windoze) and I can't even get the mother effing Citrix receiver to work on it despite using a package straight from Citrix.... WebEx also bitches about Java not being installed (spoier alert it is), hell even the TeamViewer client I'm running on it is packaged with wine built in...

I would much rather run OS X or Windows with a Linux VM simply because Linux is just too god damn limited when it comes to normal desktop usage and I'm not even talking about purely consumer stuff like YouTube (which actually works fine). I will take OS X over Windows any day though because regardless of how outdated the shell is (you can just install a newer one from github or macports) it's still actual UNIX underneath with all the functionality that comes with it. This also means that just about any software made for Linux will actually run on OS X, that's where things like macports project and github come in. Mind you if you ever used BSD then you can see that OS X doesn't hide functionality as much as you think, it just goes about it in a more BSD way, which is annoying for anyone used to Linux myself included.
 
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