Buying A New Laptop - Fall 2011 Edition

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day shopping for a new laptop. And I have to admit this was one of the most difficult research tasks I have had recently. And the results of my research have been most surprising, especially after I found the key element, which is 2537M. Remember this symbol, and here is the story.

Up till today I have been using the already famous on this blog Nokia Booklet 3G. The Booklet has been outstanding in several aspects, with its crown features being the 12-hours battery life in a sub 3 lbs, 19mm unibody package. My personal edition of the Booklet has also featured the ultimate storage speed and security solution available - the 256GB FDE SSD drive. Unfortunately the Z530 Atom processor, while responsible with its 2W TDP for the 12 hours battery life, has been too slow for my recent needs, that are now extended far beyond simple Web browsing. Hence the need to upgrade.

I started with formulating the list of requirements in form of must-have's:

• Displayport digital video out interface (I have the 27" Apple Cinema Display and it has only one input, which is mini displayport). Also, displayport unlike the HDMI, can route out analog signals for older VGA devices, like projectors.
• 256GB of SSD storage minimum (I already use around 200GB and do not want to scale back).
• New generation processor (the primary reason for the upgrade)

And nice-to-have's:

• A good screen with wide viewing angles (I will be partially working as a salesman now, so will often be presenting things to other people sitting by my side).
• Long battery life (it is difficult to give back something you have already had)
• High portability (having problems with my back, I prefer to travel as light as possible)

Somehow the most obvious step was selecting one of the MacBooks - either the Air or the Pro. Unfortunately there have been a number of cons preventing me from hitting the buy button at the online Apple Store:

• No good support for Windows. Yes, there is the Bootcamp, which works very well on my current MacMini, but the biggest problem with Windows on a Mac laptop is poor support for the touchpad. It simply works inferior - bad acceleration settings ruin the experience.
• The Airs have no replaceable SSD storage, so no way to use the hardware encrypted drive. Of course there is always the TrueCrypt software option, but I prefer to stay with the FDE option that has already passed my 4-year test.
• Also the Airs have only the option of a glossy screen. For a moment I was considering the 15" Pro with the anti-reflective matte high resolution display option, but hey, buying a computer with a spindle CD drive in 2011 does not make sense to me. Apple has got rid of the CD drive in Mini, yet it maintains it still in the MacBook? This does not sound magical nor revolutionary. I suspect the entire Pro MacBook line will be refreshed in the near future. Especially the CD option is very arcane these days.

So doing several quite simple searches I found out my list of requirements limits my choices a lot. Which is good. There is just a handful of vendors offering modern highly portable laptops with displayport interface. One of them is Lenovo, which inspired my smile, as I had several Lenovo ThinkPad laptops in the past and always loved them. The choice seemed simple. The X1. Thin, light, fast, all the modern goodies in (including the gorilla glass display), the lovely touchpoint and user replaceable drive. I almost bought it last Friday. But then the warning signs came in. The gorilla glass does not improve on anything in a laptop, but brings a lot of reflections and collects fingerprints. The screen, while bright, lacks contrast. The battery life is mediocre. And the price is high. Sigh.

In despair I looked at the specs of the Lenovo X220. Displayport - check. Intel Sandy Bridge i5 - check. User replaceable drive - check. Battery life - surprisingly good. Weight - inder 3 lbs. Screen - small, matte, and - reports say - very good IPS with very wide looking angles. I started checking on more reviews in deep. Especially informative is the one by NotebookCheck, where I learned the X220 can have either very good or a very bad screen. The difference is 40 Euro. Unfortunately most shops offering the machine did not reliably list which one they actually sell. I ended up tracking this key difference to "Premium HD" attribute and then double checking with the Lenovo site.

And then I realized there were three processor options. The most common i5-2520 (2.5GHz), the high end i7-2620 and the suspiciously looking i5-2537 running at only 1.4GHz, which was slightly more expensive than the 2.5GHz one. Strange indeed. I started digging deeper, going to Intel.com. So what you basically see there, is the 2537 consumes 17W of power, while the 2520 is rated at 35W peak. This is a HUGE difference. Assuming the X220 has 63Wh battery, the 18W difference is worth 3.5 extra working hours!!! Meaning the X220 may reach 10 hours in a sub - 3 lbs package. I was sold. The last step was to check if the performance of the i5-2537 CPU will be adequate to my needs. It seems it will, as all reviews I could find refer to the performance of the chip as "very snappy".

So in short, the result of my research is NYD2TPB, which is the model number for the Lenovo ThinkPad X220 I selected, featuring the 2nd generation ultra low voltage Intel Core i5 CPU, the 2537.

Looking at what I described above, I can only feel sorry for average consumers, who are likely to shell out hard earned dollars for a computer very similar to the one I selected. Yet they have a big chance to get something suboptimal to say the least, with poor screen and a shorter battery life. Even Apple with its, many would say easy understandable, product line, does not help here. I am sure in the not distant future they will release a refresh to the MacBook line, featuring the i5-2537 chips, or the newer i5-2557 siblings.

In the meantime, when you shop for a laptop, look for the 2537 CPU first. This is the key that will open a new level of mobile computing satisfaction for you. Also the choice, as of today, will be fairly limited, probably just to Lenovo or the Samsung 9-series. Which is good and simplifies the decision process a lot.