thirumalkumaran said:
Ok let me pull the leg of the unibody here....
Guys are you aware that the macs are the ONLY laptops currently made with the unibody process? (Don't say adamo, anybody knows is it available now?)
Its started from a round billet, rolled to a thin block (Rolling increases strength than cutting).
Then loaded to a CNC machine (Obviously everybody knows) cut in multiple times and laser cut for speaker holes (for 15inch & above) and many intricacies (like the standby light window) are added, later sand blasted, anodised and sent for assembly.
You all know these are done in the process just made in the aircraft frames!
You ask CNC vendor he would quote at least 20-25k for the unibody single part alone!!!! (I would do that,I'm in the business)
not just punching and bending some metal parts, drilling holes and covering with some extruded, injection molded plastic.
Damn! are there any manufacturing / Production Engineers here...?
There are a whole bunch of machined laptops out there. Most ultrabooks are unibody. A lot of them are aluminium alloys or magnesium alloys. They are manufactured by the same company - Pegatron. Apple wasn't the first to do it, but as always, they made it popular. If you want the pinnacle of manufacturing and material science, take a look at the Sony Vaio Z - made of carbon fiber. Thinner and lighter than a Macbook Air, faster than a Macbook Pro.
Aces170 said:
I dislike apple for some of their business tactics. But I cannot deny, Macbook is marvelous. A lot of thought was gone in the designing of it, Apple made sure even small things are made right. For eg: the chiclet keyboard, its miles ahead from anything in non Apple world, the amazing large responsive trackpad,
First of all, Apple don't make the keyboards and trackpads - and you find exactly the same Synaptics trackpad in high end non-Apple laptops too. Personally, I dislike chiclet keyboards and find the trend disturbing. But to each his own.
IPS screens with accurate color calibration out of the box.
All Macbooks are TN panels and colours are way off. The displays are made by LG.Display and AU Optronics and for a TN panel they are very good. However, they are still far inferior to the IPS displays you find in non-Apple laptops. The only IPS display in the Apple range comes with the iMac / Thunderbolt/Cinema display - featuring the very same LG IPS panel in Dell Ultrasharp models. Put next to an HP Dreamcolor Elitebook, Macbook Pro's display really falls apart spectacularly. But that is what you would expect comparing a 10-bit IPS display to a 6-bit TN panel.
If I was using a laptop for long periods, I wouldn't hesitate to buy the Macbook. Not to mention the amazing battery-life due to the OS.
I think you are comparing Boot camp Windows vs OS X times on a Macbook. Boot camp Windows do not feature power management and the dGPU is enabled throughout. In reality, power consumption is much the same on a similar battery. E.g. Asus UX21/31 feature exactly the same battery to their MBA counterparts. Battery life is roughly the same, with Windows featuring a slender lead in some usage scenarios. It is just that Macbooks with 80 Whr batteries are usually compared to cheap laptops half their price which have 55Whr batteries. Something like a Thinkpad X220 can get you 20+ hours of battery life with the slice - unheard of in any Apple laptop. While I have mentioned X220, its IPS displays is far superior to anything on any Macbook.
I think another issue is that a lot of people here are comparing a Macbook Pro to cheap laptops like HP or Dell XPS laptops which offer similar configuration for half the price. The comparison should be laptops like Thinkpads, Origins, high end Vaios, Clevos, Maingears, etc.
I am a bit shocked at the amount of myths flying around here. There's a massive variety of non-Apple laptops and many of them are superb products. I have no doubt that Macbook Pros are superior to HP dv series or Dell XPS, but then, they are a fraction the price. Compare a Macbook Pro 15 to a Thinkpad W series and it's a different story altogether...