The Great Laptop Quest Part 2: The Hardware

Previous: The Great Laptop Quest Part 1: Software Support

Okay, so we know Ubuntu Linux supports all the applications I need in my work and most of those I like to use for pleasure. Now it was time to find a laptop with the necessary hardware features, service life, and aesthetic characteristics.

I looked at quite a few specifications online. Having used Apple products for the past several years, I was very much out of touch with the current state of the art in non-Apple OEM products. I assumed all Intel-based laptops would be comparable. I was disappointed in the relatively lame hardware configurations offered by other OEMs. In the 15" display range, all the OEM laptops offer relatively poor display resolution. The other Intel OEM equipment lacks integrated Bluetooth support, and not all products offer Bluetooth even as an add-on. Many of the OEM units lack an IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire, I.Link, or Lynx) port. Many OEMs are still installing tray-style DVD drives instead of the more reliable slot-style drives. Backlit keyboards are treated as special upgrades rather than basic features.

A sturdy full-size keyboard is an important consideration for me, as well. I do a considerable amount of typing, and keyboard longevity has been a problem for me not only with my current MacBook Pro but also with past laptops, particularly those from Dell and Texas Instruments (probably a moot point).

Support for dual monitors is another useful feature. I like this feature when making presentations.

Eventually I was able to find only a handful of OEM laptops that were comparable to Apple equipment. I was surprised and a bit disappointed at just how short the list of candidates turned out to be. If only Apple's quality rose to the level of their coolness factor!

The price differential was so extreme that it became a decision factor for choosing the replacement equipment for the MacBook Pro. I found that I could obtain two laptops and pay less than one-third the price of a single MacBook Pro comparable to the one I'm replacing. The 15.4" MacBook Pro had always been a compromise size: Small enough (just) to carry to meetings and presentations, and large enough (just) to serve as my workhorse platform for everyday work. With the price differential greater than 3:1, it was feasible to consider a higher-end laptop that had more of the hardware options I wanted and that had a larger display, along with a "netbook"-sized unit for presentations and note-taking.

I found many favorable customer reviews regarding the Toshiba Satellite series, representing the higher-end product range, and the Acer Aspire One, representing the netbook product range. Customers were writing that they had purchased their second unit, and their first unit was still in good working condition after 4 years or more. If these units last 6 years and cost 1/3 the price of a MacBook Pro, then the total cost of ownership will be 1/6th that of a new MacBook Pro. It's hard for coolness alone to compete with numbers like those.

So, the "small enough and large enough" criterion could be met simply by purchasing one large laptop and one small one. No need for a compromise on size!

Global electrical system support is largely a non-issue these days, but it was still worth investigating, just in case. Optional power supplies and third-party adapters take care of this requirement nicely.

I must say no other laptop compares to the Mac in terms of aesthetic appeal. The highly-regarded Toshiba Satellite and Acer Aspire One units aren't bad-looking, though. In an era when most laptops still look like plain black slabs, the Toshiba and Acer stand out without looking garish.

Based on my assessment of software and hardware, my Mac replacement would consist of these two units:





My plan: Configure the Toshiba Satellite P500 with an 18.4" display as a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux as the default OS and Windows Vista as the alternate. Use the Acer Aspire One to run presentations and handle similar work-related tasks. Its pre-installed Windows XP environment is fine for the purpose.

Next step: Ubuntu-Vista dual boot configuration on the Toshiba Satellite.

The Great Laptop Quest Part 1: Software Support

Previous: Macrilege!

As a consultant and knowledge worker, I use my computer for writing; preparing and giving presentations; developing spreadsheets with graphics; and writing, testing, and demonstrating software in various languages. These tasks call for software that supports document authoring and desktop publishing, image manipulation, presentation slides, and all aspects of software development including version control and test environments suitable for local deployment.

For exchanging files with clients and colleagues who use Microsoft Office, I need word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software that can read and write Microsoft Office file formats. Support for Windows fonts is also helpful, since most of the formatting issues that come up with transferring presentations between software packages have to do with font support.

As a consumer, I use my computer for surfing the web, viewing videos, listening to music, organizing my media files and syncing to my portable media player, and playing casual games, where "casual" means games like Tetris or Minesweeper rather than those like Warhammer or Halo 3.

Both for work and for pleasure, I also need the basic facilities people have come to expect in a personal computer system: Wireless networking capability, Bluetooth support, CD/DVD reading and writing, good display resolution, acceptable perceived responsiveness, and so forth.

The software support described above constitutes my needs in a laptop. Regarding wants, it would be nice to be able to watch DVD movies on the computer, to make phone calls using a service such as Skype, to organize and play my media files, and to sync my portable media player.

I installed several software packages on Ubuntu Linux under VmWare on my MacBook Pro to see whether Linux met these needs (and as many wants as possible). My findings were encouraging.

OpenOffice installed easily, worked well, and supported all my requirements in "office" software. The tools I use for Java development all work well - Java, Maven, Eclipse, etc. The tools I use for Ruby development all work well - Ruby, Rails, etc. I had problems getting NetBeans to start. I experimented with using Geany as the IDE for Ruby development, and found it satisfactory even if not as feature-rich as NetBeans. I understand there's a product called Mono that enables .NET development under Linux; that sounds interesting, but I didn't check it out for purposes of this investigation. For version control, I've been using subversion for quite some time and I've been transitioning to git. These programs work fine on Linux.

I was able to install Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL with no difficulties. I found it easy to build and deploy Ruby on Rails applications and Java webapps to the Apache environment. All the tools relevant to this type of work are well supported on Linux.

The mind mapping program I'm accustomed to using, FreeMind, works the same on Linux as on any other platform. For other tasks I perform on the computer, I had to try out different programs than those I had been using before. This turned out to be no problem at all. Gimp came pre-installed on Ubuntu, and works fine for my image editing needs. I found a news reader called Pan that has all the functionality I need. I installed ffmpeg and found it works fine for converting media files. A program called Banshee worked fine as a media library organizer and media player, although it is not able to sync my Zune. Banshee actually proves the case for Mono, since it's a .NET application. In addition to the basic Unix-style utilities for managing archive files, Linux supports ZipCreator, unrar, and several other tar-like and zip-like utilities.

Firefox is the web browser that comes with Ubuntu (Gnome), and it was already my personal favorite so this was a natural fit.

I like to use a wiki to maintain notes and reference information locally, for my own use. I had been using Confluence personal edition for this purpose. According to Atlassian's website, it's supposed to work on Linux, but I was unable to get it to start. I downloaded Instiki and manually converted my wiki pages; it wasn't too burdensome, and forced me to review the contents and delete out-of-date information, which was a useful exercise anyway.

I could not verify hardware drivers and firmware in the VmWare environment. I had to rely on information in Linux forums online to assure myself that the necessary support was available. What I read sounded promising.

It was not feasible to verify that Skype would work under 64-bit Linux, since my MacBook Pro is a 32-bit system and Skype does not (currently) offer a 64-bit version of its software for Linux. I did find explanations online of how to install the 32-bit verison of Skype on a 64-bit Linux system, so this sounded promising, as well.

There is one Windows-specific application in particular that I use: Music Publisher from Braeburn Software. I made no attempt to check out comparable software for Linux, because I strongly prefer this particular product. I will have to run it on a Windows system. This does not affect my assessment of laptops for professional use and general personal use.

The only disappointment was that I could not find a way to sync my Zune using Banshee (or even by copying files manually). It seems the Zune is not recognized at all as an external storage device. This is true both in Mac OS X and in Ubuntu Linux. Apparently, the Zune is specifically designed to work only with Microsoft Windows. This is not a show-stopper for my assessment, although it would be convenient to sync the Zune with my primary laptop.

One of my requirements about software was that the system demand an "acceptable level of tinkering." What does that mean? Well, most operating systems don't "just work," like a toaster. Mac OS X comes closest. Microsoft Windows requires tinkering to get rid of a lot of annoying little reminders, helpful hints, confirmation dialogs, security warnings, advertisements, talking paper-clips, and pre-installed programs that nobody wants. Windows demands further tinkering on an ongoing basis to keep it free of malware. Unix and Linux systems have a reputation for requiring a high level of technical tweaking just to get them into a usable state and keep them operational.

For my purposes, an "acceptable level of tinkering" falls somewhere between the tinkering the average consumer would accept and the tinkering a computer science major would accept. I have a technical background, so I am capable of learning and understanding whatever tinkering might be required. However, my goal in using my personal computer is not to tinker with it endlessly. I want my new system to be easy to use, but I'm prepared to do a bit of manual labor to get everything installed and configured properly.

With that in mind, my VmWare assessment of Ubuntu Linux passed the test.

As far as software support was concerned, Ubuntu Linux was looking good. Next step: Check out the laptops available from vendors other than Apple.

Macrilege!

Apple customers are funny. They...that is, we...seem to have almost a cult-like attitude about Apple products. Over the past few years, nearly all my colleagues have purchased Mac laptops. At user group meetings, conference presentations, training classes, on airplanes and on client engagements they pull out shiny new MacBook Pro laptops almost to the total exclusion of any other product. That sort of reverence seems a bit silly; it's just another company, after all. Yet, it's part of the Apple customer culture. Maybe that's why I feel compelled to justify my recent decision to move away from the Mac platform. Maybe, too, it's why I feel an irrational sort of guilt about it.

I've been a happy Mac user for about five years now. I've got no complaints about Mac OS X. The problem is the cost of ownership of the Apple hardware. My MacBook Pro (the second Mac I've owned) is in need of replacement, and it's less than three years young. I've replaced the keyboard, and worn out the second keyboard. I've replaced the battery and the power supply. The display has many dead pixels and uneven brightness. The machine has started to exhibit intermittent scary behavior having to do with electricity, causing the occasional mysterious crash.

Okay, so why not just get a new MacBook Pro? Well, my first Mac, a PowerBook G4, cost about $2,500 and was serviceable for about two years. It still runs today, but not reliably enough to use for anything important. The MacBook Pro cost about $3,000 when it was new. A comparable replacement today would start at around $3,600. When beefed up appropriately, it would be around $4,000 to $4,200. With an expected useful lifetime of around three years...well, it just doesn't add up.

Non-Apple laptops don't run Mac OS X. Has Microsoft Windows improved to the point that I can work with it happily? Based on my occasional use of my wife and son's Windows Vista machines, I would say "No." Not to worry: There are beaucoup versions of Unix and Linux out there. One in particular has become relatively user-friendly: Ubuntu (and its cousins).

So, should I just dump my Mac and buy a one-way ticket to Ubuntuland? It turns out that I'm just a tiny bit too risk-averse to take such a rash step. To find out whether Ubuntu could meet my needs, I made a list of my needs and then loaded an instance of Ubuntu Linux under VmWare on the MacBook Pro to check out the available software.

When I thought about what, exactly, I actually do with my computer, I was surprised at how modest my needs really are. I spend a lot of my time working on the computer, but it seems I spend that time doing just a handful of different tasks.

My software needs:

1. Support for all the types of work for which I use my computer


2. Acceptable level of tinkering needed to configure the system and keep it running

My hardware needs:

1. Support for all desired hardware features


2. Reasonable initial price and total cost of ownership


3. Portable, yet large enough to be a comfortable platform for work; and small enough to be convenient to carry to conference sessions and business meetings for giving presentations and taking notes


4. Usable on different national electrical grids, since I travel in my work


5. Reasonably nice-looking; doesn't look like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Thus begins the search for a new laptop! Next: The Great Laptop Quest.