test

[TCO]

Awesome! So glad to hear that I was heading in the right direction.

[notyoueither]

Unless they find a reason to void the AppleCare warranty, such as working on a computer belonging to a smoker constitutes a health risk to the tech...

[DanS]

Christ, TCO. 70 lbs? It's a big effort for me to manage a 20 lb. net loss, with the muscle weight gain.

[Asher]

nye: SquareTrade has been criticized many times in the past for their methodologies and data. They had some nonsense numbers about Xbox 360 reliability last year also that MS laughed at. They release numbers people find surprising so they get press, and when they get more press they get more business. They're largely an extended warranty provider for small eBay-based businesses.

[notyoueither]

Did they claim that XBoxes were reliable?

[SlowwHand]

Here's current weight, 160, beginning of December:

Nice, TCO.

[Asher]

Did they claim that XBoxes were reliable?

Ironically, their failure rates were greatly understated. So yes. IIRC they pinned it at 16%. It's in the 30-35% range over the lifetime.

The problem is their figures are not reliably sampled.

[notyoueither]

And you expect to get better numbers out of Apple's or HP's shops?

We have limited information for reliability. Polls from companies that have to fix them are better than nothing, or your brother's peeling paint.

[Asher]

I know what I feel from the build quality of a laptop, and I feel I've a large enough sample size from people who get laptops similar to me and use laptops in similar ways to me. Dells are atrocious, ASUS are cheapily built (go ahead and press in on the back of the LCD panel and watch the screen distort), and Toshibas are mediocre with some appallingly poorly designed laptops (in terms of thermals). The Toshiba tablets the sales force use at work get way too hot way too quickly and it hampers the reliability of virtually everything inside -- they just aren't designed well.

You probably know I'm not a big Apple fan in general, but the MacBook Pros are the current tanks of available laptops. I used to swear by ThinkPads, and the old ones were beasts, but Lenovo has done quite a number on the current models so they're merely average.

But the simple fact is build quality means a lot. Apple, like most other high-end laptop manufacturers, were smitten by Nvidia's design flaw in the 8xxx series GPUs (which all MBPs shipped with at one point) which may skew figures one way or another, but those are all covered automatically under warranty for 3 years (even if the machine is a 1 year warranty). If anything, that'd increase Apple's repair % while not affecting Toshiba (which mostly dispenses bottom-barrel, integrated graphics crap) to nearly the same degree. Still, the build quality and design on the MBP is head and shoulders above anything ASUS and Toshiba produce.

[notyoueither]

I am not that familiar with the Protege. I will take your word for them.

I am curious though. How many Asus notebooks have you had your hands on?

[Asher]

I am not that familiar with the Protege. I will take your word for them.

I am curious though. How many Asus notebooks have you had your hands on?

I've personally only touched one (not in a store), my brother's...and I touched it a lot because it had issues after the first month he bought it, and continued to have issues til he threw it out 2 years after he bought it. He replaced it with a MacBook (non-Pro) and put Windows on it, no issue since.

But I have heard of a lot of things about the ASUS laptops, most of them not very good, from a lot of university friends of mine. ASUS laptops are very popular at schools because they're cheap. And they're cheap for a reason...

[notyoueither]

They are not cheap. Asus is a premium brand, and they charge for it.

Talk about making things up.

[MrFun]

crap...why are the pictures so big.

Who cares what size the pictures are? CONGRATULATIONS, dude.

[Jon Miller]

Nice work GP, I have been back at 185 for the last year (first gaining muscle, than because I took off ~5 months to focus on finishing PhD/etc... really working out a lot right now, should drop back down).

JM

[Dale]

The new MBP's running boot camp Win7. It's a nice piece of work! All our laptop users have them now.

In other funny Apple news, the iMacs in the office couldn't handle the heat the last few days (over 40C) and shutdown. Stupid iMacs don't have fans in them.