Fist things first: Yes, I know it looks like a MacBook.
OK, moving on...
My 6-year-old iBook has been on its last leg for quite some time now, and I finally decided it was time to upgrade. The price of a new Mac was a huge deterrent (as well as the fact that I'm just, well, over it) and there are several nicely-spec'd PCs for well under $1000. I started doing some research and settled on 3 similarly-priced laptops. A Toshiba, an HP, and a Sony. I refuse to buy a Dell because of that infuriating "Lollipop" commercial.
When I went to check them out in person, the Toshiba had an awkward keyboard layout. All the keys were completely flat, with no contours, and felt awkward. There was a 10-key pad squished in on the right side, and the touchpad was off-center. Overall, it just didn't seem quite right.
The HP had some bullshit artist-edition circle design on the case. Any company that would pull that shit does not deserve my money.
Then I saw the Sony. Sleek, light, and beautiful. It was about half the thickness of the other two and has all the features I wanted, plus a Blu-Ray player. Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive.
The only units they had in stock had already been "optimized" by their tech support team, and the charge would be $70. Are you fucking kidding me? I'm not paying $70 to have some teenager remove the bloatware from my laptop. I had to speak to (read: yell at) a manager, and they finally decided to waive the fee. Fuckers.
But I walked out with a pimped-out machine for 1/3 the price of a MacBook.
First impressions are positive, but not great. It wasn't quite as fast as I had hoped it would be, but after disabling Sony's proprietary applications and turning off the shitty virus scan it runs much smoother. I thought this fucker was optimized????
I was going to install Windows 7 on it today, but will likely wait another couple weeks, mostly because I don't feel like dealing with it.
There's a pretty cool "instant-web" feature (not sure if that's really what it's called, but that's what it does. The software is called SplashTop). With the laptop powered down, I can push this button and a small Linux distro will load and run a web browser. It takes about 5 seconds, as opposed to a couple minutes of waiting for Windows to boot up.
Like I said, these are just first impressions. I like the design and the specs, but I'm not a big fan of proprietary software, which this laptop is loaded with. Once I'm able to load it up with my own apps, music, and photos, we'll see how it fares.
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