I want to replace my laptop as it's getting a bit long in the tooth so I've been looking at the specs for these things. I find it hard to believe that most laptops are sold with a naff resolution 1366x768, seriously!! This is the same resolution as my budget lappy bought in 2008 so why haven't things moved on? Asus seem to be the only company making 1080p standard, and you can stop pretending that 900p is full hd, you know who you are (Sony).
I seriously considered apple since they have a nice screen and keyboard...however, I kid you not a similar spec machine all apart from the screen res costs around £1500 let me say that again £1500 and that's pounds sterling not dollars, more for apple, for that money I want a diamond coated screen made from crystalised unicorn tears sheeesh how do you justify that markup? Still I guess some people have more money than sense since this basically says they value a screen at £1500 I wonder how many pounds per pixel that is?
Backlit keyboards!?!? Why FFS are they not standard? OK this is something that Sony do get right, in fact I am not going to be too harsh on Sony since although they lie about full hd the laptops do look nice and are only slightly more expensive than laptops that don't have backlit keyboards. Whilst on the subject, why does the UK seem to get the crappier models of laptops? There is a host of ASUS N56 that do have backlit keyboards yet none are available in the UK, unless that is your writing a review for the company in which case the better models are supplied.
Sooooo many lappies have spinning rust drives? What's the point, especially what's the point with all these 5400rpm drives, if it's power that's the concern then kit it out with an SSD they're really not that expensive anymore.
Another thing, for gods sake why oh why is windows 8 shipping with non-touchscreen laptops, it's a bugger to use unless your touching the screen which is after all what it's designed around.
This ones a kille too, why does every 15.6" laptop have a numeric keypad? It makes the touch pad off-centre (that's off center if your American) and simply gets in the way, my old Acer has one and I assumed it was a gimmick of a cheap brand but it isn't. So for the sake of a few number buttons that I use very infrequently I have to put up with getting rsi and a bent spine!
Do laptop manufacturers ever actually ask the public what features they like, because there are plenty of people that feel the same as I do.
So basically what I want is a 15.6" laptop that has an optical drive, 1080p screen, plenty of processing power i7 (although i5 would probably fit the bill), plenty of ram since I do like VMs ~12-16Gb, a backlit keyboard that doesn't have a naff numeric keypad with a 250Gb+ SSD, at least 1 usb3 port all in a case that doesn't flex when you pick it up by a corner and not costing more than about £800.
