17″ MacBook Pro

I just spent a few minutes going through the MacBook Pro site of Apple. It’s quite astounding that a 17″ laptop can actually have up to 8 hours of battery autonomy. My own Asus W7S barely has two hours, if I have it in the lowest power consumption profile. 8 hours, that’s huge.

I’m also pretty impressed by the multitouch trackpad. I think that Apple has understood that even if tablet PCs looks pretty cool, they aren’t a product that will work for long, since people will get annoyed at having their screens covered with marks. The more I think about it, the less I want something like that. Instead, the way to proceed is probably via some kind of mega-trackpad, that will take the place of a keyboard. I don’t propose that it would replace the functions of a keyboard, but it could be some kind of large trackpad, kind of like a Wacom digitizer.

Some kind of OLEDs could be used to map a full keyboard onto a surface. That would really be something. The 17″ MacBook Pro weighs 6.6 lbs, that’s only a pound or so more than my current 13.3″ Asus. The MacBook is thinner then my laptop and has the same battery life as an Asus Eee PC, which is really impressive.

The only downside is the $3000 you’ll have to spend on it. I don’t know why the Taiwanese try and reverse engineer the Apple products. In fact, most of them are already made in Taiwan. I’m just surprised that Asus can’t come up with something like these MacBooks.

I’ve talked this over with my roommate and we think that a combination of tools, like a netbook coupled with a larger laptop would be the best option. A netbook to lug around everywhere and a bigger laptop to work on.

Sony hasn’t understood the concept of netbooks. Their VAIO P series has only a 4 hour autonomy. Some of the Asus Eee PCs boast 10 to 12 hours of autonomy.