You misspelled "awfully".

Dude, you forgot the blue-ringed octopus, stonefish, sea-snakes and cone snails (yes folks, there are even fuckin' snails that can kill ya!).


Welcome to Australia!

That's not too hard for deBeers to to spin. "Our New-Clear(TM) diamonds don't just give her a wonderfully radiant glow, they have a glow all of their own." Hell, they could even add a fifth "C" to the classic 4 - Cut, Clarity, Colour, Carat, and now Candlepower.

How so? I'm pretty sure that no-one I know would be even slightly bothered by such an event.

GP also mentioned that nobody is making anything better than 1080p, which is what I was refuting.

My frankenpad began as a T60p (15.0" 4:3, by the way, I forgot to mention that), with just the LCD swap, maxed out RAM, and a 2 GHz Core Duo, and I stuck with Windows 7 on that build (my experience on OS X being subpar, having used it extensively on an iBook G4, and being frustrated with the speed).

Then after a while, things were failing, the chassis was damaged, and I was getting sick of the RAM limitations, so I got a nice refurb T60 15.0" 4:3 cheaply, ripped out all the T60 bits, put T61p bits in (which is what required filing part of the chassis away), swapped my LCD over, and ran with it for a while.

Then, the screen started failing right before the MBPR was announced, so I jumped ship to OS X, and I'm liking it now that I have a fast machine.

It's not your only choice, it's just your only choice that's currently available.

Plenty of 1920x1200 options if you go back to Core 2, a few at Nehalem, and a couple at Sandy Bridge. (Some of those in the Core 2 and Nehalem days are even 15".)

Also, if you go back to Core 2, and don't mind some frankensteining, you can get an IDTech IAQX10, IAQX10N, or IAQX10S panel, a ThinkPad T60 or T60p, and a T61p 14.1" 4:3 motherboard, heatsink, Socket P CPU, and PCMCIA slot assembly, and put them all together. Need to reflash the panel's EDID ROM, and file some stuff away from the chassis, but the end result is up to the following:

2048x1536 IPS display
2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo Penryn
Quadro FX 570M (but crippled, and 128 MiB VRAM only)
8 GiB RAM
Whatever SSD you want, but IIRC it's constrained to SATA 2 speeds (maybe SATA 1, actually)

With less frankensteining, you can run the T60p board, and get up to the following:

2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo Merom
FireGL V5250
3 GiB RAM
Whatever SSD you want at SATA 1 speeds

And, with zero frankensteining, you can find an ultra-rare config of the ThinkPad R50p, which means up to (I think):

1.7 GHz Pentium M
Radeon 9200 or so IIRC
I think 2 GiB RAM?
Whatever PATA SSD you can find

The T61p/T60p frankenstein is what I ran before getting a MacBook Pro Retina, I'm a bit of a pixel whore.

No, that would be an aggressive uterine tumour which should be excised as early as possible in order to prevent many years of mental, emotional and financial trauma. Such tumours are the primary cause of many chronic social ills, including SUV's, sitcoms and stick-figure-family rear window stickers.

Then it is you and not the AC, who risks looking like an ass due to ignoring context previously established by someone that chose not to log in. But it's your reputation and your choice, and you are free to make it.

There were certainly attempts at copy protection, though, largely relating to either weird disk track stepping mechanisms, disk defects that copying software didn't properly copy, and the like. I think there was the odd dongle, too.

Of course, Bumpgate hit all the x86 business laptops with discrete graphics, too. ATI didn't have anything competitive performance-wise at the time, so everyone went with 8000 series Nvidia stuff.

Basically, 2007-2008 was a bad time to buy a new laptop with discrete graphics.

Well, that's kind ofenvironment-dependent.



Oh, come on - you just knew someone was going to do it!