You forget the matter / wave duality. An electron orbiting a nucleus is a standing wave. There is no moving electron, just a quantum system with an oscillation energy defined by QM. You cannot claim accelerating motion hence no bremsshtralung hence no crash.

Being a Mac user I'd happily trade one of the USB ports of my 2010 MBP for a Thunderbolt port for external display daisy chaining. The laptop's still good enough that I've not had the heart to upgrade to a newer one, but Thunderbolt and retina display are the two big items in my next laptop wishlist.

That's one component I really can't relate to. Since 2004 when I got the first Mac I've only done a power down / reboot when upgrading the operating system (either a minor service pack release or full OS upgrade). You close the lid and you open the lid. The time from closing the lid until the laptop is movable to bag is 0s (it's SSD so shaking won't matter to it) and time for startup from closed lid to fully functional is 1-2 seconds at most.

If you think it's the battery drain that you need to shut down from, then I haven't seen the laptop use the battery really while in sleep. Even a day of flying and traveling with laptop in sleep mode hasn't reduced the remaining battery life more than a few %. So why shut down?

The new MBP Retina ones even have Power Nap functionality that means it'll do a backup while sleeping. This will consume a few % of the battery charge, but you don't need to leave it open for it.

One thing I sure hope is coming soon to laptops as well is the hybrid drive that Apple introduced for the iMac. Basically you get SSD + conventional storage with the OS doing intelligent shuffling of content around so that you get the best of both worlds. Then again laptops are for mobile usage and mobile usage is shaky and bumpy meaning that physical spinning drives do die from it way more than SSDs do. So doubt it'll happen. I just hope that the SSD pricing keeps coming down so that getting a 768GB SSD doesn't cost four figure amounts. Though interestingly enough, upgrading a MBP from 128GB to 768GB adds $900, I had expected more. Still it would be nice if the amount could go up without such steep price increase. I personally don't need more than ca 256GB on the laptop as my main photo library etc is elsewhere, but more capacity while retaining SSD benefits is quite high in the list indeed.

It's still there on some models. At least MBP has it, small unobtrusive button on the side of the laptop that lights up a row of green dots showing the battery level. Works with laptop on or off as you'd assume. I haven't really used it, but it's a nice little feature that is almost invisible when not looking for it.

Really? I think most people are satisfied if there's wifi and cable available. The possibility for 3G/4G is there in a number of laptops, but it's usually easier to get it from wifi hotspot on the phone or a USB dongle for it if one really needs it. I've never had a need for any other kind of networking and can't say it's something that is the most important improvement, not with better graphics and battery life being far higher at the moment.

That's actually something I've not felt as an issue for a long time. The large pads that macbooks come with have had extremely good sensitivity and misclicks are an extremely rare thing if you use tapping instead of clicking. Yes if you have to actually press the pad down to click it'll smudge your action, but if you just gently tap on the pad it'll be on the precise location you wanted it with no cursor movement. And tap+drag is quite doable as well. Right click comes with two finger tap and once you get used to it I'd never change back to having to use multiple fingers to just get a click or to move the finger some distance to get the click. If I could I'd probably remove the click function alltogether, but I think I've accidentally clicked only once this year if that...

Thunderbolt display chaining: http://www.apple.com/displays/

That's one of the features I'm missing from my 2010 MBP that with the mini display port you cannot chain monitors, but with thunderbolt you can.

You sure it's just the thickness? I'm sure hoping that by making it basically unrepairable at home they've also gone the final mile and started to use asymmetric battery layout that allows them to use every cm^3 of space for added battery capacity. I'd sacrifice upgradability for far longer battery life. If you get a high end configuration now you're probably still good 3+ years down the line and at worst you just sell it in after-market and get a new high-end laptop not terribly far from upgrade pricing anyway plus the added benefit of warranty and what else might have come along (thunderbolt for example and chaining monitors is what I'm missing most from my 2010 MBP).

I guess you never use your laptop out of connectivity like say an airplane.

I doubt it's the recharge cycle killing it. It's more likely it's the fact that you keep it constantly charged and the only discharge it gets is the 5 min you use it before you find the charger at home/office. Most lithium batteries keep their lifetime up if they get constant use. Not fully discharged, but close to it. So a commuter that takes the charged laptop and travels around using it only to make it to office and put it to charge again after which he goes to various meetings without charger is the perfect use case. If you only use office and home locations with chargers it's recommended to at least once per month let the battery use up its charge and recharge in full. Not doing that will reduce the usable capacity a lot. I didn't know that when I got the most recent MBP in 2010 and most of the time used it in home and office charger all the time and the result is that after 3 years it's now down to 2h of battery life. Probably would still be 4-5h if I had done at least the monthly discharge cycle...

I don't second that. If the benefits form soldering everything together outrank the possible benefits of theoretical future upgrades, then I'd prefer the soldered version. Having the SSD straight on the mobo as well as the RAM you can in theory have a nice custom design that is slimmer allowing for other things that need to be bigger like the battery pack. Being able to fill every single cm^2 with battery that is not a standard rectangular shape would also increase the battery life substantially.

If the specs of the laptop are reasonable to be also fine in 3 years (like 16GB RAM + 256GB SSD are to be fair), then I don't see a problem as when you really need to upgrade you just purchase a new laptop and sell the old one. There are plenty of people who will take a well configured laptop off your hands and not send it to a landfill so the recyclability is a lesser issue and only comes at the very far end of the lifetime. And then it won't really matter if the SSD is in a 2.5" bracket or soldered onto the mobo as it'll still end up either recycled or in the landfill.

Yes, single component failures would reduce the lifetime of such devices, but hopefully in a tight and integrated system the failure rate is smaller (no bad contact issues etc that might cause voltage fluctuations and damage). Overall I'd not say that is a major concern. I'd rather take 12+ hour battery life in an integrated laptop over 6h in a swappable one...

Just don't get your ass wiping tissue mixed up with screen cleaning one ... oh you mean you don't re-use them :p

From what I've understood from Tim's interviews on this topic (and he's asked that frequently) is not the point of taxes or more expensive workforce. It's the lack of expertise. You guys don't seem to have enough experts to do the R&D and product and material development because of reducing standards in education in comparison to China. Sure they could do the final assembly by drones in US, but why do all the production of high end components in asia, then send the items to US for assembly and then distribute globally. And they do have some parts made in US already (wasn't the gorilla glass part a US development or smth similar).

So according to Tim there aren't enough experts in material science etc to build the factories and keep developing them in comparison. That's the bottom line. Not the assembly line drones. There are plenty of those globally, currently employed by fast food restaurants.

Well if it's data about me (i.e. movies I've made of events, photos, copies of movies that I have around etc etc), then it's a few TB. But if it's data that I actively use, then the whole of LHC recorded data would add to it taking it to a bunch of PB instead, but that's not just mine (though I could take the analysis skims that I've created, those could be maybe listed as mine, that's a few hundred TB).

Decided to vote for the 1-5TB one still :P