It seems like there ought to be a web site somewhere that has specs on "all" the available laptops and would let you filter by their specs. But I can't find it. Am I stupid? In particular, the specs I'm interested in are screen resolution and physical dimensions, including weight.

Is this helpfull?

http://www.hardware.info/en-US/productdb/bGNkbJg/grouppage/Notebooks/

Edit: Or this dutch site? Schermresolutie=resolution, Gewicht=weight

http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/496

The first one doesn't allow me to search by resolution or weight. The second one is pretty close, except it includes laptops that are not currently available. Thanks.

This is where being a platform or brand zealot helps narrow down the choices right up front.

Part of the reason I want this is that I'm totally amazed that laptop resolutions are relatively lower now than they were like 5 years ago. Yeah, they're all widescreeny, but who the fuck cares about that? Okay, people who watch a lot of movies on their computers, but what about business users?

Case in point: My office is full of IBM ThinkPad T4x laptops. They have 14.1" 1400x1050 screens and weigh under five pounds. In order to get a screen of the same height, you now have to get a 15.4" screen, which increases the size of the laptop dramatically, and I don't think you can find one that weighs less than almost six pounds.

And, yes, (at least) for business use, height is the important screen dimension. If you're coding, you want to fit more lines on the screen, not make the lines longer. If you're working with a word processor, you want as much of the (almost always) portrait-oriented page on screen as possible. There's nothing inherently wrong with making the screen wider, but it makes laptops bigger and heavier, while either reducing the height or, at best, leaving it the same.

Also, having docking stations be a requirement helps narrow things down quite a bit, too. There are only four vendors I'm aware of that provide them, and one of them is Sony, and if I wanted the kind of support I would get from Sony, I'd just buy a different brand and then dial random digits on the phone. In fact, I'd probably be better off. I figure there's a greater chance of a randomly dialed person being able to help with my issue than there is of a Sony "support" person being able to. Heck, a "this number is not in service" recording probably would be more help.

(The others being Dell, Lenovo, and HP/Compaq, BTW. Let me know if you're aware of others.)

It sounds like you want a notebook with a rotating screen.

The argument for wide screens is that you can lay up multiple (though smaller-looking and higher density) pages.

I'm not sure you're going to find something new to fit your ideals. Which is why you're looking for that nice table comparison. You're going to have to come to some decision to balance the physical screen dimensions, weight and pixel density just for starters.

Personally, I don't have a problem with the higher resolution screen options offered by Apple as an example. The increased density means additional clarity for smaller type sizes as long as your vision isn't lacking. The physical sizes of the screens are acceptable. Weight is about the only issue, but I think I'd pretty much always want lighter, regardless of how light the product already was.

Connection to an external display can solve your dimension/resolution problem with or without a dock, depending on the graphics capability of the computer. Macbook Pros can output dual-link resolutions in portrait or landscape for instance. I'm not sure how many other brands offer rotation (or accelerated rotation like the Macs) built-in.

I was only semi-joking about the zealot comment, but I can't seriously consider any notebook products from any company other than Apple at this time. There's just nothing out there with even close to the same build quality.

I'm still blown away to see VGA connectors on almost every new notebook by the clone makers. VGA!? Redonculous.

Rotation was available in ATI, Intel and nVidia drivers for pretty much everything that I've used. As for whether its accelerated I've no idea as I've not used it.

Heh.. until one goes to a conference and then observes the daily panic as presenters suddenly realize their precious notebooks won't accept the industry standard projector cabling (15-pin D-Sub).

Sure there are dongles available, but oddly enough they seem to get forgotten/lost by those presenters quite frequently.

I just find it amusing. My own main notebook has both VGA and DVI-D duallink on the back.

Cheers

One of the classrooms in which I teach has both a VGA and a DVI cable. I plugged my MacBook Air into the DVI and, after three minutes of fidgeting, gave up and switched back to VGA. For better or for worse, VGA is the standard, and it does the job.

Sorry, it took me a second or two to figure out what your complaint was here. I'm assuming that the first laptop you mention is a 4:3 display, and the second [hypothetical] laptop is a widescreen 16:10 display?

If that's the case, I understand what you're saying, but I can also see an opposite way of thinking: mainly that you can make a widescreen laptop just as wide as the 4:3, and it'll be lighter because it's shorter. I know this was an appeal in the last office I was in because it meant that the attorneys who flew quite a bit would be able to more easily use a widescreen laptop on a tray table if the person in front of them leaned back.

Anyway, I remember Dell offering screen choices on a couple of their models**, but I think your best bet is going to be Lenovo. I'm not certain about their consumer sales, but at least in their business side you could pretty much customize the heck out of their laptops, which included screen resolutions.

*edit*

**Looks like the XPS M1530 offers a choice of 15" widescreens: 1280x800 or 1440x900.

Wow, my experience with in-depth testing of all things VGA and DVI has been the opposite. That DVI for the most part just works and VGA has been hit or miss, mostly because of the displays, not the computers/firmware. Generally problems with going to resolutions not supported by the display and then getting no image or broken image. Every DVI device I've ever tested has always had a proper EDID so the computer always knew which modes to select.

The only thing I can possibly suspect with regards to the Macbook Air is a fault in the firmware of the ultra-crappy integrated Intel GFX.

DVI is also passe but will stick around for some time. Display Port is where it's at now.

Yeah, sorry. The T4x laptops are 14.1" 1400x1050.

Let's assume your scenario, that I'm interested in 1400 pixel width and would like it smaller. In order to get the closest equivalent, I have to go with 1440x900, which is available, at its smallest, in a 15.4" screen. (Correct me if you can find a smaller screen with a similar resolution. Please. I want to know about it.)

Using some basic trigonometry (and assuming the pixels are square), you can discover that the dimensions of those screens are 11.28"x8.46" and 13.06"x8.16". So it actually is shorter. That said, with the T41p and T61 I have at my desk, while the actual LCD panel is shorter, the lid is exactly the same height. Why? Because they can't (or won't) reduce the depth of the main body where the keyboard is, and the lid has to have the same dimension.

But the DPI is significantly lower with the widescreen one: 110DPI vs 124DPI. There are also almost 12% fewer pixels.

Factor into this the extra weight that the widescreen laptops inevitably seem to have (I don't know what to blame this on), and it's just not worth it.

Not to be picky, but I'm only aware of one option, on the 17" MBP, which frankly should be the default on a 17" screen. I'm still hoping for a 1920x1200 15" MBP screen, but figure I'll have to do it myself if I actually want one before snow leopard.


If it's gotta be a PC, buy Lenovo. Their low end models are now low end, but their midline and high end lines are still better than any other PC laptop maker.

Matthew

No docking station, no business use.

Apple really needs to wake up on this front.

I'm using a PowerBook with a 1280x864 screen right now, so all of Apple's MacBook Pro models are higher resolution options. When I wrote that I thought they had both a 1440 and 1680 resolution option for the 15" model.

1920 on a the 17" model may be too high for some people. Remember that you generally can't adjust most font sizes in Mac OS interfaces. In fact I only know of adjusting the icon label font size.

I'd like my next notebook to be a 17" MacBook, but I'm already worried about the UI issues it may bring at 1920. I've been waiting some 5 years for them to add controls to the OS for this. Windows, for the most part, has had much more detailed user-level font control since at least Windows 95. But Windows sux, etc. etc..

Yup. In a similar fashion to Bitt, I'd like a laptop with a high resolution screen that doesn't weigh a lot. All of the laptops with a high resolution screen are all boat anchor style desktop replacement systems.

My old Dell Inspiron 9000 boat anchor style laptop had a 15" 1600x1200 LCD and it was actually pretty nice in terms of resolution. That LCD + a light system would be great for me. The majority of my work is actually done on a server anyway and I don't need the rest of it to be blazing fast and incredibly heavy.

The new Dell Latitude E6500 has gotten very good reviews for its build quality, and it has a higher resolution screen, is slightly lighter, has a more featureful docking station (specifically, 2 DVI ports instead of 1 DVI plus 1 VGA), and is (very slightly: about $50) cheaper than the equivalent T61.

I'm taking a chance and getting some of them in. I've not been wildly impressed with the Lenovo T61s I got in. Nothing wrong with them, but not as good as the IBMs.

I've never had any problems with VGA. It just works. If the display doesn't get detected then you just set whatever the maximum is.

You don't have to worry about HDCP and whether its single or dual link. You can hot swap VGA with no problems just by moving the cable. Once you start getting things that use HDCP then you need to reset things or get a HDCP compliant switch box.

When you hot-swap a VGA cable you generally won't have a visible display if you switch to a monitor that can't handle the resolution you were just outputting to the previous monitor. Unless things have changed in this respect, hot-swapping only worked perfectly (resolution didn't matter) with digital connections, at least on ATI Mac hardware. I can't speak for the Windows drivers and firmware.

The rest, HDCP and single/dual link aren't concerns for most people out there. Dual link only matters if you're trying to drive a dual-link display. HDCP is only going to matter when you're playing back protected content on a platform that implements the protection.

VGA also doesn't look as good and for me that's more than a little big important. Every Mac can output to VGA from its DVI-I connector with a dongle if necessary. I'm assuming any clone notebooks offering only a DVI port offer the same capabilities, no?

I like to have at least one system around with legacy ports, but I don't want a notebook with a serial port nor parallel port on it either. I wouldn't mind it if Apple would have kept the S-Video port on their notebooks though, since it allowed using two external displays and turning off the built-in. Now you're limited to using the notebook's own display if you want to connect to an NTSC/PAL monitor at the same time.

I've never tried plugging a device that was outputing a higher resolution DVI signal than the display device could accept. It is the display device that does the "magic" in this case though.


HDCP seems to get automatically enabled if it can do it. I've not worked out how you can change it in either OSX or Windows.


True. On my desktop I use DVI. The issues with my hotplugging are mainly from occasionally unplugging the desktop and plugging in my PS3.


Nope. Some are DVI-D only.


I'd actually like to have a serial port and parallel port still. I'm not bothered about the S-Video port at all. Total opposite of you

Lots of embedded devices still use a serial port for various reasons. I could use a USB dongle but its just a hassle to have to remember to lug that around and it doesn't always work properly either.

I've got plenty of device programmers and other odd devices that require a real parallel port and not the USB printer port dongles.

You can get honest-to-god UART-based PC Card serial ports, which, I've been told, work pretty consistently. Not that that solves the "lugging it around" problem. Or the "laptops won't have PC Card slots much longer" problem.

There are probably equivalent parallel port PC Cards, too.

I use my old desktop for the devices that need a proper UART serial port and real parallel port. Thankfully the things I need to use with my laptop all work okay (so far) with a USB to serial dongle.

My VAIO actually has a CardBus slot and a ExpressCard 34 slot which is a bit odd. Sony bundle a combo memory card reader for the ExpressCard slot. The first time I saw it I thought eh? Sony have some bizarre custom slot just to fit in a card reader device? Sony being Sony, the laptop actually has a built in MemoryStick slot in the side as well. It would have been easier and nicer to just have the combo reader built in...

ExpressCard doesn't help because most ExpressCard devices are actually USB based ones. Not seen many that use the PCI Express part of it yet.

I just did a quick search and found some that are PCIe.

I guess I've never considered the Air to be a netbook. I suppose it's technically an extremely high-end netbook (small, light, no optical disc reader, SSD), but it's so ridiculously far out of the price range of the average [or even the next most expensive] netbook that in my mind it's silly to even include it in the same category.

Personally, I'm hoping to get a Dell Inspiron Mini 9. When the deal was going on, I should have asked if anyone here was interested in getting the Studio 15 laptop. $99 was an incredible offer for the Mini 9.

Mmm.. Judging from the hotest new products out there, HDMI is where it's really at.

Cheers

HDMI is just DVI-D plus audio.

Ah, don't worry about the offer. It only applied to 'full price' Studio 15 laptops which were $250 more than what anyone normally pays anyway.

I ordered a Mini 9 for my sister a short while back and should be here in a week or so. Quite looking forward to playing with it, looks pretty neat.

Back to the original topic...

I agree that there should be the equivalent of DPReview.com for laptops.

Laptopreview.com is nothing like dpreview.com.

Maybe we should band together and start one.

Work gave me a laptop to replace my desktop during my last refresh cycle. The only port I really miss on it is the Line In. No more empeg at work for me until I get around to getting the digital audio card installed