The new Apple Macbooks are great, but Hybrid Tablet PC Notebooks have way more features. Which should you choose as a designer? Here’s my take on it: I use a Mac tower at work but I use PCs at home (Running Windows XP instead of Vista of course). I followed all the latest news on the Macbook and Macbook Pro revamps on Mac Rumors up till the day they were released, then went to see them in person.
The design of the new Macbooks are obviously years ahead of PC notebooks. The Macbooks are smoothly built, great heat dispersion, and OSX is great for design work. Upon asking if they had a Macbook available, I was going to purchase one right there and then. No stranger to my impulsive purchase decisions, my girlfriend stopped me by pointing out that I should check on PC notebooks as well. I thought that it was only fair I do a proper pre-purchase research.
I went to Costco to roundout my research when I saw a cool little 12.1″ HP Pavilion TX2623CA notebook for $300 cheaper than the Apple Macbook. At this point I was still leaning towards the Macbook because I didn’t have a computer with OSX at home and I wanted to fill in that void. But check out this list of Pros and Cons:
Apple Macbook:
Faster CPU @ 2.0 Core 2 Duo, 2 GB Ram.
HP Pavilion TX2623CA:
AMD Athlon X2 QL-62 Dual-Core (equals to around 1.6 to 1.8 Core 2 Duo), 4 GB Ram.
Apple Macbook:
Great heat dispersion, more advanced track pad, looks very sleek, runs OSX.
HP Pavilion TX2623CA:
Heats up very quickly and needs a cooling pad or laptop fan, not as sleek looking by far, runs Windows.
At this point the Macbook is slightly ahead even with the $300 difference. Then I read on and saw the awesome features the HP has:
Features:
Fingerprint reader, memory card reader, Altec Lansing Speakers, touch screen, rotatable/convertible tablet screen(can flip the screen to collapse into a tablet configuration), built-in wacom tablet on screen, 2 headphone jacks, standard remote control.
Screw the Macbook. The HP costs less, has more ram, a cool finger print reader that I can show off to friends, a rotatable screen that I can use for adhoc presentations Tablet style, and a built-in screen wacom. The Wacom Cintiq 12WX (12″ Wacom tablet with a built in screen) costs $1,000 by itself. And now if I buy this HP I get it built-in already? Now that’s a great deal.
With a built-in Cintiq Wacom, I can use Photoshop or Painter to sketch out a few masterpieces or take notes during presentations. I was going to hook up a regular Wacom tablet to the Macbook anyways, but now this makes it infinitely more convenient.
Needless to say, I fell in love with the HP TX2623CA and been using it since. But what do you think of my decision to sacrifice OSX in exchange for additional features? Am I nuts?
Well, yes you ARE nuts, but we <3 you anyway.
Andrea_R´s last blog post: In case of Zombie attack
OMG!! yes, you are nuts hehe.. OMG!! Argh!! I was just at best buy a few days ago after buying my macbook (the one your referring to) and my brother in-law showed me the touch screen tablet pc (very similar to yours) and with in 30 seconds I was disgusted by the differences I felt altogether from using my macbook. There was no multi-touch and it was gawke and loud. OMG I am so sorry your girlfriend stopped you from getting a new macbook!
ethan west´s last blog post:
haha I definitely think that the Macs look way better of course. However, in terms of hardware features, hybrid notebooks are still better.
Actually the HP models all started to have multi-touch screens a while ago (make sure drivers are updated), not sure if the trackpads are multi-touch though.
One bad thing about PC notebooks compared to apple though… they are much hotter. The heat dissipation technology on the Macbooks are light years ahead.
Now if Apple would just come out with a touch screen hybrid tablet macbook, that would be awesome.
The 2GB ram in the macbook is DDR3 ( the worlds fastest ram) and all other pc notebooks use DDR2 ram, I forgot to put that in the other comment.
ethan west´s last blog post:
I don’t think DDR3 makes that much real-world difference compared to DDR2. Though DDR3 prices have dropped significantly to attract customers to upgrade.
The biggest difference with Mac vs PC is that multi-tasking on a Mac is 50-200% more efficient than on a PC.
I’m a designer and tend to have 3-8 graphics related apps open at any point on a Mac. When using a PC though, I try to keep it to only 2-3 graphics apps open at any time. Stability and speed issues.