milozauckerman said:
I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how a 1.66-inch thick laptop is a horrifying ball and chain to carry around for eternity, but 1-inch laptop is like carrying a bag of golden feathers floating on pixie dust.
Actually, I said that the 17" MBP weighs a ton and is absolutely huge. It's at the absolute limit of what I call "portable", personally. If you added half again to the thickness, an inch in both horizontal directions, and over a pound to the weight, it crosses the line for me. As in me personally--there are plenty of people, I'm sure, for whom that line is above where the AlienWare sits. There are, likewise, plenty of people for whom that line is WAY below the 17" MBP's size.
The point is, you pay for compact in laptops--ALWAYS. That particular AlienWare is simply not in the same class of laptop as the MBP. I'm not saying it's better or worse, but it's not an A to A comparison. You are, basically, getting what you pay for in both cases.
Now, there's PLENTY of room to argue that Apple should make a fatter, cheaper laptop (like low-end Dells) or a fatter, faster one (like that AlienWare) but they don't. They likewise don't make any ultrathin/ultralight laptops yet, so there's no comparison on that front, either.
With laptops, you really do need to take the form factor into account rather than just stats. I mean, if you're not taking the size into account, then you could complain that that particular AlienWare gets its butt kicked by the MJ-12 m7700a with the option of an Opeteron or Athlon FX processor, dual hard drives, a 512MB Quadro graphics card, and a mess of features. It's also over 2" thick, weighs 12 pounds, has a 1.5 hour battery life, and has a 2-pound wall brick. The difference, I'd hope, is obvious.
