Submitted by “In this article, I’m going to be dealing in hard facts, coupled with a little bit of conjecture and speculation as to the future of mobile computing in 2006. When we look back on 2005 we can see it as primarily a year of transition. Since the debut of Intel’s Centrino platform, coupled with ATI’s release of the Mobility Radeon 9600, notebooks have been maturing as a competitive computing platform at an alarming rate. While I don’t really think 2005 will be remembered necessarily as a banner year in new technologies, I think it was a strong transitional period. Mobile technology is maturing at an alarming rate; in 2006, we’re going to see some major milestones.”
…those nice big hard drives coming down the pipe soon.
The rest just isn’t all that interesting to me because I tend to want anything I buy to be capable of supporting multiple operating systems so as to avoid lockin. The majority of laptops with good graphics seem to come with ATI chips and those are practically worthless. I had an old HP Omnibook 6100 complete with ‘Designed for Windows XP’ sticker that absolutely broke when updated to Service Pack 2 because ATI claimed the driver responsibility was HP’s and HP said it was up to ATI to support their chipset. Which basically meant I could either stay with WinXPSP1 and use the OEM provided Windows 2000 drivers (yes you read right…looking at the infs made it clear these were noting more than hacked drivers for W2K) which only worked with XP up to SP1 or move to SP2 and accept the lousy performance from the Windows Compatibility’ drivers.
Linux? I could never get ATI’s drivers to work. I’ve yet to have an issue with nVidia drivers on all three of my nVidia cards. So the new wonder ATI video chipsets that spank all the nVidia chipsets don’t exactly fill me with joy.
The same goes for most of the rest of these new Notebook Technologies. THe faster processors mean inevitably I’ll have worse and worse battery life. In fact the author of the article denigrates battery life and insists that having the fastest or CPU with the most cores most bits is the primary factor when it comes to CPUs!
I won’t be interested in the new Intel Macs until they’ve gone through quite a bit more revision and I’ve seen some evidence as to how Apple plans to use their newly enabled DRM capabilities.
Windows Visa? You’re joking right? This is the D.igitally U.nusable M.edia Operating system right? The reviewer himself says so. Not to mention the OS will come with DUM hardware to ensure that you can do even less with your media than you were able to before. Heck for all we know with Visa’s hardware requirements being what they are it may very well turn out to be either impossible to install a different OS on these (including older versions of Windows) but it might work out to be a violation of the DMCA to even try!
–bornagainpenguin (who wonders if he’ll even bother buying a new laptop in the next few years)