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Comment by industrialdesgn | Hacker News Reader

Macbooks are great in their own right but they don't (in my opinion) fill the gap left by earlier Thinkpad laptops, for several reasons: Lack of removable battery, fewer options (msata, main sata, secondary sata, 3g etc), VGA for presentations, trackpoint, ease of access to internals, value for money, etc.

I have looked into HP Elitebooks but I have been burned by HP and seen so many others burned by HP that I hesitate to invest in them.

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I'd stay away from HP laptops. They make fine servers and their desktop machines are acceptable, but HP laptops are pure junk. Dell is better than HP. Others are better than Dell, but there's no reason to buy a HP.

I agree with most of your points about Macbooks, except the VGA one (Mini Displayport to VGA is $15) and the price one (Thinkpads are ONLY about $100~150 cheaper than a comparable Macbook Pro, as long as you compare like-with-like).

The biggest thing Thinkpad has over Macbook is the huge 9 cell extended battery, replaceable batteries, and the "slice" battery. You really can get over a full day of unrestrained usage on a 9 cell Thinkpad with the 4 cell slice (easily 12+ hours) running Windows. And while the MBP's battery life on OS X is impressive, if you run Windows on the thing (either bootcamp OR virtually) you'll cut your battery life down to 2-3 hours.

PS - 3G/4G within a laptop is totally not worth while. Too buggy/problematic. Just buy a "MiFi"-like device (mini standalone 3G/4G to WiFi hotspot with battery e.g. TP-Link M5250). They are inexpensive (MUCH less than paying for the 3G/4G laptop upgrade), can charge over USB (so the laptop's battery can power it), and provide a nice straight forward WiFi signal "anything" can use. They "just work."

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