I've got an M17x r3. It has 4 slots for RAM. Alienware gets badmouthed quite a bit, and it really isn't deserved. My M17x is built like a tank and it has an excellent keyboard. The components are also pretty easy to access for upgrades. I suspect many are put off by the way the machine looks, but if you disable the tacky lighting it looks like any other black laptop.
It's a great computer, but there are two major drawbacks. The first is battery life. With the dGPU enabled, it gets about 65 minutes. Any machine with such a powerful GPU is going to be about the same. It's more like 2-3 hours using the iGPU. The second downside is the extreme weight. The device itself weighs about ten pounds, and it's accompanied by the largest AC adapter I've ever seen. The adapter itself probably weights at least 3-4 lbs.
I really like it too, but I may finally try a Mac when they refresh the retinas. I'll probably get more work done without all of those distracting video games anyways.
I really like my MBP. I am very productive on it. 16GB isn't quite enough when you have a few virtual machines running for things.
Windows 7 for some game dev
CentOS6 for a test webserver before I deploy to production.
OSX as the host running browser, e-mail, XCode, iTunes, iOS Simulator.
I have found so far that an up and coming, unreleased, operating system does dramatically decrease my overall memory usage, so this might help keep 16gb viable for me for a while yet.
I also thought that, .1.5 years ago, but where are we? 8GB RAM, sorry that's not enough. Most importantly you cannot upgrade the RAM, SSD or ANYTHING else. Everything is hard soldered and you pay for the most basic stuff like Ethernet extra. People told me it's not possible to install Gentoo or Archlinux on it, is that true?
I have the latest, non-retina, MBP. So I can upgrade the RAM (running 16gb now) and I removed the superdrive and put in 2 x 750GB 7200rpm drives and striped them together.
I am perfectly fine on a non-retina. There is a difference for sure. When I go to my iPad 4 I surely appreciate the retina quality. For me it was more important the expandability than the screen.
I don't know, I called the Apple hotline twice to ask if more RAM is possible or using a better SSD like the ones Intel makes, but they said: Sorry that's no possible.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad W520 with 32gb RAM and a 2.4gh i7-27600QM, and i'm totally in love with it. If you don't need the portability of ultrabooks (and you can't have it + 32gb at the moment), I would recommend it to anyone.
Incidentally, I regularly deploy W530s at work, but usually with 8gb RAM.
Lenovo seem to be doing it sensibly - the core Thinkpad line is still very well made, cheaper (and more cheaply made) products are offered under the Edge and Ideapad brands.
Hmmm I bought a T400? And it lasted for 8ish years IIRC.
Due to my stupidity I killed it ( I forgot how, it was probably so stupid that I had to erase it from my memory).
I bought a refub T510 (2-3 years ago IIRC), there's a dead pixel near the middle of the screen and the headphone jack is going out. There is some flex at the speaker area and cd area, and the power adapter gets hot often (it might be the linux distro drawing too much power for some reason).
2nd you Sir! That's what I'm also after!! RAM is cheap, very cheap, but I don't want a "DTP." It should have an Apple like quality or better. (I called Apple and they don't offer it, regardless of how much I'd pay extra for it.)
Alienware laptops look normal if you turn the lighting off, or switch the color to white. They also completely destroy Sager as far as build quality goes.
Sager laptops are rebranded Clevos. Clevos give you decent components for a good price, but they have horrible keyboards (almost to the point of defectiveness) and generally mediocre build quality.
Alienware laptops were also rebranded Clevos until they got bought by Dell. Now they're rebranded Dells. Twice the weight, twice the price, big flashy alien skull, and that's about it. Build quality is perfectly fine for Sagers, and if the "defective keyboards" bother you, you can just swap with a better one. Not to mention the keyboard on an AW I used a while back so uneven it felt like rubbing a camel's back.
When Alienware were rebranded clevos, they sucked and they cost an astronomical amount of money. Dell's XPS series, when it was their top of the line gaming series, were amazing. Now, Alienware computers are built to the same standard that the XPS gaming laptops were, and it's a high standard.
My M17x had the fastest video card available and it was only 1800. That's not really that expensive for what it was.
On my personal laptop which is a 15" Sager, I find that the keyboard is decent. It doesn't feel as good as typing on a high end mechanical keyboard but I find it is fine for a laptop.
I have thought about that! I just can't find a good "bang for the buck". They are either really small in size and cheap or really expensive but larger in size. I dont see a middle road.
