a month or so ago i was checking dell’s website for new laptops that came with haswell processors. i was interested in researching the new latitude models and hoping to find something with at least a 15 inch display (i was aware of the latitude 14 7000 series already). much to my dismay, i found that dell’s basically dropped all of the customization options for laptops. your only choice is to choose among a handful of premade configurations. and it seemed like the majority of these configurations had integrated intel graphics…no thanks, i know the intel graphics are supposed to be a lot better than they used to be, but that’s not saying much (i’ve confirmed they’re still not that great and have problems running 20 year old games even).

at the time when i was originally searching, the only laptops that had the specs i desired were the alienware ones. i wanted something that wouldn’t look silly in a professional environment though. the closest thing i could find was an XPS 15 from the last generation. surely, there would be a new release of the XPS 15…and there was very recently. today i was checking out the new XPS 15 specs and i was thinking hmm looks pretty good until i scrolled down and saw “integrated battery”. seriously? over $1,000 for this laptop and it will have an integrated battery? i really hate apple for making the whole integrated battery thing an acceptable thing for mainstream consumers. on the ultrabooks front, i’m all for lighter laptops, but at a much higher cost w/ integrated graphics and an integrated battery…no way, not for me at least. an ultrabook can be twice to 3 times as much as a tablet or smartphone. to make that initial investment (which i consider substantial) to basically be guaranteed that you’ll need to toss it in ~3 years because of a battery that no longer holds a charge is unacceptable to me.

i never finished this rant in entirety. i ended up settling on a dell inspiron that’s not too shabby. although it came with a touchscreen that i didn’t really want. guess you can blame that one on windows 8. side note: next time i get a laptop i think i’ll go for a solid state drive.

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