Apple's "new" battery technology???

The new MacBook Pro family has a breakthrough battery that runs for up to 7 hours on a single charge (8 hours on the 17-inch MacBook Pro).1 And thanks to advanced chemistry and an innovative new charging method, it can be recharged up to 1000 times — nearly three times the lifespan of typical notebook batteries.2 All in a notebook that’s as thin and light as ever....

Anybody remember Leading Edge?

They had a 22 month warranty (why not 24 I don't know). I bought a new D325 back in 1990 and ran a AX.25 BBS & packet node on it 24/7/365. After 20 months’ use I discovered it would not always warm boot and would less often successfully cold boot. The shop determined that “something” was failed on the motherboard. Leading Edge was essentially in failure by that time and it took about a month to find and ship a new board, but after it was replaced I continued on with the machine until early 2000, by which time the machine and it's mission were both technologically obsolete.

Unlike any Macbook it WOULD anchor a good sized boat. It was a huge old workhorse, with 8 slots and 6 bays, and it was stuffed full with 4 MB of RAM plus the optional 100 MB drive and ATI 256 color VGA card, all for a cool $1500 with no monitor.

After retiring it, on a whim I hooked up a drive that had Win95 on it and I'll be darned it took forever, but it loaded.

I . . . [won't] pay $119 for a battery after 1 year of service after spending $3000 on a laptop. First off an Apple replacement battery is more than likely over $200, probably much higher than that even. Secondly cars are more user serviceable even with newer cars.

Part of the issue of the expense of maintaining a Mac is the cost of updates to the OS. Strictly speaking you don't have to update the OS from, say, Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4) (using a historical example). It's just that eventually you get to where you might want some software which requires the later version, if your hardware holds up and you don't ever get hardware upgrade lust. The reality is that the fact that you can expect the option to upgrade OS X actually adds to the value proposition when you consider buying a Mac. OS X upgrades have not tended to be hardware resource hogs, so upgrading the OS by itself is generally - but not universally - an option.
In that respect it is interesting that Snow Leopard is to be less a traditional extension of the OS X user feature set than a consolidation of the software basis of the OS_X/multicore_Intel Mac platform. It will not support, and thus marks the obsolescence of, the PowerPC which lack the multicore CPU technology towards which OS X.6 is being optimized. With its features being largely development rather than user-facing, the 10.6 Snow Leopard distro will be lean and mean. And at its $29 price point (and without any sales to PowerPC Mac owners) it will not be much of a cash cow for Apple. To me, it looks more like a statement about the ability of OS X to allow developers to exploit graphics processors and multiple 64-bit cores than it does a consumer product as such.
I assume that the image stabilization feature of iPhoto '09 will exploit that processing capability, but it'll be interesting to see how else it's used. Games would be an obvious possibility, and I would wonder about speech processing - which I consider to be still in its infancy compared to what it's likely to become - as well.

And since most Macbooks and laptops in general are 17” or greater

Wow, when you make up "facts"you really go whole-hog. don't you? The fast majority of Apple laptop sales, and laptop sales in general, are in the 13"-15" range. 17" is the largest screen available from Apple, and from a brief check of the Web, the largest available from Lenovo and Dell. Sony, Toshiba and Compaq each have a single 18.4" model.

it was a little snarky for you to quote the lower of the 2 prices to compare with the $130 price of the Compaq.

Is the Compqg a 17"? If not, I posted the most direct, precise comparison of apples to, ahem, Apples.

$179 freaking dollars for a battery!!!! Just damn... I wonder what the upcharge for a proprietary battery like these new Li-Poly batteries will cost? I am only guessing

You don't say?

but they will probably be more than $179...

They are $179. The page I cited gives the prices for the built-in LiPo batteries in the currently shipping Macbook Pro -- in other words, the exact batteries we're talking about.

Sounds like you got a competent Mac GENIUS!!! Their knowledge is astounding. Again, as I have said since they started boasting this ridiculous and smug moniker, there is NOTHING “genius” about these liberal dufuses.

The questioner didn't say what happened after the "genius" decided that it was a software problem. If the software was third-party, that could be an issue - but if the problem manifests itself when using Apple software, it is still and Apple problem - and I wonder what the tech did next.
As to calling a tech a "genius," that's a diplomatic way of saying that the tech can handle problems which the customer can't - without suggesting that the customer is therefore an idiot. I'm a retired engineer, and there are plenty of technical things which I don't pretend to know. My wife is a competent person who can keep a checkbook better than I can - but who just happens to be, compared to me, woefully weak in analytical math skills. She recently asked about a problem I could have solved when I was in grammar school. Just no algebra skills at all. Do you call people like that idiots? The world is full of them - and some of them, including my wife, aren't even liberals!

Blue Highway must be the most knowledgeable technical guy in his trailer park.

I’m sitting here with a new unibody MacBook Pro 17” that has 8 hours battery life, a drop-dead gorgeous display, and OS X which never has any problems with malware. I happened to be at Best Buy yesterday. Looked at the competing Sony, HP, laptops and just laughed.

If you must have a Yugo go ahead and buy one. Poor baby.

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