Microsoft recently offered to loan me a high spec Lenovo X220 laptop. Given I am planning to buy a Thinkpad sometime in the near future I thought why not. There are many things I like about the machine. For one thing it makes pretty much everything a little snappier – the Intel Core i7 chip is a beast frankly. <\/p>\n
In performance terms an obvious long ass job is video rendering and encoding: on that score it absolutely screams. A job that took about ten hours now takes about 30 minutes! I suspect the GPU is something to do with it. <\/p>\n
But personal performance is something else, and the charm here is the SSD. Its easy to forget that in many respects Apple’s core competence is packaging<\/em> the latest awesome components into great user experiences. Apple always buys up the stock of the latest awesome components – before anyone else. It practices high end volume purchasing very cleverly.<\/p>\n It strikes me that one of the things about the iPad is its sheer availability, which is to my mind more about snappiness than form factor. Why didn’t I usually whip out of my laptop on a Tube train or whatever? Mostly because by the time it booted up and so on it was time to get off. Having a laptop with an SSD drive is just SO AWESOME. I find myself reaching into my bag a lot more often to use the machine now. It plays the role of a tablet.<\/p>\n Of course there is all kinds of IoS awesome with the iPad – I use one at home all the time. But great “tabletness” doesn’t mean not having a keyboard; it means being ready to go, on the go, whenever. I have spoken before about power consumption as a differentiator and while the X220 isn’t tablet-class it gives me a good real four hours or so of work.<\/p>\n The x220 is acting like a tablet. I am finding that interesting.<\/p>\n disclosure: I still use Windows, Microsoft is a client, and as stated above… the machine is a loaner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Microsoft recently offered to loan me a high spec Lenovo X220 laptop. Given I am planning to buy a Thinkpad sometime in the near future I thought why not. There are many things I like about the machine. For one thing it makes pretty much everything a little snappier – the Intel Core i7 chip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microsoft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-Ua","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}