That $500 (or below) Laptop Is A Piece Of Crap

All the time, you hear of alleged deals of laptops. These deals often place laptops in $500 or below price point. Often, buyers of these machines think they are scoring a deal. They think that $500 can, in this world, get you a laptop comparable to a $700 not on sale. So every year during the Black Friday sales, people go out and buy droves of these cheap laptops. When buyers unbox and even boot up these laptops for the first time, everything seems to be fine. However, after the first month of owning these cheap devices, their buyers begin to realease their gravity of their mistakes. But don't just take my word for it, here are some reasons to back my potentially controversial opinion. (aka the faults with my first 2 laptops [both a Toshiba and HP so the haters can't say this is brand issue])

1. Substandard Parts: My first laptop falls into this category. It was made of a cheap plastic that probobly couldn't even survive a 1 ft drop onto my carpeted floor. (Due it's ridiculously cheap feel, I was somewhat afraid to actually test this out.) Even if it was possible to treat this cheaptop well enough to avoid flaws, it was still destined to fail. You see, after only 1.5 years of owning the laptop, the laptop's display's backlight conked out. Therefore, the display was useless. Ultimately, the repair bill was more than cost of another laptop so I bought an HP. (I really hadn't learned the lesson I am posting about yet)
2. Craptastic Performance: The HP laptop I bought to replace my Toshiba (which was hucked to the nearest recycling center) seemed better. It had a whole 3gb of ram (upgrade from 1gb) and 320gb hard drive (upgrade from a 100gb one). However, the one tradeoff was an Intel Pentium already 2 years old at the time (a 2007 era processor in 2009). To top this all of, this laptop was running Windows Vista (a OS that is so bad Bill Gates even hates it http://youtu.be/p6qIETRCxbw) Needless to say, the computing experience afforded by this laptop is on good days subpar and on most days terrible. 

Well this post might read as rant, please my warning to heart. I ultimately spent about $1000 in my quest to get a good laptop and ultimately came up way short. For about $700 I could have bought I laptop I would still be proud to use today. I also could have bought 1 "prohibitively expensive" MacBook Pro that would have lasted even longer. (PLEASE, don't take that a me being a Apple Fanboi. If I ever owned a MacBook Pro the very first thing I would do is install Windows 7 and use that exculsively)

Unboxing: Incase Magazine Jacket for iPad 2

I really am a big fan of the Apple iPad case so I wanted something similar for my iPad 2. After trying a bunch of different cases from Best Buy I finally found the perfect one: the Incase Magazine Jacket. It is thin, light-weight, protective, productive, and stylish.

www.goincase.com

YouTube

Unboxing: iPad 2 vs iPad 1

A while back ago i did a comparison of unboxings between the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4. Since it was a sucess, im doing the same comparison unboxings of the iPad 2 and the iPad 1. The iPad 2 is in black, 32GB, WiFi and 3G. The iPad 1 is black, 16GB, WiFi. 

Check out my YouTube channel, TheDependable1

More YouTube Changes?

YouTube is an amazing place on the internet. It's where most of us content creators publish our videos to be shared with the world. In fact, there's so many of us that YouTube reports 24 hours of video being uploaded every minute! Updates to the site are often necessary, however we all know how they've been doing what seems like random and unneeded changes lately. They might be at it again...

Can you see the difference? In this image they've moved the "likes" information and made a couple other small changes. I found this image through MKBHD on Twitter and haven't seen this layout myself, but it could be coming. Why? Why do they need to change those things? Why do we need yet another unwanted and seemingly pointless update? It's bad enough that us content producers experienced decreased views from the homepage update, we don't need or want any more.

YouTube will always make changes that we don't like. They have no reason not to. It's not like there's any other video site with nearly the same exposure or community. We're not leaving YouTube - and they know it.

Follow Dylan Combs on Twitter

iLife '11 — the all new iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand

Apple recently announced their latest upgrade to the iLife suite during the “Back to the Mac” event in October. iLife ’11 includes new releases of iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand. Apple did a great job in adding more advanced features while maintaining their trademark simplicity. The upgrade is priced at only $49 USD and is definitely worth the price.

The incredible new iPhoto has added support for Facebook/Flickr and sharing photos through email. The changes to the full-screen mode allow you to utilize every pixel of your display to its fullest. Apple has also improved the slideshows feature with new transitions and themes. Their book/card-printing service has been updated and now allows for more customization of photo albums and holiday cards. iPhoto continues to keep its “Faces” and “Places” features, as well as its great image retouching tools.

The album view in iPhoto's full-screen mode looks amazing.

iPhoto's face recognition automatically recognizes faces in your photos and allows you to tag then.

The biggest change in the suite is in iMovie. Apple has added a “movie trailers” feature that makes producing short teasers for your films a breeze. Choose a series of clips you would like to use, fill in the credits, and choose a theme and iMovie will automatically stitch together a professional-grade trailer for you next movie.

Apple has also included more advanced audio editing tools in iMovie ’11. Audio clips are now color-coded and provide options for adding fades and filters. Another new feature is what Apple calls “one-step effects”. With the dozens of new effects, such as “instant replay” and color correction, your iMovie project will definitely stand out from other home videos.

iMovie ’11 has also included more exporting options, including iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple TV, QuickTime movies, and more. You can also publish your videos directly to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and even CNN’s iReport. You can also create a video podcast and send it directly to Podcast Producer.

iMovie '11 give you more control over your audio.

Making professional trailers has never been easier.

Making great music in GarageBand has never been simpler. The iLife ’11 upgrade introduced Flex Time, a function that fixes timing issues when something sounds a little off.  Flex Time allows you to manually move, stretch, or shorten individual notes without changing the rest of your recording.GarageBand ’11 adds more guitar amps the Apple’s library and allows you to reproduce the sound of foot pedals with new stompbox effects. Apple also included many new instrument lessons with the update.

Flex Time makes it easy to fix timing errors in your music. 

Apple's instrument lessons make learning the piano or guitar fun.

More lessons can be downloaded or purchased from the Lesson Store.

iLife ’11 allows you to do more with your photos, video, and music than ever before. In iPhoto, you can enjoy your photos in the new full-screen modes. You can turn your home videos into professional films with the latest iMovie and create the perfect soundtrack within GarageBand. iLife ’11 is included with every new Mac, but every existing user should consider the upgrade. If you enjoyed this post, please check out MacDesign, a blog centered around graphic design and video production on the Mac platform.