I joined the IT Industry as a full-time career in January 1992. It’s now January 2018 and in June ’17 last year I bought my very first laptop. WTF? 26 years and you’ve never bought a laptop? Yep. For all of my career I’ve worked for IT integrators and have been supplied with the core equipment required to perform my role. Which obviously includes a laptop. I’ve had a myriad of them and have even performed the evaluation of them to recommend what to purchase for technical staff. From memory I’ve used for extended periods laptops for vendors such as Compaq, AST, HP, IBM ThinkPad, Dell, Microsoft (Surface RT/Pro), and Lenovo ThinkPads.
So when it came time to purchase my own and now that I and a lot of us are in the BYOD (Bring Your Own Desktop) cycle, and we’re in a highly IaaS/SaaS/PaaS world what do you buy? How do you work these days and what do you need from your daily interface into the world of an IT/Identity Professional? Here is the process I went through when evaluating my purchase last year.
What don’t I do anymore?
What do I do?
What did I want?
In essence what I considered mandatory were;
What did I find?
I found out pretty quick, that when you hit the latest i7 Processor, 16Gb of RAM and 512Gb of HDD spec machines you are instantly in the AU$2500-AU$3000 territory.
Looking around at what I got for that and from manufacturers I’d had positive experiences with left me with a pretty short list:
What did I get?
I purchased the Lenovo Yoga 910. I managed to get a deal on it in Platinum (silver over black) with the latest i7 Proc, 16Gb RAM and 1Tb of SSD. It had touch screen, finger scanner and with a deal and coupon actually hit my original thought estimates on pricing.
Did I get what I wanted/needed? Happy?
I wrote all the above when I originally made my purchase decision in June last year. Six months on, what are my thoughts?
This is a solid workhorse. It is light and is a great form factor. The finger scanner is quick and accurate, much more than the one from the X1 Carbon. It is fast and quiet. The 4k screen is fantastic. The coating on the screen leaves less of my finger prints on it too. Whilst I don’t regularly flip it over into tablet mode, I do when I’m commuting and not on crowded transport.
If there is one fault that I’d have to point out, it’s the battery life. I was dubious about the claimed battery life of 9+ hours and maybe I didn’t pay too close attention to the conditions under which that’d be realised. Essentially I’m getting around 4-5 hours battery life with normal use. That is still better than my old Lenovo X1 Carbon. I do see 9+ hours estimated, but that’s when all I’m doing is typing and it’s in flight mode. That’s not normal operation for me.
Another important item to keep in mind, is that the unit has two USB-C ports (one which you will normally have the power pack plugged into), and one USB 3.0 port. This means you need to think about the devices you normally plug into your laptop. External mouse (non-Bluetooth or wired), keyboard, docking station, monitor(s) etc. I use a Bluetooth headset and mouse, but often present at customers sites via VGA or HDMI. You have to buy USB-C to VGA/HDMI dongles to be able to continue to do that.
All in all, I’m very happy with it. I’d happily recommend the Yoga 910.
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