I was shopping for a ThinkPad X220 for someone, and it had the option of the regular screen or the "premium" screen for $50 more. They don't tell you what the "premium" screen is or why you'd want it. I presume the regular screen is shitty. Can you even imagine Apple offering such an option? A $1000+ laptop with a shitty screen, with a $50 option to upgrade to a non-shitty screen?
But at least Apple makes it clear what you're getting:
> The 15-inch MacBook Pro comes with a 1440-by-900-pixel LED-backlit glossy display. You can also choose a high-resolution 1680-by-1050 glossy or antiglare display that gives you 36 percent more pixels.
I just took at the Lenovo page for the first time ever. Of all the PC manufacturers, I've probably spent the most time on Dell's, and Lenovo's site looks like a complete rip-off of theirs.
And that display choice is horrible. Like you said, the $50 gets you a "premium" screen, where the only discernible difference on the page is that it comes with a 3x3 antenna instead of a 2x2. I've never heard of YxY as a measurement for antennas, nor is it readily apparent what 3x3 gives me over 2x2 (speed? power?). Not only that, I have to decide whether a webcam is more important to me than a 3x3 antenna because I can only get the webcam (a $30 add-on, by the way) with the 2x2 antenna.
Whatever respect I had for Lenovo (which is more than any other PC manufacturer thanks to their apparently successful continuation of the ThinkPad) just went down the drain. Average people are supposed to get this stuff? Give me a break.
They do, actually. The 15" MBP has a "High-Res" option and most (all?) MBPs have a "matte" display option (~$50 on the base glossy glass screen).
Isn't this at the very heart of every "linux on laptop" screed out there - research your hardware before you buy! So... being able to know or choose what wifi chipset you get might appeal to many geeks. But... you have to assume what you order is what you actually get.
I got a laptop in 2003 for linux. I researched. And researched. I found the one laptop for sale at a local store had the graphics chip FOOXPJ59 in it, which worked with RH6 (or Mandrake, whatever I wanted to use). Plunk down my $1200. Get it home. No dice. Oh... they replaced it with a newer/better FOOXPJ59revC chipset, and there was a WinXP driver disk in the box. But the outside of the box indicated FOOXPJ59 as the chipset. I had to argue for about 20 minutes with 2 managers to get my money back on that after it was opened. They wanted to charge me 15% restocking fee, I was arguing it didn't contain what the box said it did - in their mind FOOXPJ59 and FOOXPJ59revC are the same thing.