Are you actively trying to induce carpal tunnel? As someone who's used the same unibody MBP for almost 5 years now, I can say it really doesn't impact your wrists, and it's hard to imagine an ergonomically sound posture where it would.



Put a bullet in your plastic laptop and see how it fairs.

Note that that's the older generation of machines which were significantly flimsier than the Unibody models.

Or drop a couple pounds of bookshelf on it from 6 feet up, like I did to mine, which is still functioning 2 years after the accident.

Now that is rugged! How did you feel when you first saw the damage to your laptop? It looks as if it had been hit with a high velocity bullet. It's very reassuring to hear and see that it is still functioning two years after the bashing it had.

That one isn't mine. It belongs to a kid in Brazil who was shot at while being mugged.



Yes. I'm quite pleased. The blunt trauma on mine isn't quite so dramatic, but it put a large dent in my speaker grill and squished my DVD drive shut. Nonetheless, the speaker still works just fine, and the DVD drive reports itself as present and correct in the system hardware check even though I can't get anything inside it.

Network optical drives FTW!

If I were to overpay for a laptop right now I'd have to go with either the rMBP or the Chromebook Pixel. Those screens are just too nice. But I know Kerm doesn't care about picture quality considering his setup in his apartment. ;)That said there is a reason Workstation class laptops such as the high end thinkpads or the Dell Precision line are not made from aluminum.

Are you completely stupid? If you shot a plastic laptop with that perfect of an angle it would hold up just as well. The key is the bullet didn't hit anything important, the aluminum casing itself offered zero protection against the bullet.

Here's the protection a macbook offers against actually getting shot: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2009/12/15/macbook-bullet-ermno-pics/

Oh, look at that, it's destroyed completely.



See above, are you completely stupid? Plastic laptops can easily take that as well. Aluminum is flat out weaker than plastic, there's a reason ruggedized stuff is made of plastic and not aluminum. Aluminum is very light and nice to the touch, but it's a very weak material.

There's a reason the line of laptops with a reputation for being tanks is made of plastic (that would be the thinkpad btw), and not an aluminum unibody.

Although, the plastic ThinkPads are the lower-end ones. (Same goes for the plastic Dell Latitudes, and presumably the plastic HP business machines.)

That's not to say that there aren't a lot of plastics on the higher-end ones of all brands (I'm not familiar with the HPs, but the lids on the Dells are all plastic or nearly so, as far as I can tell, and there's certainly a lot of other plastics like palmrests and trim), but the good business machines ain't all plastic.

Dell and Lenovo have both been using magnesium frames for quite a while now, and Dell's using magnesium and other metals on the exterior of the machine now, too (and they even advertise that fact right on the machine, that the bottom cover is magnesium). Actually, that's not exclusively the domain of business machines - I have an iBook G4 with a magnesium frame, too.

I had an older ThinkPad with a cast magnesium base (before they used a discrete frame). Many ThinkPads use a titanium-reinforced ABS in the lid, and a few ThinkPads have used CFRP in the bottom cover plastics.

additionally, plastic is much better at shock-absorption, meaning that a fall is less likely to damage fragile bits.

I can vouch that plastic is much better at shock absorption. Also that replacing a laptop's LCD yourself costs $80 materials plus your labor, vs. $750 or so from most manufacturers.