I've always hated the "divide" between home (entry), mid-range, and business and high-end (or gaming) notebooks. Taking into account the reliance on desktop GUI performance and the fact that modern GPU's can almost be seen as a separate processor able to take huge amounts of load from the CPU given the right applications and motivation to do so, it feels wrong to still use the "business notebook" spectrum as a valid entity, business notebooks essentially being a gaming notebook without a decent GPU. I've always had so called "business" notebooks with huge amounts of memory and CPU power, yet, I've recently changed to a so called "gaming" notebook and the performance and productivity gain on my "business" applications have been considerable (Visual Studion 2010, SQL Server 2008, Crystal Reports 2008, Office 2010 etc.). What they should be focusing on really is reliability and stability when it comes to a "business" notebook (whereas I'm glad they mentioned HDMI outputs in the article, not sure though if this is based on considerable GPU improvements or just basic resolution output improvements). My feeling is that since gaming notebooks are designed to take pressure from the most stressful applications known to the average user (which are almost always games) there should be a more fundamental shift towards complete, reliable, stable high-performance machines with all-round performance gains (even mid-range specs with decent graphics performance will do) versus those with basic Web browsing and document editing etc. in mind that come with built in graphics processors like on-board Intel GMA45 etc. There's nothing as crap as having a modern, expensive "business" notebook with all the bells and whistles, only to find that the most basic graphic intensive programs are kicking the holy crap out of it when needed, and we're not just talking games here anymore, a lot of basic windows applications today are designed to use the GPU for basic rendering and even geeks like me don't like to turn off features like aero-glass anymore...
Let's hope this new line of Lenovo's will start addressing that.
Yeah, I know, I'm probably going overboard and I know that the type of solutions I've just mentioned have always been there, but if you look at the average consumer price-list you tend to see a clear differentiation between low, business and high end notebooks. What I'm proposing is that we get rid of the so-called "business" notebook spectrum and rather replace it with machines that aren't bottle-necked as much by a single feature (like graphics processors, which truly are more important the the average "business" oriented person might think) to a less rigid model where performance is more balanced between potential bottlenecks while still keeping cost in mind as a valuable parameter. I've noticed so many times that hardware providers will provide impressive specs to lure the consumer by dropping one or two valuable features that they don't even realize will make a huge difference if they're upgraded slightly at the expense of other features...
