Computer Prices Keep Falling By ConsumerReports.org

Also see http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf re: 1 in 3 Laptops fail over 3 years

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By ConsumerReports.org

Computer prices keep falling, so you should be able to find a good deal when you shop this holiday season.

Illustration: Sarah Jones

Tablets may be grabbing the spotlight, but traditional computers remain the tool of choice for those who need to get serious work done. Laptop and desktop models continue to display innovations, with laptops shrinking and more touch screens coming to desktops. And tiny netbooks still make sense for many people.

Here's the latest computer news:

Gateway NV57H26U Photo: Courtesy gateway.com More from ConsumerReports.org: Latest computer reviews HDTV buying guide Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers or sponsors on Yahoo! Great deals are plentiful Laptops that we rated Very Good or Excellent are available for $500 or less. With many models, you won't have to compromise on performance or features. For example, performance on the Gateway NV57H26U, was excellent. It's a 15.6-inch laptop with decent battery life that costs just $450. It also has an HDMI port for connecting to an HDTV for high-definition video streaming. If you need a laptop mainly for tasks such as word processing, Web browsing, and e-mail, even better deals emerge. Our ratings include a few 15.6-inch laptops for under $400. The Gateway NV55C49U ($350), Dell Inspiron I15R-526MRB ($380), and HP G62-373DX ($380) are all recommended models with good or very good performance; all three models were fast for productivity tasks.

Apple MacBook Air 11.6" Lighter and cheaper models are coming If you're shopping for a laptop, be on the lookout for ultrabooks, new laptops that are supposed to be thinner, lighter, and less expensive than most laptops. Thirteen-inch ultrabooks will be no thicker than 0.7 inch, about 30 percent thinner than most laptops. In addition, battery life should be at least 8 hours and the price less than $1,000. Toshiba's Port g Z830 and Lenovo's IdeaPad U300s are among the first models expected. They will weigh under 3 pounds, be about 0.6 inch thick, and use solid-state storage. Asus is also releasing an ultrabook this fall. The new ultrabooks were not available in time for our ratings, but several laptops we tested provide similar features. Apple's MacBook Air, available in 11- and 13-inch versions, and Samsung's 13-inch 900X3A-A03 are thinner and lighter laptops than most models their size. A third choice is the Sony Vaio VPCZ2190X. What distinguishes it from other laptops is the included Media Dock. There's a DVD drive, an option missing with other thin-and-lights, as well as a built-in discrete graphics chip with 1GB of memory. Plug in the Media Dock when you want to play demanding video games or leave it home when you want to carry around just the diminutive Vaio. Performance was excellent in either case, and battery life was 7.5 hours. The Apple, Samsung, and Sony are featherweights, easy to carry, stylish, and comfortable to use. As we expect with ultrabooks, those models don't make you trade ergonomics or functionality for low weight, thin profiles, and battery life. But they cost more than the maximum targeted price for ultrabooks.

All-in-ones are growing These space-saving all-in-one desktops should become an even bigger part of the market, experts say. The best cost at least $1,000, but as the market grows, prices could drop. Meanwhile, sales of the bulkier full-sized desktops, which offer more bang for the buck, will probably fall.

Plan ahead for Windows 8 When the next version of Microsoft's operating system launches in late 2012, touch-screen capability should be available on more laptops and desktops. That's because Windows 8 will be developed as both a tablet and a computer platform. If you're buying an all-in-one desktop, consider a model with a touch-enabled display to take advantage of the new features when they become available. Among the changes expected in Windows 8: The Start menu will be replaced by a screen full of tiles representing your photos, widgets, applications, bookmarks, and videos. You'll use your finger (or a mouse) to slide from screen to screen, select tiles to launch them, or open multiple tiles at the same time. Office and Internet Explorer 10 will also be touch-optimized, Microsoft says. There will also be an app store where you can buy low-cost software, much as you do for a smart phone or tablet.

Apple IPad 2 16GB Laptop or tablet? Buy a laptop if … • Serious typing is a priority. • You want to store, load, and unload a lot of data on the device. Buy a tablet if … • Portability is a top priority. • You want a touch-screen device to browse the Web, play games, and enjoy other apps.

Do you need a netbook?

A tablet is lighter, faster, and better for movies or games than the 10-inch, budget laptop known as a netbook. Here are a few reasons a netbook might make sense:

It's cheaper
Tablets with screens about the same size as a netbook's usually cost $500 or more, compared with $300 or less for netbooks. Seven-inch tablets cost less but offer only about half the viewing area.

You need a keyboard
For serious work, a netbook's keyboard beats a tablet's onscreen keys. Many tablets accept external keyboards, available at additional cost.

You create lots of content
A netbook runs standard office applications. Apps for tablets can perform many of the same functions, but they may not be as full-featured. Netbooks usually have 250GB of storage, compared with 8 to 64GB for most tablets.

A netbook makes wired connections
A network port for a wired connection to printers or other devices is standard equipment on a netbook, but not on most of the tablets we've tested.

Bottom line
If a netbook is right for you, here are some models we recommend: The Asus Eee PC 1015PX-MU17-WT, $280, which has a very good display; the Gateway LT2802U, $200, which has more than 9 hours of battery life; and the Acer Aspire One AOD255E-13877, $270, which has 10 hours of battery life.

Copyright © 2006-2011 Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. No reproduction, in whole or in part, without written permission.

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Also see http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf re: 1 in 3 Laptops fail over 3 years

Dispute Over Apple Image Shows Internet's Reach

KEVIN DREW, New York Times, October 13, 2011

HONG KONG — Few personal journeys can shed as much light on the age we live in as the one traveled by Jonathan Mak in the past week.

Mr. Mak, a university student in Hong Kong, went from being an unknown, aspiring graphic designer to an Internet sensation after an image he produced spread rapidly across digital platforms following the death of Steven P. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple.

Mr. Mak’s design of a silhouetted profile of Mr. Jobs in the Apple company logo was shared across the Web and reported by news media. The actor Ashton Kutcher posted the design on his Twitter account.

And then, nearly as fast, Mr. Mak found himself being vilified.

With a speed fitting for the technological age that Mr. Jobs helped usher in, Mr. Mak became the subject of derisive Internet postings and negative news media reports. His design, it turned out, closely matched one produced earlier this year by Chris Thornley, a British graphic artist.

“It’s been a very overwhelming experience,” Mr. Mak, 19, said by telephone between classes at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. “I still attend classes and lessons as usual. But as far as following my assignments, it’s been difficult.”

Mr. Mak said he had developed his design in late August — a white Apple logo on a black background, with a black silhouette of Mr. Jobs indented in the apple — as a tribute to Mr. Jobs after he stepped down as chief executive of Apple.

Mr. Mak said he had searched across the Internet both for inspiration and to ensure he was not copying another design. He said his searches had not uncovered Mr. Thornley’s design.

He then posted the tweaked Apple logo on his blog . Mr. Mak also asked the public to alert him if they spotted similarities between his work and others.

The design lay quietly on his blog for weeks until Mr. Jobs’s death on Oct. 5.

“Overnight, my Web site went from getting 80 responses to tens of thousands,” he said. “At first I was very happy.”

But by the weekend, Mr. Mak said, people began informing him how similar his design was to Mr. Thornley’s, which featured a black Apple logo on a white background, with a white silhouette of Mr. Jobs at a slightly different angle.

Mr. Mak said he had received notification Sunday night from Mr. Thornley’s wife, Julia, about the similarities of the two designs.

In the world of graphic design, similarities between images are quite common, said Juliette Cezzar, director of the communication design program at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. But Mr. Mak’s case shows how easy it has become to unearth similar images or outright copies.

“If we were living in a different age, it would take weeks, maybe months to discover copies,” Ms. Cezzar said. “Now it can take 24 hours. That is a good thing.”

In a statement released to the news media, Mr. Thornley said he had followed the controversy while receiving treatment for a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He said he had first developed his design in May “because I wanted to celebrate the fact that someone who had cancer was still working, still driving forward and still thinking positively about the future.”

Mr. Thornley, a 40-year-old living in Darwen, England, acknowledged the dangers the digital age presented to creativity.

“The Internet can be a double-edged sword,” he said. “You need to use the Internet in order to promote yourself, but in order to do this you are making yourself vulnerable to these situations.”

Mr. Thornley said he hoped to speak with Mr. Mak soon about the two designs.

“J. Mak has been as honest as he can about the situation, I think,” he said. “It is important to have the debate about this, and J. Mak has to be credited for opening up the debate and not hiding from it.”

Such an environment “is really stressful for designers,” said Ms. Cezzar. “You don’t want to be called out in front of the world and called a copier.”

For his part, Mr. Mak said the past week had provided a lesson he could apply as a graphic designer.

“It really taught me to be very careful about what I say and do,” Mr. Mak said. “With all the negative publicity I received in Hong Kong, it taught me to be very careful. At the same time, I need to stay true to my sense of aesthetics.”

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Ideas can come forth, inspiring us, and come to more than one at a time. Try not to vilify one of two after both have discovered fire or making the "first" stringed instrument on their own, from a puff of inspiration which spoke to both and gave us inspiration and joy, in return._Neale Sourna

The Faces Behind the Famous Hands An introduction to the hand models in iconic ads. By Caitlin McDevitt

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  Model: Ellen Sirot; Credit: Peter Pioppo

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  America’s Top Hand Models

  You’ve seen their hands a million times in glossy magazine ads, in television commercials, and blown-up on billboards. Plenty of corporate ad campaigns use hand models, and the few in the business have been busier than ever since the recent boom in popular handheld electronic devices. Who are these people, and how did they land these gigs? Here’s a quick look at some of the faces behind the hands you know so well.

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  Mia Crowe

  The most popular e-reader on the market, the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle, is held upright in ads by hand model Mia Crowe. Though she’s posed for Apple (AAPL) products, too, her client base isn’t confined to tech companies. Her Web site says, “Turn on the television right now, and you can see Mia’s talented hands in commercials doing everything from spreading Philadelphia Cream Cheese on a bagel and twisting open Oreo cookies to pouring test tubes of blue dye onto Tampax feminine pads to test for absorbency.”

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  Credit: Peter Zielinski

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  Kimbra Hickey

  When part-time model Kimbra Hickey posed for the cover of Twilight in 2004, she had no idea that the book would be popular. Since then, the image of her hands, cradling an apple, have graced the covers of the millions of copies sold around the world. She still attends events promoting the book and signs autographs.

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  Credit: Flickr user, catharticflux, and John Firman

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  James Furino

  The Staples (SPLS) “Easy Button” ad campaign was so catchy that the office supplies retailer started selling these buttons in stores. Hand model James Furino didn’t need to buy one to get his hands on an Easy Button. His index finger does the pressing in one of the memorable ads. He feels lucky to have the hands and the “meticulous” personality that hand modeling requires. Yet he’s quick to dispel a common myth about the business. “It is lucrative, but you can’t get rich doing it,” he says.

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  Credit: Stephanie Klein-Davis

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  Elizabeth Barbour

  During a photo shoot in 1983, Elizabeth Barbour says she “tilted her hand in such a way” that the photographers captured the perfect shot of her hand grazing a glass. The shot was the basis for the redesign of the Palmolive soap label, which is still around to this day. She was paid $650 for the shoot and calls the experience “one of the funniest things I’ve ever done.”

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  Credit: David Kaptain

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  Ashly Covington

  She rips biscuits apart at just the right speed, spreads icing onto cinnamon buns without making a mess, and folds pie crust like a pro. Pillsbury is just one of full-time hand model Ashly Covington’s many clients. She set out to be an actress, not necessarily a hand model. “After college I was trying to get headshots taken,” she says, “The agent was far more interested in my hands.”

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  Credit: Ad screenshot courtesy of IPhoneSavior.com

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  Pamela Moses

  Actress Megan Fox is well-known for her good looks, but she also owns a pair of infamously ugly thumbs. When she starred in a Motorola (MOT) commercial that aired during this year’s Super Bowl, Fox’s hands looked surprisingly normal. That’s because they weren’t hers. Model Pamela Moses lent her hands to the commercial. More than a few astute Fox fans noticed the substitution.

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  Credit: Dylan Cross

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  Ellen Sirot

  Ellen Sirot has been in the hand-modeling business for 20 years. She has worked on countless campaigns selling just about everything from nail polish to pregnancy tests. Recently, she has jumped on new opportunities in tech advertising, such as this Verizon (VZ) campaign. While some models don't bother to baby their hands, Sirot insists on it. She wears gloves all the time and has even developed her own line of hand cream to keep them moisturized.

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  Credit: Leslie Hassler

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  Ryan Serhant

  AT&T’s (T) “hands” campaign won the title of “America’s Favorite Magazine Ad,” a contest sponsored by Magazine Publishers of America. For the campaign, Italian artist Guido Daniele painted hands, holding electronic devices, with imagery from around the world. Ryan Serhant offered up his hands as the canvas. What’s his secret to keeping his hands in perfect form? He explains, “Lots and lots of lotion, gloves when it’s cold, gloves when you work out, and gloves when you sleep.”

• Caitlin McDevitt is an editorial assistant at The Big Money.