Item — HN Reader

Wow, that's quite a price jump from the i5 to the i7 and then subsequently to the 6 core one. Could you talk a bit about the economics of having hotter / higher end chips in a notebook and whether there are other non-obvious cost increases to them? Are the higher end models "subsidizing" the lower end one, or is there motherboard / chipset upgrades that need to happen as a result?

Really like the laptop though, and it's a close contender when it's my time to upgrade... :)

1 comments

You're paying quite a bit for vPro.

I'd guess that the 2 extra cores don't really make much of a difference day-to-day. If you crank up all the cores, both chips will throttle in a laptop of that size. If you are only running a couple single-threaded applications, the extra 100MHz turbo hardly makes a difference (around 2-3%).

On the flip side, the places that need/want vPro are going to be very enterprisey and don't mind spending the extra money.

Huh, that v-pro argument makes sense. Enterprises gonna enterprise.