With all the hype about this or that battery exploding in recent years the last thing you want to see when working away with a laptop in your actual lap is smoke fuming out the back. Thankfully no explosion in this case, just a poor design leading to a frayed cable connecting the screen. Appears this shorted and started to melt the plastic hence the nasty smoke.
Fortunately it wasn’t the magic smoke, so now I have a desktop for the first time in two years.
This could’ve been good timing, since I was hanging out for the new MacBook Air refresh, but I refuse to buy one since Apple didn’t include USB 3 (seriously, how lazy). I was willing to forgive the lack of page up/down and home/end keys. (Oh and for the love of god Apple throw HFS away already. ZFS please.) So now I just have to wait for Lenovo to release an update for the Thinkpad X1 with an S-IPS panel, 3x USB 3, HDMI, Thunderbolt, but none of the annoying crap I’m never going to use like a VGA port, built in 3G, or that nipple thing (does anyone use it?). Might be a long wait. So hard finding the perfect laptop.
Edit 5:50pm 07/09/2011: Seems I’m not the only one. Ultrabook: Intel’s $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game — damn it, that Toshiba doesn’t look too bad.