Wait or Buy

I wanted to buy a HP Envy 14 Beats but I was worried about there being a refresh. I know that the SB defects will set the refresh back to april or may. I was wondering if you guys think it would be worth it to wait or buy now.

 

Depends on if you can wait or not. I would recommend waiting if possible but it's up to you.

Won't be long till your new system becomes outdated

 

I agree with Illusion, technology is ALWAYS going to become outdated 6 months later. If you need it now, buy it now. If you can wait, wait.

 

you just have to carefully assess your needs and whether or not the current product offerings can fulfill them. many of us on the Envy 17 side of the house are going through the same thing. we hear of folks who are delighted with the good deal they get on the current product, and that it works perfectly for them -- those are compelling stories! But there are certain capabilities we know about that are coming in the future, and some of us are willing to wait because those new capabilities are important to us.

I wouldn't let the advance of technology itself drive your decision. let it be the true assessment of your needs. The only advice I can offer about waiting is that if you don't have an urgent need, then consider waiting until it becomes so

 

I'd personally wait until they got the newer stepping Sandy Bridge components in all of these motherboards. Then again, I'm not in dire need of a replacement and would probably wear out an Envy 14 before the defect hampered me. I'm patient enough to out-wait the refresh.

 

Or one could wait for the Sandy Bridge successor which is Ivy Bridge, or its successor, the haswell microarchitecture.....

Ivy bridge offers DX11 support and some 30% graphics improvement over Sandy Bridge. So if on-chip DX11 is important to you, wait some more!

DX11 on chip isn't that important to me, so I'm with you reedrichards the target for me is Sandy Bridge, when they iron out all the kinks.

 

You're just a few short months or weeks away from getting the latest technology. I don't see why you shouldn't wait. Unless you either have too much cash or you are utterly in dire need of a laptop right now.

 

You also don't know when the SB i5 will ship. It's been announced the quad processor SB will ship first which will refresh the high end machines. SB i5 isn't due out till later in the year so if the person needs a laptop now, then he should purchase one now. There are some good deals to be had on the current technology, you just got to look around and at all the different vendors.

 

You're wrong, the speculated release date for dual-core Sandy Bridge processors is February 20th. That's just days away, not months. Hang tight, if you don't need a new laptop now I would recommend you wait until early March for the laptops based on these new chips to be available.

 

This article sums up advances of SB better than any other I've seen: Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Tested: Quantum Leap or More of the Same?

They tested a "generic" 17" laptop with a SB Core i7 Quad, integrated gpu, SSD, With battery life as good as it is, it may be safe for "portable" computers to approach Quad cores for the first time. Getting a dual core cpu and a conventional HDD, you will lose a fair amount of the performance gains shown on the test model, but the battery life will be better and the performance will certainly be improved by 50-100%.

I'm sure most people know this, but along with the 50% increase in cpu power, the biggest gains are in the integrated gpu, battery life, WIDI 1080 -

GPU: 3dmark06 goes from 1,800 to 4,000 (nVidia 310,320) range and is great for non-gamers who want excellent HD video (and can play some lighter modern games.).

Battery life with a quad core, integrated gpu only: 5:46 under medium load (SONY Z get's 5:00 on same test; Thinkpad T410, Core i5, nVidia 3100 gets 3:52

WIDI - goes from 720p to 1080p. Virtually zero lag.

I think these benefits make it worth the wait if you don't have an urgent need to buy. Keep in mind, though, it takes 3-6 months for the driver bugs to shake out with a radically new cpu/gpu architecture.

 

I was just struck by the irony of this sequence and point out that we should be careful to differentiate what is known from what is speculated!

this is good advice. While I personally doubt the SB laptops will come that soon ( I suspect late, rather than early March) , such an opinion is itself speculative, and after all we do have a teaser "reserve one now" out there now. But here is the point: Until we have an announced release date, we don't know when the SB laptops will appear in the wild. The advice, which I believe to be good, is that SB is worth waiting for if the improvements it brings are valuable to you, because it's advent is soooo close.

As for picking up a latop from today's inventory I would offer these points:

• Sandy Bridge is only valuable if one is willing to pay the difference in cost. Current Inventory is cheeper
• If current inventory meets your current and projected needs for the expected life of the product, then nothing should prevent an immediate purchase
• There are some good deals to had right now. play the game
  

 

If you have doubts about it then it's better to buy another model. But I heard that HP Envy 14 Beats has an excellent design and high-end features at a reasonable cost, especially the $999 entry-level 14-inch model. I'm sure it would be a good buy. Logitech Coupon Code

 

I would just wait because there is probably going to be some killer deals to be had when these redesigns do drop.

 

There is one more thing that I think's worth considering and that's all those little niggles and bugs that seem to be all too commonplace with new models.

With most new models it usually seems to take a few months of BIOS changes, driver/firmware tweaks and sometimes in more extreme/rare cases hardware modifications to get models right. Buying a model now from the current generation, or indeed when the prices drop as the new models come out, allows you to benefit from everyone else's experience of which models are best for your needs, and makes sure all those software and firmware issues are sorted.

Of course there's the added bonus if you like using linux that you might get a distro to work practically out of the box without all the work.

I'm looking for a laptop this year and I'll probably waiting for the release of the new elitebooks/thinkpads (maybe even the precisions) and then adding 2-3 months before I buy one, though the niggles are fewer and farer between on business models as a rule.