“There’s no native USB 3.0 support on these chipsets, but most motherboard makers are looking to third party solutions to enable USB 3 on Sandy Bridge boards.”

Are there any third-party chipsets available yet?

“There’s no native USB 3.0 support on these chipsets, but most motherboard makers are looking to third party solutions to enable USB 3 on Sandy Bridge boards.”

Are there any third-party chipsets available yet?

Based on the article, it seems as though you rated the laptop highly due to it’s hardware performance. My original point stands, that it’s really nothing special, and actually quite lacking (thunderbolt vs usb 3.0, 1400×900 ultraportable-type resolution on a 15″ semi-desktop replacement) It’s as common as every existing and soon-to-come 900-1200 dollar sandy bridge based laptop in existence.

Based on the article, it seems as though you rated the laptop highly due to it’s hardware performance. My original point stands, that it’s really nothing special, and actually quite lacking (thunderbolt vs usb 3.0, 1400×900 ultraportable-type resolution on a 15″ semi-desktop replacement) It’s as common as every existing and soon-to-come 900-1200 dollar sandy bridge based laptop in existence.

Every resulting generation after the initial release however, is just status quo, especially ever since Mac went intel. They simply release new hardware updates in line with intel’s new offerings, along with the other 23904839028342397589 PC manufacturers out there, who, by the way, offer the exact same internals (if not substantially better) for 1,000 dolllars less.

So I fail to see how a 15″ laptop with a 1400 x 900 resolution coming in at over 2 grand gets a 5 out of 5.

Another inconsistent feature is when Jobs shot down Blu Ray because it wasn’t a proven mainstream technology, yet they’re the first to adopt a new data transfer protocol that has exactly 0 market penetration, and no usb 3.0, seriously? NO usb 3.0!?!?

Yes, the unibody construction is awesome. To date, even with all the copy cats, Apple’s is still the best. But I guess each individual consumer will have to ask if it’s worth the 1 grand over charge.

Personally, I ditched my first gen unibody after the hard drive crashed twice and the LED display was irreparable (vertical banding issue, Apple support basically said “deal with it”). For the 2.2k I paid, I didn’t expect to have the issues of a 500 dollar laptop, so I sold it and went OSX86 aka hackintosh. Granted it’s not portable, but I get a machine faster then a quad core Mac Pro with all the luxuries of OS X for less then 800 bucks.