My friend Michael Coakley is a beermonger who enjoys taking pictures that would make professional photographers weep with envy. He also likes expensive toys, apparently including the new ThinkPad W700, because he keeps sending me IMs about it.
The W700 is a "mobile workstation," which means it's a laptop capable of crushing both of your femurs, leaving you immobilized and helpless. The upside is that you can spend that idle time doing some awesome photo editing, since the W700 includes a high-color-gamut 17" display, a built-in color calibrator, and a Wacom digitizer pad right on the palm rest. The PC hardware involved is formidable, too, including a quad-core Core 2 Extreme processor, dual 7200-RPM hard drives with RAID, Quadro FX graphics, 8GB of memory, two gigs of "Intel Turbo Memory" flash magic for utterly imperceptible Windows Vista acceleration, and a Blu-ray drive.
Prices start at (gulp) $2,978, because an even $3K would be too much.
