Laptop Suggestions
It looks at though my less than 2 year old Wintel Laptop (HP dv2000) is giving up the ghost. Sometimes it doesn't even successfully
The question then is whether or not it is worth repairing or should I just get another laptop. I will, of course, check to see how much it will cost to replace the Mother Board or get it repaired before making my final decision, but I thought I would ask you.
I want to ask then the Converts, those who used to own a wintel laptop and switched to Mac. I'm really looking for as much objectivity as I can get here, if you have always been a Mac fanatic then you could never claim to be objective ;).
Another Wintell or a Mac?
Thats the big question of the day. Should I buy another Wintel laptop or go with something completely different and get one of the new Mac Laptops.
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Then again, I am a convert!
BTW, if I hadn't been on the mac, a lot of cfeclipse wouldn't have existed!
One thing you will hear of course is that Mac's cost more. Well over the course of time, they really arent any more expensive. I only paid $2000 for my first one and sold it for $1000 after it was 2 years old. So thats not a bad deal.
I would suggest visiting an Apple store and playing around with one. They give you free reign to tinker and play, see if that helps.
I have found that mac software (third party apps) are usually cheaper and of much better quality than PC shareware as well. Thats not always the case but more often than not.
I had WOW, Flex and CS3 running in windows on it and it didn't even flinch :) as for development I have to say you cant beat linux :) Flex compiles faster in OSX for me and it's all a much smoother and more pleasant experience than windows.
My previous laptop was a top of the range Dell and before that a Sony and they dont even come close to my little baby mac :)
In terms of price - taking the cheapest Dell laptop and actually bringing it up to the spec of the Macbook suggests the Apple premium is around 15% - which I think is probably justified by the case / design / battery life, and that is also just 'specs on paper' - it would be interesting to measure actual machine performance.
Killer features for me - ability to just shut the lid and go, open the lid and pick up exactly where I was / be online in a couple of seconds. The new trackpad - 2 fingers to scroll, 4 to switch windows is awesome. Battery life / power management is great too. I left my power supply and managed to make two 2.5 hour journeys with no problem (screen dimmed to conserve power).
Also, there's a lot of Mac only programs (in fact it was software like OmniGraffle and Keynote that drew me to the platform, rather than the hardware / OS). Windows has more software by far (but of course you can run that in dual boot / VM now) but the Mac has a lot of good unique software - and often cheaper than Windows equivalents - the Cocoa frameworks make certain types of development cheaper.
Note - be prepared to tweak the default settings - you get a lot of people complaining that never seem to think they can change stuff, and by default the Mac defaults are oriented towards new / simple users. A lot of the good features with the new trackpad are disabled by default, for instance, but by enabling tap-to-click / drag and secondary clicks you can basically do almost every normal mouse action without actually clicking.
I also set my dock to 2D and hidden, and use a third party program to disable 'safe sleep' unless power is below 10% (safe sleep means it writes to disk when you close the lid - I prefer being able to instantly move the machine without worrying about the disk).
You can just get so much more done and it makes computing "fun" again.
Compared to windows the stability is mind blowing.
I was reading someones comments yesterday about their new pc and how they couldn't believe they could open dw, ps, a browser and instant messenger all at once without it crashing and that was so great. I usually have 30 or more apps open at once on my mac and it doesn't even phaze the thing which helps me dev a lot faster since I'm not always opening and closing apps all the time.
yeah I'm a mac fan boy but it just is that much better :)
I've never had problems with windows crashing... well no more that any guy across the room with OSX.
About 1 year ago I switched from a win desktop to a MBP. First thing I did was install XP using Bootcamp on half of the HDD. About3-4 months ago I was using OSX for most of the work ( mail, IM, OpenOffice, browsing, Photoshop ) and keeping XP running in Parallels (using the 50 GB bootcamp partition) for dev ( Eclipse, FlashDevelop, DBDesigner ). I was starting to experience a shortage of HDD space since OSX and XP were both having 50GB each but I had projects on both by this time.
Once Sun launched VirtualBox I decided to get radical :)
Most of my XP projects were Eclipse based so I just copied them from the XP partition to the MAC one and imported them without problems. Then I deleted the XP partition and I created an XP VM in VBox for testing websites in IE, using DBDesigner and the VPNs that I didn t manage to get to work in OSX.
I guess my point is that with a VM you don t have to worry about those Win tools you will miss and Eclipse runs excellent on OSX. And if you hate OSX ( I started to like it after 4-5 months :) you can still run XP in bootcamp.
And yes, the MBP are the best laptops for running windows :D
But I have several problems that so far have prevented me from pulling the trigger and abandoning my PC.
1. Email client on the Mac is horrible, ten steps down from Outlook. I am not much of a Thunderbird fan and I am not certain there is an alternative. My friends who use Entourage (Outlook for the Mac) do not recommend that I buy it. I know I could run Outlook but to do so I would need to buy MS Office. I am happy enough with Apple's Office alternative it seems like a very pricey way to get a good email client.
2. There are five commercial products that emulate Windows Explorer on the Mac. That says it all concerning Finder.
3. Search - You have a choice, fast which misses much or dropping down to the command line which works fine but is even slower than Windows search.
I may go Mac full time anyway but these are the issues holding me back.
1. http://www.postbox-inc.com/ in beta but looks decent.
2. path finder http://www.cocoatech.com/
3. path finder http://www.cocoatech.com/
there you go... $40 fixes it all ;)
Here's a couple:
1) Unlike a Crapple, if it breaks, it will be fixed within half a decade, in fact usuallly within 4 hours - if it's hardware. And you don't need a genius to fix it! And when it crashes you don't just get a spinning wheel and no answers. To say 'You can't go wrong with a Mac' is ignorant. Google 'issues with my mac' or read :http://mac.elated.com/2009/01/13/mac-troubleshooti... - Mac has it's fair share.
2) You can get extra batteries when you're on the road. (even if you have one of the 19 hour dell batteries) - You can also get 3rd party periferals that don't cost three times as much as they should
3) The interface is initally great, but after you open your first program and have to scroll three thousand columns of files just to get back to the desktop, you start getting pretty peeved.
4) Out of the nine Macs that i've owned, only one stayed stable enough 'out of the box' to use on a regular basis.
5) There's not a large choice of anti-virus for Macs - more and more viruses are arriving on Macs we see here every day, but there's not many good clients to fix them.
6) Why run Windows in a VM when Mac offers nothing I want or need in it's OS? People talk about how flaky windows is and then in the second sentance say how they run it in a VM?!
7) I've already laid out cash for software on Windows. Why should I change my whole software line-up to be part of the latest fad. (which would make me cool - no really it would!).
8) I'd be dreaming if I thought most IT departments would let a mac on their network from an external consultant. I've found most large corporates are not that positive about having a mac on their network, most won't even let you plug in.
Disscussions for me reveal that people who transfer to Mac generally don't know much about computer hardware. Like they never knew the difference between a slow motherboard and a fast one. or that 512Mb Ram isn't enough to run any OS. They probably used Norton or Symantec anti-virus and the built-in defrag too (if at all) and ran the system on a single partition.
Oh and when you get your Vista lappy:
- add Eset Smart Security for virus
- add perfectdisk for defrag
- Get 64bit vista and you've got yourself a kick-butt system.
- Get 4 Gb Ram and watch CS4 fly...
then set up your apps then run the Vista backup to to create in image, then in case of failure, re-image and back in 10-15 mins! - and map your user directories to the second partition so you don't have to reset your desktop, documents, email etc...
I'm guess I'm saying here... buy a solid laptop with a good warranty and you'll be pretty happy.
Anyway as a developer who's been working in the field for nearly 17 years I can safely tell you that I've had 0 instances where a company including the likes of UBS have not allowed me or even been happy to let me use my Mac on their network.
And just a few quick points as I dont want to get into an argument here or compare e-peen sizes I just thought I would clear up some stuff, this is coming from a guy who has 5 laptops in his house and an insane water cooled setup for his gaming rig.
I've owned just about every top of the range laptop that has been released over the years, XPS, Sony Z series, Alien Ware. You name it I probably have one sitting at home! Hell my wife checks her email on the XPS I got sick off and gave to her.
As for those points I was mentioning.
1: Time Machine > anything windows has to offer! Just do something and watch it get backed up right away. No images and shit I can just boot up from my Leopard CD select the date I want to restore from and Boom 30 mins later it's as if I never lost my laptop or even switched hard drives. No re installing of apps, serials and all that other crap I had to do with windows.
2: My macbook pro compiles my flex apps faster than any previous laptop I have ever owned by a fair margin. The only thing I have that compiles faster is my Gaming rig and that's running Raid 5 and I7 with 64 bit windows and 8GB of DDR3 and it only does it by a few seconds at most.
3: I dont need to worry about viruses, even when my Firefox gets hijacked it takes me about 10 seconds to restore it to default! I dont have to run some shitty anti virus and wait 2 hours for it to finish. Hell if you setup your security settings correctly nothing on your mac can get hijacked without your explicit permission.
4: CS4 runs way quicker on my mac than on my desktop rig only difference is my desktop rig performs better when I am dealing with much larger files. That issue is easily fixed in the near future when 8GB of laptop memory becomes cheaper :)
5: I never have to waste my time with defrag.
6: Windows has been more stable on my Mac thanks to it's standard equipment rather than all the crap you get on a Sony for instance, Vista has better Driver support for the hardware that comes in a Mac than it does for most of the laptops available on the Market.
7: Everything I need for a great development environment is already included on my mac and very easy to upgrade. Be it C compilers, Ruby, PHP, Apache etc.
8: I can replace my batter when I feel like it and my memory and hard drive take less than 5 mins to replace.
9: I reboot my system like once every month.
10: Once you get used to all the gestures and shortcuts navigating windows etc is way way better than anything else out there. Think CMD+Space and start typing ter hit enter and your in terminal for instance. Windows doesn't even pick up new stuff until the stupid indexer runs and that takes forever and eats up much needed resources.
11: I can run WOW + Fusion (Vista) + Flex Builder 3 + TextMate + Omnigraffle + Photoshop and my laptop would perform like a champ without even slowing down much! actualy I have no less than 8 apps open right now because I'm screwing around with Visual Studio in VM while running Flex builder and LCDS in osx and outlook etc. I can not say the same for any of my Windows machines, even my gaming rig fails when it comes to this.
Now I'm not a fanboy of either windows or mac and seeing as I have both and use both allot ( Visual studio rocks) and I do some .net stuff too as well as games which by the way seem to run just peachy on my mac.
Both mac and windows have their uses but in this instance I will have to vouch for the Mac when it comes to a work horse machine that is reliable and has the least downtime as well as the best backup system and gives me the best of both worlds, having used the likes of TextMate and Omnigraffle theres no way I would go back to working on a PC my PC's are and my Vista boot camp partition are almost entirely reserved for gaming and windows development now.
I don't want to bash windows, I have nothing against it but when it comes to work I'm afraid Mac / Linux will be path to take especially if you are a developer.
Anyway enough ranting I'm off to work! I just thought I would give my two pence about the fight between Mac loves and Windows lovers I'm not going to list Windows benefits here because they are irrelevant to this topic as they are not benefits that help me in my day to day use.
lol well Chris isn't very smart, never has been, never will be and posts like his keep his tradition alive.
"13 inch beauty"
You are surely kidding right? That has to be one of the ugliest, most unattractive laptops I have ever seen & a 13" screen to work on? ummmmm k
"There's not one feature on MBP that was better than on PC,"
You are right, there isn't one there is a thousand.
"so you can close you lid and when you open it you're ready to toll in less than a minute"
You forgot the "r" in toll;)
When I open my MBP it takes about 3 seconds, hell I can reboot it and have it up and going in under 30 seconds, I'd be pissed as hell if it took a minute to wake from sleep or bootup.
"this is with CF8 and MSSQL 2008 running..."
Well mine has cf8, railo, openbg, apache, tomcat, php, rails, mysql running...
"1) Unlike a Crapple, if it breaks, it will be fixed within half a decade,"
What a dumb comment...
Apple has been the number one rated customer service and support for a for a few years now.
So how far off were their scores?
Apple = 86
Dell = 60
Frickin a 60!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Yeah GREAT service from dell!
Now how about customer satisfaction
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9891471-16.html
Satisfaction rate:
Leopard = 81%
Vista = 27%
27%!!!!!!!! are you kidding meeeeeee!!!!!!!! lol
"- Mac has it's fair share."
Not compared to windows
"You can also get 3rd party periferals that don't cost three times as much as they should"
Well sure... junk is always cheaper & the people who buy junk always think they got a great deal but all they really got is junk and then it breaks and they go buy junk again and soon after they have spent more on replacing the junk that replaced the junk.
"4) Out of the nine Macs that i've owned, only one stayed stable enough 'out of the box' to use on a regular basis."
Yeah... we believe you Chris.....
Most every tech company out there agrees that os x is much more stable than vista
Vista is only stable for users who actually spend most of their time making sure it stays stable.
I been on a mac for 4 yrs now and haven't lost 1 piece of info to an os malfunction, can I say that about windows... ummm no
"5) There's not a large choice of anti-virus for Macs"
LMFAO LMFAO LMFAO
"more and more viruses are arriving on Macs we see here every day"
Like what?
So you are getting mac viruses that no one else on planet earth is getting, oh you mean that ONE in the last like 8 years.
"but there's not many good clients to fix them"
Why do you think that is Einstein? And "if" you do get one you simple put it into the trash and delete it, it's not like windows where it jacks your whole system.
Don't you think if there was an ACTUAL threat that the AV companies would be all over that?
Funny thing is that the only people you hear about all these "supposed mac viruses" are from the few companies who try to sell mac av.
"Mac offers nothing I want or need in it's OS?"
Then don't use it.
"how flaky windows is and then in the second sentance say how they run it in a VM"
Well yeah because in a vm when windowz croaks you can just restore the image, in a reg install you are hosed.
"which would make me cool - no really it would"
Impossible... nothing could make you cool.
It isn't a matter of being cool for me it's a matter of not losing my data to crashes and a MUCH MUCH more efficient work flow. On windows I could safely have 5-6 apps open at once on a mac I usually run 20-40 and it doesn't flinch.
"I've found most large corporates are not that positive about having a mac on their network, most won't even let you plug in."
Yeah because of all those "viruses" macs have....
Well I have found that most large corporations won't let a computer with Vista on it anywhere near their building which is one of the HUGE reasons why Vista is flopping so badly.
"Disscussions for me reveal that people who transfer to Mac generally don't know much about computer hardware"
No people go to macs because they are sick and tired of a crappy os .
If you cared about your hardware then you surely wouldn't be buying bargain bin parts Dell.
Apples are about the user experience and good quality components to ensure that user experience. The people just care that it works and if their old pc had better hardware but they went to a mac and it runs better then what good is the pc's hardware?
"or that 512Mb Ram isn't enough to run any OS"
You mean a windows os post windows 98
"- add Eset Smart Security for virus"
Don't need that (just saved $60 a year)
"- add perfectdisk for defrag"
Don't need that either (just saved $30)
- Get 64bit vista and you've got yourself a kick-butt system.
Don't need that (just saved $290)
btw~ when you buy Vista it is a license for 1 install, when you buy an Apple OS you can install it on up to 3 computers. So if you have 3 computers in your home and you want new OS on them all a mac will cost you $129, vista will be $960 based on vista ultimate which is the comparable version to Leopard, oh and leopard is 64 bit.
Vista doesn't kick butt either, actually it has been probably the biggest software trainwreck ever.l even m$ won't refer to it by name anymore.
However it did get an award:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/140583-5/the_15_big...
The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007
#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
"Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do? "
"And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe."
Yeah you rock on Vista!
"- Get 4 Gb Ram and watch CS4 fly..."
Like a wounded duck with an as* full of buckshot.
4gb of ram will barely run areo
"then set up...."
and then after that do this and after that do that, and then this and then that, and then this again because it crashed the first time...
No thanks, I will just plugin my new mac and go because I don't have to do all that crap.
"I'm guess I'm saying here... buy a solid laptop with a good warranty and you'll be pretty happy.
"
Hi Dell.. Yes I would like your cheapest computer built with your cheapest parts for cheap..... oh thats all your models, ok then gimme one of those please...
No thanks for me, my computer is my lively hood and I am not about to skimp with a POS laptop. For me and a massively growing amount of others have discovered that our production dramatically increased after going to a mac which means more $$ made and less hassles and headaches than windows.
Or you could buy a very solid laptop that is based & designed around you having a good user experience which makes it much more enjoyable to use and actually looks good as well.
I saw somewhere the other day that 67% of people getting ready to buy a new laptop in feb were going to buy apples.
While all these computer companies are taking a hit, Apple still is going the strongest which just goes to show that people will pay for quality and a better experience. Windows lost 7% market share to macs last year and there is a big reason for that... Vista
But then again windows users don't get that macs really don't compete in the same area as windows. Windows markets either to enterprise which apple doesn't and windows caters to bottom of the barrel cheap-as-it-comes systems and apple doesn't want those customers, they want customers who appreciate quality. It is the same principle as buying a lexus or bmw, some people just want something better than a ford.
Thanks everyone for your input I have reached a decision and decided to buy a MBP. While I did receive some serious sticker shock and honestly can't afford it at the moment without a good machine to use I can't really write blog entries, tutorials or anything else and I treasure my readership enough not to let my blog fade.
I'd just like to throw in to the mix that I, like others here, have worked on a number of systems (laptops and desktops) in my 25 years of working in IT, and I live on my laptop, all day every day.
And I'm still using Windows, and even Vista (horrors!). We see these debates all the time, and most want to paint us Windows users as morons who either don't have a clue, or don't use our machines the way we could if on a Mac, so I want to reply here, especially to some of the points Wael made. (And I caught that he made the point that he's not a Windows hater, but just felt he was sharing practical experience in the choice of a "developer workhorse").
The thing is, my dells (latitide d620, and 610 before that, and other dells before that) have indeed been developer workhorses (though not marketed as such). Let me just address a few of the points made, in case anyone else comes along here and wonders if they're missing out horribly by using a Windows machine. (I'm not debating here at all the beauty and elegance of Macs. Just the accusation many make that Windows machines just can't match up in performance and reliability.)
I too run dozens (yes, dozens) of apps at once, all the time (on 32-bit, not 64, though with 4 gig of memory), and I never see a speed decrease. And some of these apps have multiple tabs open at once (like Chrome, FF, my editor, etc.) Once in a while memory will approach the 80-90% mark and I'll need to start closing things, but that just seems reasonable, at least until I switch to 64-bit and really crank up the memory. But I've no doubt some try to work with a gig and do suffer. That's not really an OS problem, though.
As for stability, I can't remember the last time my system "crashed" (blue screened, locked up unexpectedly, etc.). Again, I realize some see it happen all the time. I don't, despite how hard I stress my machine (and fly around all the time opening things with keyboard shortcuts).
I don't seem to need to worry about viruses, either. Have never had one. Nope, not ever, and I've been a Windows guy since I guess about 1990 (DOS before that). And I stopped running anti-virus programs a few years ago. They were never finding anything, so it just didn't seem to be worth the bother. I do run a check every few months, and still don't have anything. I'm sure some think I must be nuts, or am missing something. I do work from home, within a firewalled home network, and I also run Windows firewall for when I'm out.
I realize some organizations wouldn't let me run my machine on their network because of no firewall (happened just 2 weeks ago with a client). I offered to install one, but it ended up not being critical. I used my phone for net access.
Again, I know some people suffer horribly with their machines getting infected with bots, zombies, trojans, rootkits, and so on. I help people recover from them all the time. I honestly don't know what they do that I don't (sure, we can all guess at a few obvious things. Who knew clean living could mean a clean laptop.)
He mentions "wasting time with a defrag". Again, this is not part of any routine for me. I might do it once a year if it comes to mind. I won't say I go a month between reboots, but I do leave the machine running for days on end, with occasional standbys when going to meetings or traveling. I've certainly gone a couple of weeks or more without a reboot.
As for shortcuts and gestures, I'll grant I see a lot of people addicted to their mouses and it seems a great time waster watching them mouse around, when I know the keyboard shortcuts that could speed them up tremendously. If I sense they're open to them, I share them (and will do a CFMeetup talk in the future on the subject.)
As for his mention of "the stupid indexer", well, there just like some mentioned that they tweak their macs from their default setup focused on new users, there too I've certainly disabled things that get in my way needlessly. The search service is absolutely one of them. I do just fine with a file find tool(my favorite is free at agentransack.com, terrible name but great tool) which uses no index but is still very fast.
And the classic Vista hack is to turn off the damn UAC. Did that first thing, having heard so many moan about it. With it out of the way, Vista's been a champ. I know others in the CF community who have been able to proclaim the same, so mine's not an isolated case.
So again, my point in all this is simply to say, please don't cast all who use Windows into the "hopeless" barrel, or leave people thinking that they're lamentable and to be pitied if they stick with it. Really, this is no joke. I'm really perfectly happy and productive, indeed powerfully so, with my windows machine.
I'm also not entirely ignorant of the Mac. I have to use one in a volunteer position I have, and I also got a mini last year just so I could have a Mac-based machine to help someone with a CF server problem on a mac. I honestly have never fired the thing up since the gig. I just don't have need. To me, that lack of compelling pull to the Mac even when I have one in-house is just another reason I've not been motivated to go with an MBP to replace my Dell laptop.
I'm glad to see this discussion again. I'm at a point of considering replacing my machine (mainly to get 64-bit), and I really am still open to an MBP, which is why I caught the blog entry and have read the comments. I want to be persuaded. It's just that a lot of the arguments against Windows just don't hold up to my experience.But I'm still open to considering the other advantages a mac may bring.
I liken this to my observation about fuel economy. I drive a Lincoln Towncar. Yes, truly a beast in size, and shocking to many who think it's got to be a horrible gas guzzler. (I bought it about 8 years ago, a couple years old, at an incredible discount, and figured the comfort in driving would make up for the bad fuel economy.) Well, after resetting the MPG tracker, I found that I get on average about 20 mpg, and this is a V8! When I see much smaller cars getting hardly better than that, I'm tempted to say, "eh, why give up the comfort, safety, capacity, etc."
But then it dawned on me: my experience is probably anomalous (just as with my PC). Maybe it's how I drive. Perhaps if I drove a much more fuel-efficient car I'd get far better MPG than most. So I now wonder if I should go ahead and replace it (don't yet need to), to get a smaller car. There's a part of me that says I should. It seems perfectly logical that the big boat should get poor economy, and surely many look on in disdain and think I'm being, again, a luddite. But my experience in the towncar doesn't show it to be the gas guzzler.
So in both these experiences, is it me? Am I really THAT unusual in my good experiences with both? Or might things be even THAT much better is I made the switch(es). IT's tempting to try, but in both cases not a trivial matter. I almost wish I could magically experience the switch for a month, and then if it didn't work, reset the clock. Sadly, life doesn't work that way, so I sit here on the edge of decision in both cases.
Anyway, sorry for the long ramble. If any read it and get some consolation about their happiness with a PC (or another Towncar getting good MPG), it's been worth it. If nothing else, in both the case of those who look askance at both PC users and Towncar drivers, I hope to have shared a little perspective that may have surprised you.
I realize some will not be daunted in their antagonism. Please don't feel compelled to fight me point by point on this. You've got all the other points above on your side. Mine's just a counterpoint. You have the overwhelming strength of popular opinion on your side. You don't need to try to refute my observations. We can accept that they may be very limited in applicability to most people.
And I had looked at that before I posted, and noticed that it seemed most that lost the line breaks were from MAc fans. I wondered if there may have been some issue there, but I submitted mine from my Windows machine.
I've gone ahead and entered 3 line breaks between each paragraph, to see if they get reduced to 2 (which would show as one line space between each paragraph). If that does it, it's interesting but no real solution. People won't think to do it, but it may be useful if you want to maybe see if there's a fix in your version of BlogCFC that may resolve the problem. Just odd.
Since I upgrade it looks like line breaks are being interpreted into BR's instead of P's... Need to find the source.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to express your thoughts. I had a huge response written down explaining that my decision was more based on hardware than software but it helps if one hits the Post button instead of the Cancel button! Sigh some days it just doesnt pay to get out of bed.
While browsers have at least evolved to save us often when they crash (restarting opening all the windows we had open), sadly they don't yet have the DWIM button ("do what I mean"), nor even the smarts to save all form post contents. How often have we hit the right button but the server (or network) burps, and we back up to try again, and our content's gone. Horrors.
I sincerely do think that a solution may come, where (just as they save a history of visits) they could have an option to save the history of form post content, whether until we close the browser, or for some fixed period of time, so that we could recover it and try again. (Sure, some browsers are better even at that issue of backing up and not losing stuff, but as in your case, you hit a button that did a submission to a working page. You just didn't mean cancel--and I do hate how different sites put cancel before submit. Hey, I know how to close a window. Don't even let me shoot myself by hitting the wrong button.)
So anyway, some sort of post content history could be really valuable. Of course, the privacy- and security-conscious would vehemently decry it (but I'd accept it as an option--like I said above, I live ok without AV tools. I'm just as ok at protecting my privacy.) That may be all that holds it back. Then there are those who will say, "ah, you're adding more bloat to the browser". Fair enough.
But I know every time I make a form submission of any substantial content, I save it off to the clipboard. Maybe it's things like that that keep me safe and happy as discussed above. Still, it would just be nice to be relieved of that one more thing to worry about.
I think that HP or Dell are good options to consider.
Good luck!