For many years, Apple ruled the roost when it came to media creation. Even current Apple commercials appeal to a certain media creation genre. Sleek lines and Retina Pro displays knocked spots off any Wintel combination that dared to tussle with it. That was then, this is now. The ease of use and super-powerful slim notebooks that run Windows 8 are throwing serious competition Apple's way.
Jumping into the area of a pro media creation laptop is the Precision M3800. This isn't just a midrange refresh but a brand new fire-breathing laptop. So what's so different from many, many other laptops? First, the display. For media creation, of course, the screen is one of the most important parts. According to Dell, the new 15.6-inch M3800 blows Retina displays out the proverbial water, boasting a 3840x2160 resolution on a 4K HD Ultra display -- 3.4 million more pixels than the MacBook Pro 15.
Such an outstanding display would be wasted without a good graphics card to pair with it. Dell has put a lot of thought into this and gone with an Nvidia Quadro K1100M card that has 2 GB of dedicated VRAM.
Further, there's support for 4th generation quad-core Intel Core i7 CPUs and up to 16 GB RAM. These specs should satisfy even the most hungry mobile media worker.
You may be thinking that this is going to be a huge "luggable" laptop like the mobile workstations of old, where style and size were sacrificed for maximum performance. This isn't the case with the new M3800. The design is sleek, and thin, having a wedge like appearance of the Macbook Air, albeit slightly thicker at 18mm. As for the weight of this ultra device, it weighs in at 1.88 KG, a whole 22 grams lighter than the current generation of 15" Macbook.
Included in the package is a range of SSD and standard HDD options, up to 2 TB. In terms of peripheral connectivity, the M3800 offers Thunderbolt 2 to support a range of ultra fast external devices.
What makes the M3800 really stand out, however, is the fact that although it runs Windows as standard, it extends Dell's foray into Linux-based laptops if so desired. The fact that this ultra powerful laptop works out the box with Ubuntu means it is going to appeal to not only to mainstream media professionals but also Linux power users. It is a beast of a machine in a small and appealing package.
