In June, Apple unveiled new MacBook Air laptops that included Intel's latest Haswell processor cores, which are particularly notable for the fact that they include high end graphics capabilities built directly into the chip, rather than separately as has traditionally been the case with computer processors.

When put under a lot of stress because of heavy data processing, a customized laptop computer can heat up pretty quickly.

The massive growth of the tablet industry has led many to question whether custom laptops and notebooks are on their way out the door in favor of the slick, intuitive touch screen interface provided by tablet computing.

Although tablets are incredibly useful and fun mobile devices, users should give a second though to abandoning their laptop computers for an Apple iPad mini.