Turns out the Dell notebook I was looking at, agonising over, and eventually going to buy has today jumped $500 in price. It was an attractive price to start with, but now by comparison it seems like a total waste of money. It’s not that good a machine, but it hit a sweet spot in the lower price bracket.
Now I don’t want it, and I’m not sure what to do. It seems that the two big qualities I’m looking for in a laptop are possibly a bit unrealistic.
- Solid-state disk,
- Reasonable display.
The advent of the catchphrase “high definition” has stymied laptop displays, and it seems the standard resolution has become x by 720 as a result. Even on higher end products it’s disappointing to note that there’s been absolutely no progress on screen definition over the last, what, five years? Sweeping generalisations aside, I have given up on finding a laptop with a workable screen resolution because they just don’t exist.
The disk is less important because I can always replace it, but buying a laptop with both optical and magnetic storage I will never use angsts me terribly. If I’m going to buy a laptop only to swap bits out, it kind of defeats the purpose.
In five years time I suspect this won’t be such a problem, but until then it looks like I’m going to be settling for hardware that I don’t need or want and won’t be happy with. That said, I do crave portability and want to get my grubby hands on a mobile computery something pretty damn soon. The question is “what”?
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