Buy cheap, buy twice

The laptop I drafted this on is a good example of why buying cheap is a bad idea.

It’s an HP tx2 bought (almost) on a whim because it was on sale and I’d wanted a touchscreen laptop for a while.

I’ve never really liked it. A couple of keys (vaguely important ones like shift & space) don’t work well, the fans are noisy, it gets hot, and it’s heavy.

Replacing its spinning rust with an SSD gave it a new lease of life a year or so ago but I’m getting fed up with it now…

Replacement thoughts

A lot of research was required. The shortlist of desires included:

• light
• thin (MacBook Air sort of size)
• 13” Full HD fold-flat touchscreen is likely all I need
• decent backlit keyboard with non-annoying layout
• 8Gb RAM
• SSD (reckon 256Gb is enough)
• Core i5 probably good enough, don’t know if I’d notice speed improvement of i7
• A minimum of 4 hours battery life (longer is always better, obviously)

I don’t need:

• gaming performance
• hybsrid becomes-a-tablet functionality
• a glossy works-like-a-mirror screen

Possibilities

Numerous possibilities presented themselves.

Yoga 3. Or 2. Surface Pro. Dell XPS13. Or XPS15.

Regardless how slim its bezel is I won’t buy Dell as I’ve simply heard too many bad things about them (from ex-owners). And I wasn’t convince by the surface.

Love the idea of the Yoga’s different setups but I’m not going to use that flexibility very often.

Samsung’s book 9 seems only available in 13” lite version in the UK these days.

A Zenbook perhaps? That may have been a good choice…

Choice made

But in the end I made the obvious non-obvious choice for someone who’s only used PC’s for the last couple of decades. Yes, I’ve grown longer arms and splashed out on a Macbook. Yes, they are expensive. But, actually, compared to the latest Windows ultrabooks there’s really not much difference in price.

I’ve also never had one and am curious as to whether the hype is deserved.

The only real choice was 13” or 15” … I tried both but went for the extra screen estate. Judging from the first couple of hours (I finished this post on it) I reckon it was the right set of compromises from my original desires. I’m looking forward to finally using a computer with decent scripting capability (due to its Unix roots).

Let’s see how things pan out…