The Squirrels Are Watching

Laptop Hunting

Almost time for a new laptop — my aging and not-so-reliable Powerbook from freshmen year is starting to show its age. There are plenty of dents from being dropped so many times, some serious overheating (especially where the power cord plugs in — also dented), and everything is just running really slowly (granted, something that might be solved by simply wiping the system clean but I really want a new laptop). With that in mind, some considerations:

Heat: I should be able to put my laptop on my lap without fear of sterilization.

Battery Life: I like to work in coffee shops. Coffee shops often suffer from a shortage of conveniently placed power outlets.

Size: I don’t like to work in cramped spaces, but I often have to — whether it be in the back of the airplane or squashed in between two fat people in a lecture hall. Smaller laptops are more convenient.

Weight: This was initially a higher priority for me but the more I think about it, it actually isn’t. I used to get really annoyed carrying around such a heavy laptop but upon further thought, what really bothered me was the fact that I carry a heavy laptop in a shoulder bag that causes me to tilt to one side. This is easily rectified by simply putting my laptop in a backpack. Still, all else equal, lighter is better — so I probably won’t be getting a desktop replacement anytime soon (I actually like desktops — you can open them up and tinker with them — so why replace?).

Linux support: I expect to be doing a lot of programming over the next year or so. Since most of the stuff we use comes from the open-source community, I need to spend a lot of time in a *nix environment. Windows is a non-starter obviously, but OS X is actually not that ideal either. A lot of tools we use are developed with Linux (and Ubuntu / Debian-based distros in particular) in mind. What might require a simple “sudo apt-get” to install on Linux often requires manually  downloading dependencies and recompiling  source code on OS X. Heck, our web server is Ubuntu, and it makes sense for the development environment to match the production one.

Linux can be a headache though. Trying to fix an audio driver or figuring out what battery life is so abysmal really isn’t something I want to do. Keep in mind that I’m not entirely sure I want to use Linux all the time — so maybe a bad audio driver isn’t a big deal, but since virtualized OSes probably entail reduced battery performance, I’ll have to dual-boot into Linux and having a manufacturer with some history of supporting Linux and being willing to release the appropriate drivers means far fewer headaches.

Cost: My ceiling is $3000 but I’d really like it to be closer to $2000 (or even less!)

Performance: I’m obviously going to pay attention to this, but it’s fairly low on the priority list. I’m not playing games on this and any serious computation related to work will probably be done on a separate server. So video card probably isn’t important. A low-voltage CPU is probably more useful than a slightly faster one that kills the battery. You can never have enough RAM but again, it’ll have to judged against the price increase. That said, if viewing this in terms of an investment, it makes sense to max out everything once above conditions are met. The cost-effectiveness of upgrading down the road are overstated.

Anyhow, will post later on some systems I’m considering.

Tags: laptops