Saturday, December 05, 2009

Window Shopping

Back in the fall, I decided that if I taught this semester, I could afford a new laptop. My bank account hasn't increased quite as much as I had hoped, but I could still do it. (Especially since I was actually starting this term below my "keep my savings account at level X"... I actually managed to save more than it looks like, but part of that was making up for the shortfall in the summer. I can defer some of that "make up" to next term, when I'm teaching an online course.)

I'm pretty sure I want the 13" MacBook Pro... it's lighter to lug around. After the new laptop happened to come up in conversation with my dad, I thought I'd go over and look at what the customization options did to the price.

Click, click, click... doubling the ram costs *how* much? No thanks. Click, click... save $30 on the cost of iWork? Sure, I might as well upgrade now rather than later. I've been thinking of upgrading much of my aging software. (I think much of my software is actually older than my current laptop!) Click... video adapter? Yep. (But should I adapt to VGA, what is mostly what I'll need, or to DVI, and then also need to carry around my current DVI to VGA adapter as well? I'll probably just go straight to VGA, and hope I never need to connect to DVI.) AppleCare? Yep. Hard drive? Hmmm. Without upgrading the hard drive, it's at $1,810, and that's before ordering a spare power adapter. (Why is that not an option on the customization page?) Another $51 gets me an additional 70 GB of space, or $154 doubles the drive space to 500 GB.

The hard drive on my current laptop is only 150 GB, but it's over 80% full. (Of course, I'm not sure how much space some old OS 9 crap is taking up... but if I decide to put some sort of Windows on the new Intel machine, I'm sure that'll hog a *ton* of space. Not that I *want* Windows, but it sure would have been nice with what I was teaching this term.)

Looks like a new laptop will run me somewhere around $1800 - $2000. Food for thought.

PS: When I went into the local Apple Store recently to get a replacement foot for my current laptop, the salesperson/tech guy was impressed with how "pristine" my old lady is. He thinks it's neat it's still performing well. (Which it is, now that I have the additional RAM... and is another reason why I might postpone the purchase.)

2 comments:

Bethany said...

That's one reason I'm a PC. :-P

(My Windows 7 directory is 9.8 gig, FWIW.

noricum said...

Only 9.8? Perhaps it isn't as much of a hog as I feared.