Sorry to anyone who perhaps came across this and to myself for letting this slip so early in the habit building process. Unfortunately, my computer died on me and I had to get a new one. I had done quite a bit of research online already; trying to decide between many PC options.
I’ve spent the last decade or so on macbooks and loved it, however after working in a professional setting on a PC, it’s hard to go back. In addition, once I start my MBA, I think a PC will suit me better.
Decision: Microsoft Surface Laptop 2
I wanted something light, fast, and comfortable to use. I was willing to pay a little more for these things.
Form Factor: One of my early curiosities was a Pixel Slate. A VC executive I get a newsletter from raves about his and I loved the simple idea of only having a tablet and being able to take notes in class and auto-transpose them to text. But with Google backing out of tablet development, I wasn’t sure it would hold. Also, outside of just taking notes and internet browsing, I still have a (probably irrational) fear that a browser-based computer won’t suffice. However, that still left the Surface, other tablets and 2-in-1s. After talking with a few people, it sounded like word on the street was that despite the functionality of the tablet form, many people don’t bother to use it. If that was the case, my dream of drawing on images and taking notes by hand probably is more imaginary. So that left the laptop.
Brand: My options now were hardly slimmed down. There are tons of good computers out there, many of which fit my needs. I could go overpowered through someone like Dell and pay roughly the same, I could go cheaper and have more modularity of parts to upgrade later, or I could go with MIcrosoft’s flagship product. I was pretty torn between the Dell XPS13 (which my old company uses) and the Surface Laptop 2. I thought about a few others but the quality of the keyboard on the Surface Laptop is top notch. The Dell certainly can be a higher performance machine; the specs can be upgraded a ton to feature double the ram, virtually have infinite storage, and have a 4k screen, but those all cost money to upgrade.
At $799 the Surface Laptop 2 and the Dell don’t seem as evenly matched. Plus the look and feel of the Surface Laptop are smoother, even if it’s a tad heavier. So that’s what I got.
Sure the Black would have been cool - it’s beautiful, but it wasn’t in stock and you had to upgrade your storage (I explain why I passed this up below). But in order to get back to writing these blogs to you and just having a computer — I swooped the silver base model. So far, so good.
Performance: I ended up getting the base model of the computer but for my needs I think that’s ok, it still has an Intel i5 processor and 8 GB of RAM. Sure, the i7 w/ 16 GB RAM and at least 4x the storage capacity seems obvious to get, but for an extra thousand dollars? I’m not so sure.
The greatest risk I have is storage, but I already have a massive external hard drive so I can periodically archive whatever I’d prefer to keep off the cloud there.
