Little Black Guidebook

We have a planned tech-refresh cycle at our house. Rather than impulsively buying the iPod, digital camera, cell-phone, or computer that we crave as we used to do, we plan these purchases and buy them at specific intervals based on how far technology has advanced and how well our current tech meets our needs. We used to buy a new computer every time the game that we just bought no longer met the minimum requirements for memory/hard drive space etc.. Now we buy a more expensive computer, but keep it longer, usually 3-4 years. My laptop was on its last legs after 4 years and was getting so frustrating to use that I basically didn’t use it except to download photos off of my digital camera. My blogging slowed/stopped, I lost touch with friends, hadn’t updated Facebook in months, and basically had to buy a new one.

I travel 150,000 miles a year and hate to lug my 7+ pounds of current laptop, not including chargers or other accessories. Most of my flights are over 3 hours in length so battery life is important and only 2-3 of them are international trips so the seats don’t usually have chargers. Like the engineer that I am I tried to quantify my laptop buying decision to help my naturally indecisive nature. I wrote down all of the characteristics that were important to me, ranked how important they were on a scale of 1-5, then ranked how well each option met that characteristic and multiplied the two then added up the total points. It went something like this:

Some of the Characteristics:
Light Weight (worth 4 points)
Cost (worth 2 points)
Long Battery Life (worth 5 points)
Reverse compatible with Windows XP (worth 5 points)

Macbook = 5*4+2*2+5*5+4*5=69 points
Dell XPS = 4*4+4*2+3*5+3*5=54 points

I was totally floored when I ranked all of the options and ended up having the 13.3″ Macbook come out on top. I resisted, I went and looked at my numbers to see if I could tweak it and get the XPS Dell that I thought I wanted to come out on top, but then I stopped and realized that I was defeating the purpose of the ranking system in the first place, to take emotion out of the decision. So I took the plunge and am now the owner of a 13.3″ Macbook. Ack, “what have I done?” was the sensation as soon as I hit the final purchase button.

What will my geek/nerd/tech guy friends think?

That just cost me how much?

Oh my God, my laptop has a glowing Apple on it! Can I find a sticker thick enough to cover that?

And once the laptop arrived I continued having questions:

How the heck do I right-click?

Where is the Home button? Or the End button for that matter?

How in the world do you get the cd to eject? Uninstall something? (Drag to trashcan!)

After a week, the Mac still didn’t have a name. I definitely decided that she was a SHE and not a he like Fred, Fred Jr. Freddie and Felix before her. I hated not having a native copy of Microsoft Office installed and didn’t understand gestures.

Then, after that first week, things began to click. I discovered how to right-click, how to Home, End, uninstall, eject, and a bunch other things. I discovered how everything was designed to go so well together and what a difference that can make. And, as you’ve probably noticed, I’m blogging again.