Thoughts on Laptops

So I’m trying to come up with my future plan for computers. I have had a 4th gen iPad for a while now, and the Retina display is a thing of beauty. I just want to stare at it all day. When I look back at my Windows desktop running 1920×1080 on an LCD monitor, the eye torture I must endure to look at text makes me physically ill.

So of course I am now thinking that my next computer must be a 15″ MacBook Pro with a Retina display. But have you seen how much those things cost? Holy crap. It’s more than what a computer and monitor cost way back at the beginning of computers!

So I went looking for a Windows laptop with a Retina-like display. Only… there aren’t any. I mean, none. They don’t exist. The best Windows laptops have 1920×1080 screens and that’s it, which is 100-150 dpi at best. (That’s not bad, except compared to the Retina iPad.)

It makes me think about what I do with my computers. Shouldn’t 1920×1080 be enough? At this moment, I spend the vast majority of my time on a computer (at home) doing one of these things: web browsing (ie. reading or watching), writing, or playing games. Playing games isn’t much of a consideration since I’ll almost always be using a desktop PC for that. And 1920×1080 is the perfect size for watching video. But I am worried about the reading and writing.

But here’s the thing. I can always put the iPad next to the laptop to read things on the web. I can even write things on the iPad with a keyboard attached. It works quite well for that. I could easily see it as my main writing machine actually. Talk about distraction-free writing.

So I’m not sure what my point is. Except I probably don’t need a new laptop yet.

But if I were going to get one, I am looking at these candidates: A 15” MacBook Pro Retina, of course, a Vizio 15” notebook, a 15” Samsung Series 9 thin-and-light, or this thing called a CyberpowerPC 15” gaming laptop, which is kind of ugly and heavy, but a gaming powerhouse. Right now I almost never want to run a game on a laptop, though, so it would probably be pointless.

It occurs to me that if I get the MacBook Pro, I can run Windows on it with Boot Camp or VirtualBox. So why don’t I just save myself a lot of trouble and just get a MacBook Pro? Because it’s expensive as crap, that’s why. And it will only have a 2 year lifespan, as with any laptop.