I’ve always wanted a laptop.
I grew up wanting a laptop, partly because of the movies I have watched as kid, and because of the cool things that you can do with it. I’ve been introduced to computers as early as I was seven years old. I was tinkering with it, taking out it’s components and rebuilding it then trying out different configurations. At one point, I’ve even destroyed my sound card, although details on why that happened are all too distant now. If only I’ve focused all that curiosity into learning how to code at that point, things might have been a lot better now.
Back to laptops.
I’ve always wanted one. But it’s so expensive that we cannot afford it. I could go as far as to say that even the 90% of the population can’t afford one. Even my parents, having decent jobs, can’t afford one for them to share on. All we have is a clunky desktop computer. If I remember correctly, it got a 650MB hard drive and 16MB of RAM.
Fast forward to 2008.
I’m 20 years old, working as an offshore Technical Support Associate for a US based ISP. I still cannot afford to buy a laptop. At this point, I already know how to code and do some stuff, but it’s still limited to the basics. Programming is still pretty obscured here by that time, and there’s no rush to learn how to code. No coding New Years’ resolution. No “I <3 Geeks” shirt with scantily clad female ‘idol’ as visuals. Companies are reluctant to sponsor mainstream tech related gatherings.
But I’m several days away from owning a laptop.
Or something close. I skipped several meals to get the newest consumer hype at that time: netbooks. These are like miniature laptops. And they costs far less, about a fraction of the price. Underpowered yes, but it looks like, feels like and works like a laptop sans a lot of moving parts. That’s where I learned Linux and where I learned a lot of programming. On a 7.9” netbook.
It’s now 2013.
At this point, I got a 14”. Compared to what we can have now, it shares the same old feeling as my clunky desktop that I used back in the days. Sure it has a two 2.0GHz CPU cores and a 4GB RAM, but you get the gist of it.
This post was supposed to justify my sudden fascination with tablets that I haven’t felt when iPads first went out, but I guess I’ll write it some other time.
