Anti-Climacus

If this current academic year has a theme, it is "now that I have an actual salary I will begin to replace things over five years old that are no longer adequate to their tasks." This week, that meant a new laptop.

The old one (a PowerBook G4) was the kind of workhorse every graduate student should have. I received it as a gift in 2005, towards the end of my second year in grad school. I am fairly certain I started writing seminar papers on it even before I got on the internet for the first time. It was my primary machine through preliminary exams, my prospectus, and my entire dissertation.

Notably, it never had a significant problem in its 5.5 years of use. Sure, it always ran hot, and this began to degrade its performance starting a year ago. It developed the inability to run more than one program effectively at about the same time. The CD burner died four years in. But like a good Mac, it never made me suffer any of the little indignities PC owners suffer on a regular basis.

The critical shortcoming of my old laptop became obvious when I was in the process of revising my dissertation: the screen was too small. For idiosyncratic reasons, I prefer revising my documents, even on the computer, by having a copy with corrections and a master copy side-by-side. But this was functionally impossible. The presence of a more-than-adequate desktop computer in my office made the fact that I couldn't do work on my home computer palatable. But as I approach a point where it is still unclear what I will be doing next year, leaving my computing situation to chance was no longer an option.

Enter the new MacBook Pro 13". It's a lovely computer, and more than sufficient for all my needs. I really only have one quibble. This is my first computer with a widescreen-ratio display. The extra space is advantageous for watching any kind of video. But the real estate I care about is north-to-south (ie how many lines of text will fit on the screen in Word?); in this respect, the new computer is approximately the same size as my old one.

Which means, if I ever get a technology budget, I will be opting for something bigger next time.

Or having my engineering friend help me build a desktop out of parts, which 14 year-old me thinks would be kind of cool.