For a majority of us, purchasing a new laptop isn’t an everyday thing, and it’s also not typically a small purchase that we just run out and rush into. That’s why it’s important to ask yourself a number of questions prior to purchasing a new computer. In this post, I’ll be helping you answer the question, What will I use this computer for?
I’m a web developer, and I do about 95% of all of my programming and development using Microsoft technologies, on a desktop PC, at my office. The use of my laptop has, and probably will always be more for personal use – pictures, music, videos, responding to emergency situations while out of the office, for checking email while on vacation. Over the years, I never really used my PC laptop to do any real development work. Most often, the only “real work” that I’d do on it was write quotes and proposals for clients. And Mac OSX offers the Microsoft Office Suite which would allow me to create quotes and proposals just as I did with my PC.
Prior to deciding the type of computer that I was going to buy, I put together a list of things that I’d like to use my new laptop for. Your list will probably look different, but this will give you an idea and a starting point of things to consider prior to making your next computer purchase.
- Image editing
- Video editing
- Music management
- Writing quotes and proposals
- Browsing the web
- Email – Personal, work, and other (I’ve got like 500 email addresses)
- Watching movies
- Blogging
- Basic HTML editing
- FTP access
- Remote server access – for my work servers
The above list covers about 90% of my day to day activities that I’d be using my new laptop for. Next, I had to ask myself, what software/features do I need, and how much power do I need to accomplish all of these tasks. Mac OSX comes with iLife and iTunes which takes care of a large portion of the above list, but for advanced photo editing and video editing, I’ll be using Adobe products such as Photoshop, After Effects and Premier. These programs typically require strong processors, and a large amount of RAM. I was never really worried about storage space because I typically will store all of my music, pictures and videos on my home PC server and/or on an external hard drive. The only time videos, music and images will take up space on my laptop hard drive is when I am working on them directly.
My minimal storage space needs, made just about any laptop a perfect fit for me. However, due to the amount of work that I anticipate on doing with digital media (music, pictures and videos), my mind was pretty much set on going with Apple and the OSX operating system, due to all of the easy to use tools that it comes with. My need for a fast processor took the MacBook and MacBook Air out of the equation, thus leaving me with MacBook Pro as my final option. So, now there was only one question left – 15 inch or 17 inch. And I think we all know the answer to that one! 
