I have been thinking about a laptop to purchase for at least the past six months. I sold my old black Macbook to a buddy of mine, Ben, for $300 in hopes of using that money to buy another laptop. Well, sometimes stuff happens and you have to use your $300 of easily earned money for something else. So for all this time I’ve been without a portable machine to call my own. I’m actually using Stephanie’s to write this blog post. I keep bouncing around which laptop I want, and I’m not sure that I’m anywhere near close tot he answer. All I know right now is that I want it to be a Mac.

The cool thing about having a laptop for me now is that I work at a place with a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. If we can do our jobs with it, we can use it. It’s the most freeing idea in the world. My problem is that I don’t have a device to bring. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between either a Macbook Air or a Macbook Pro with Retina Display. There are pros and cons to both of these laptops and I can’t decide for the life of me which one is the one that will work best for me. The major downside to the MBPr is that it cost SO much. It has fantastic specs, but I just don’t know if I should get it. The MBA is really lightweight and wonderful for travel, but it has quite a bit less power and only goes up to 13". I’ve had a 13" laptop before, but if I plan on doing any real work with it, I might want the screen real estate.

Then again, I could always add a monitor to it when I need to do something real, and then I would have the space to actually do something. See, this is where I get my problems. There is NO answer to my situation. I either get the best laptop and spend tons of money, or I get the lower end laptop, save some money, buy my beautiful wife her dream home, and then be happy with it. Let’s be honest though, this is probably the last huge laptop purchase I’ll have before we have kids. So I want this one to be able to last. But I also already have a powerful desktop, so what on earth do I need a super powerful laptop for? I should be able to do everything I need to do from a Macbook Air. They are really super nice laptops and they gain me the portability that I don’t have right now.

Congratulations, you’ve just witnessed parts of the conversation I have in my head everyday while I try to decide what laptop to get. If you have any contributions you’d like to make to this ridiculous first world conundrum that I’ve found myself in, please feel free to leave a comment. Just don’t tell me to get a PC. I’ve been down that road and I know I wouldn’t be satisfied at the end of the day. I’ve carefully weight this decision so that it was the one area where I know the answer. Bah, I hate decisions.