gettin' spexy

What does it mean to look for a laptop?

Foreword
Those of you who know me (rather too well) will be well aware that my free time in the last couple of weeks has been largely consumed by laptop shopping. It has caused me so much angst and internet time that I began to wonder: is this more than just a desire to get value for money? Does my indecision between models extend beyond greed for specifications? (specs?)

I started writing this while lying awake at 1am and contemplating the Lenovo Thinkpad X60s and the Sony Vaio SZ38. Superficially I was having internal arguments about specifications such as weight vs screen size, battery life vs hard drive space and so on. Typical nerdism, hey?

But why can I not find answers, despite having hounded the best nerds computing brains to my knowledge? I have my theories... **insane laugh**

1. Girls vs Boys
My girlfriends have very different requirements for techgear than my male friends. For example...one dinner party some weeks ago...

Sue: I'm thinking of buying a Macbook because it's pretty!
Thadeus: Did I just hear...you want to buy a laptop because it's pretty?" **expression of disbelief**

I noticed markedly that when I asked my girl/boy friends whether I should go for a Lenovo or a Sony, that the boys went with Lenovo and the girls with Sony.

Now, why do I suspect Sony is tapping the female market?

Ever seen a man buy a pink laptop?

Moreover, their laptop designs are sleek and lightweight, while simultaneously packing in features like Dual-Layer DVD Burners (and sometimes Blu-Ray!) as well as webcams.

Lenovos, on the other hand, are chunky - but this allows them to outdo the average adolescent male in terms of surviving bumps and scratches. The lightweight ones don't have optical (CD/DVD) drives. To quote my mother, "Who in this day and age would make a laptop without a DVD drive?" She reckons it's because boys have different pastimes to girls - for example, girls watch their chic-flick movies using their laptops' DVD drives, but boys download car/plane/violent/explicit movies directly from the internet, thus rendering the DVD drive useless.
(NB: that Lenovo might cause the boys some issues when they run out of hard drive space though...HAH!)

Penultimate statement - I quote the divine Philadelphia (Dellie!)...

Dellie: (go with) "The pretty one, you're female."

Lastly, take a peek at Sony's latest advertisement.

Sorry about bandwidth - but I felt you had to see it in its full glory -

Anyway, this ad features 3 people, all representing different brands/kinds of laptops. Notice that only VAIO is represented by a FEMALE. I rest my case.

2. What to do with the Ugly Duckling?
With reference to the ad above, notice that the PC man (whom we can associate with brands such as Lenovo) is not particularly aesthetically pleasing. All right, so he's not aesthetically displeasing, but he's not particularly...well, pretty. On the other hand, the VAIO girl takes pride in having a quirky sort of prettiness, I guess "bohemian" isn't the word, since the style implies long, tiered skirts and peasant tops, but it's the same idea - individualistic=beautiful.

Perhaps, (since to be fair, the man in the Sony shop pointed out that boys are snapping up the apple-green laptops as fast as the girls) it's not a question of gender roles, but something even more fundamental to society - the pursuit of beauty?

Several thoughts have run through my head which equate my Sony and Lenovo laptops with different aspects of beauty.
* "I'll take the Sony...it's pretty!"
* "I'll take the Lenovo...I don't want a laptop that's prettier than me..."
* "I'll take the Sony...I'll be sitting in Gloria Jean's using the wireless, and men will be drawn to my beautiful laptop."
* "I'll take the Lenovo...and I'll MAKE it prettier than the Sony! I can knit it a cover! I'll buy rainbow stickers!"

So during my extraordinarily long meditation session, I decided, "let's overcomplicate stuff..."

If I take the Lenovo, it's a question of, adopting the ugly duckling and waiting for it to turn into a swan.
If I take the Sony, it's as if I'm buying an extravagantly expensive parrot.
Does maturity really mean learning to deal with delayed gratification?

3. Magnetism
The Sony has a magnetic clip to hold it together when you fold the screen down - but then I wondered, could Vaio laptops be magnets for other things (apart from laptop thieves?)

A not insubstantial part of my adolescence has been spent on wondering how to be a boy magnet, or becoming an iron filing to some boy's metaphorical magnet. So, combining part I, concerning boys and girls, and part II, all about beauty, I came up with an even more twisted theory.

Just shortly before I was writing about maturity. Perhaps, the conflict between Sony and Lenovo in my case is an expression of despair that I don't know what guys would like to see in me now that I'm supposedly mature enough to deal with long-term relationships with the male species.

Here is a table, which I feel sums up the attributes associated with each brand. And why.

Sony	Lenovo
Looks (already reiterated too many times)	Brains (Thinkpad)
The stuff of flings (I've heard they can be flimsy)	Long-term dependability (everyone says they're durable)
Playfulness (cf PC-Mac-Vaio ad)	Seriousness
Emily Bronte	Jane Austen (if you've read them you'll know what I mean)
"La Vie Boheme!" (watch RENT if you don't understand the joke...)	Conservatism
The OC	Ugly Betty
...the more accessories, the better!	Minimalist fashion philosophy
Consumerism	Frugality
Individuality	Conformity (alright maybe this is really stretching it...)
Sexy boys from the Arts faculty	Nerdy boys from Engineering or Science (thanks for the idea, Perpetua!)

Obviously, both laptop brands claim to capture different elements of personality - good lord, now I sound like an essay - but isn't personality what the guys rave on about these days? **sigh** I wish it were true...if it were true, pornography would not exist.

In Conclusion
a) It is now 2am and I still haven't made a decision.
b) The next morning: "Or maybe this is all just another hiccup on the journey towards perfection? Learning how to make compromises is a sure-fire sign of maturity!"
c) Some days later: "It'll be a Sony!"
d) Sometime in the future: "It is a Sony!"