I remember of times back then when options were limited. There used to be a very small tuple of technical offerings which we would look into before making that buying decision. Budget; of course it always took the hot prime seat, but considering the offerings that vehicle would bring in for me never made me ponder so much before I could start the journey. The life was peaceful, and technology advancement in the products were happily growing at ease.
Fast forward now, the budget again stays there occupying the hot prime seat. But with that the choices in technological intricacies are so huge that it makes me afraid. I get afraid of every buying decision. This is the fear of making a mistake which I might contemplate later. And hence most of the time I just delay or postpone indefinitely my decision to buy 'my next daily driver'.
I imagine this as a situation wherein I am at a sea beach, which has a huge fleet of boats docked. I need to buy one and start my journey. Now I am very much confused which one to go with. I have the experience and an outline for my journey, but then there are also loads of incertitude on the journey ahead. Will my boat help me complete my journey? Or will it crumble midway? And may be who knows, the boat could fall apart just after I start my journey. I might need to get back to the shore, and make that difficult buy choice again.
This situation is weird. I know the boats are powerful, and every other one here at the dock are ahead and behind with one another by a very small margin. Yet they make my choice 'difficult'.
But I made a decision... 😎
My new daily driver now is a Windows 10 laptop. It comes with AMD Ryzen 7, 5800H. It has Nvidia RTX 3050 dedicated graphics card. The RAM is at a sweet spot of 16 GB right now. And SSD is offering 512 GB of storage. The distinguishing aspect is the 14" screen which sits at 2.8 K of resolution, and it is an OLED display. 😊
I am a casual gamer as well. So there was an obvious impulsion in my head to have a Windows laptop. Linux distros are still not catching up well with gaming and Nvidia drivers support. Thus, a Windows laptop.
I was using a Macbook Air 2017 model to this date. The performance of this laptop to this date is still satisfactory. One thing which always saddened me was the screen quality. The company laptop that I use for my work has an amazing screen with very high nits of peak brightness. I love that display! When I switch to my personal laptop, the Macbook Air, I feel it very difficult now to adjust my eyes on the screen. This triggered me to get a new personal laptop with a better display.
Once the churn to get a new laptop is ignited, how strange it is to see the dopamine bringing in even more reasons at place to go ahead, make a buy.
I waited. I waited a lot. I even earmarked my requirements in an excel and kept ticking/unticking them to make a solid decision. And if I have to go back to the golden days back then, and compare that to now, I will say that the 4 x 4 truth table has now turned into 16 x 16 truth table. Now, the different combinations together give rise to a lot of confusion. Narrowing them down slowly helps.
The journey with the new daily driver has started positively... ❤️
I am writing this blog post with my new companion. I will be playing few games on Steam too. The download in enqueued.
And by the way, Windows 10 is much much better performant and stable than Windows 11. At least this is based on my personal observation with both these versions of Windows.