new laptop tonight?

Having just traded a bunch of Egyptian currency for a bunch of Euros (at a surprisingly fair rate), I think I should dispose of most of those Euros by crossing the street and buying a new laptop.

My first laptop (a generous gift from my brother after I’d drawn the short straw on a joint business venture) lasted 5 years, though it first started eating data after 3.5 years, which I was too inexperienced to take as the warning sign that it was. These things become obsolete so quickly that they just aren’t built to last, nor is there much point in building them to last at this stage of the art.

The second one (mail-ordered via Amazon to avoid state sales tax) lasted 3 years, and failed in physical rather than memory terms– the screen, namely, was the big problem. That model of PowerBook was known for screen issues. For awhile you had to have the screen at just the right angle or it would black out, and by the end it was just always blacked out.

The third one (French keyboard, purchased in Toulouse, and the original machine on which this blog was born) lasted 19 months before it started crashing in weird ways. I had to finish the Meillassoux book right then and couldn’t afford an unreliable machine, so I went down the street and bought a new one. The Toulouse machine was reliable as soon as we bombed the hard drive, so I gave it to a junior colleague whose laptop had just been stolen in West Africa and who couldn’t really afford a new one at that moment.

The fourth one, on which I am typing this blog post, was purchased in Cairo in late September 2010. It’s still perfectly workable. However, the keys are starting to stick just a little bit due to all the typing of the past year. 15+ months. That’s probably the reasonable lifespan for my laptop these days, given the amount of writing I do. This time I will probably keep this one rather than give it away. It will be nice to carry a beater around to cafés, not worry about spilling tea on it or being robbed while carrying it, and so forth.

Also, writing is my job. It’s what I do. It hardly seems extravagant to have two of these machines.

And even though we all know this, it’s still absolutely astonishing to look at the display models of Powerbooks here in Paris and see how much more powerful they are then my current machine, at exactly the same price. Moore’s Law is well known, but it never ceases to amaze. I think I can get quadruple the memory tonight for the same price I paid for this one 15 months ago.

But the iPod was the more amazing jump, from the one I picked up in Portland in January 2007 (which actually did run out of space a couple of years ago) to the one I picked up in Brussels in October 2011 (which I won’t be able to fill even with every CD I own).

We forget how futuristic it ought to feel that the equivalent of 300 or 400 1970’s vinyl albums can now fit in our pockets on one small metal device that costs a little over $200.

My big problem now will be finding the time to convert all my CD’s into MP3’s. When exactly am I going to do this? I suppose I could do 4 per day for there months, or something like that. It would be incredible to have some of this stuff on the iPod– the 4-disc Chess Blues set, for example. Never thought of having that on iPod before.

All of Charlie Parker on Verve, Trane on Atlantic. I’ve had those boxed sets for years, but never in portable form.

Heck, many of Deleuze’s lectures, which I deleted from the old iPod for space reasons. Now I can just dump it on there and leave it. I could listen to Deleuze while riding the bus to work.