My current 17" monstrosity of a laptop
If you’re a snow bum or someone that ever travels by air, I’m about to share something which will make your life easier… DO NOT buy a 17″ laptop.
But, why Jed? Why shouldn’t I buy a nice big laptop? Here’s why:
1) They weigh 500 tons
Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but they do weigh a stupid amount. You might say that a little extra weight won’t bother you for the short commute through the airport, but trust me, it adds up.
It starts at 3 to 5 kg just for the laptop. Now add in the giant power brick that’s needed to power your laptop and you’re already adding in another couple kg with all the cables and other junk.
So now you might be saying, ‘So what? 5kg isn’t that bad!’ Well it isn’t that bad… at first. I didn’t think it was that bad at first either, but constantly carrying it around airports, unpacking it and then repacking it, have added up over the years and now I shiver at the thought of packing up my monstrosity of a laptop.
The whole point of a laptop is that it’s meant to be mobile, but I basically never move my laptop when I don’t have to because it weighs a ton.
2) You almost never need that much power
The only reason you get a big laptop is because you want more power. However, unless you have to play brand new video games on the highest resolution with all the fancy effects enabled, you’ll basically never need all that power.
The only real upside of all the extra power is that I can process videos 5-10 minutes quicker when I edit new snowboard footage. It may just be me, but I’d rather wait the extra 5-10 minutes than deal with all the downsides of carrying around a huge laptop.
In addition, today’s laptops are insanely more powerful for what you get in a tiny box. A good 13″ laptop can handle video editing just fine these days. Besides video editing and games, there’s not much else that requires computer power.
Surfing the web, checking facebook and doing your email does not need a 17″ laptop.
3) It makes more sense to have a desktop + laptop
Desktops are highly underrated. For the price of a nicely powered 17″ laptop, you can buy a desktop that’s twice as fast as the 17″ laptop, plus have money left over to get a 11-13″ laptop for travelling. It’s the best of both worlds. You can use the desktop when you’re at home and the laptop when you travel.
Not to mention, you can use services like Dropbox to automatically share all your files between all your computers, without you having to do anything. In this day and age, it’s just become highly wasteful to have a huge 17″ laptop.
Trust me, as someone who runs most of my business on the go, you don’t need a 17″ laptop monstrosity. Know what laptop I’m getting next? A nice, light macbook air.
– Jed