Everybody Has My Laptop

As a contractor, I spend a fair amount of time working in various non-traditional office locations. I am partly enabled to choose my work location by the mobility afforded me from my beefy laptop, which I purchased in December, 2003.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing a lot of people with my laptop. While I am unable to identify the specific hardware any given unit contains, the screen size, full-sized keyboard, and painful-looking hunched back are all unmistakable of a 17” HP Pavillion laptop. The other day in Murky, there were two other people with the same thing. In years past, I would revel in the ego-boosting comments I’d receive from people who witnessed my laptop coming out of the backpack and onto the table.

“Wow, that’s a big laptop,” they’d excliam.

Or, perhaps more commonly, “Isn’t that really heavy?”

Now-a-days, with everybody and their brother lugging one of these beasts around, I don’t get nearly as much attention. (And I leave the debate as to the Freudian implications of all of this to the comments.)

In any event, why is it all of a sudden? Perhaps it’s because the price has dropped after two years? Except it really hasn’t. The price of an equivalently configured HP Pavillion laptop today is only a few hundred dollars less than the purchase price almost two years ago.

Even more astonishing, the hardware offered for sale is almost identical to the hardware I’ve been using for two years. What happened to Moore’s Law? Isn’t it time for me to upgrade? We should be up to 6GHz by now! Instead, people are buying the same machine I’ve had for two years, for almost the same price. What’s going on?