So late Friday night my 2011 Macbook Pro died, it was an inevitability really. The damn thing is 8 years old and it has already had a free logic board replacement from apple because of the soldering issue that plagued the early 2011 models. This prompted me to hunt for a replacement daily driver laptop. Yes the Macbook has been my daily net surfer, word processor and light game laptop for over 8 years. With some minor upgrades the damn thing was pretty snappy. I installed 16GB of DDR3 ram and a 480GB SSD as the only drive in the system. 16GB is a bit overkill but occasionally I did use it for a bit of light video editing and it felt like it helped. Now i’m in a bit of an odd situation as over the past few months I have dropped down from 3 laptops to none. My proper gaming laptop had a fatal SSD failure, there is an ongoing story with that one that I will link >here< but needles to say I’m down 2 laptops and the old windows machine that i have left isn’t really any good for anything more than light web browsing as the inbuilt keyboard is dreadful and the track pad is abysmal. This started my search for a laptop that I can do some light gaming on as well as daily driver web browsing and writing.

After an extensive search on everyone’s favorite search engine i found a couple of options that weren’t too expensive. My original idea was to replace a Macbook with a Macbook, sounds like a pretty good idea right?! apparently apple has got it into their heads that their laptops are made of platinum. I know someone complaining that Macbook’s are expensive on the internet, how original i know but i hadn’t been paying attention for a while and i didn’t realize it had gotten this bad. For the uninitiated, here’s what people are up against. Back in the heady days of 2011 we would pay £700-£800 for a 15 inch Macbook pro. Now this was expensive but at the time they were doing some ludicrous deals with student discounts up to 20% off list price. currently if i wanted to replace my Macbook pro with something similar it would cost £2700! So as Monty Python would say, Macbook’s are right out.

Next option was to look at a consumer laptop. I had heard good things about the developments in the ultra book scene so I had a hunt about and i found a couple of options. The first and my personal favorite would have been a Razer blade 15″ ultra book. the specs all looked good and the performance looked pretty decent to be fair. The only issue i had was the fact that it cost £1600. This was well out of my £1200 hard budget that i had set myself. This put the Razer blade stealth in my sights. Unfortunately due to the size of my shovels that people keep insisting on calling hands a small form factor laptop is out as well. so my search continued. I am 3 coffees in and about 5 hours at this point and i’m about to give up when my housemate pipes up and asks why i’m mumbling and repeatedly bashing my head against the wall. He says why don’t you just go to PC Specialist and build one on there. Now bear in mind that for 4 years i have been taking the piss out of him for having a GAMING laptop. You know the kind, where the power brick is the size of a small country and the actual laptop is thicker than a 90’s yellow pages. But he says that they have moved on in 4 years and offer some actually portable stuff and that his was just designed to be stupid.

So desperate and out of ideas i look at the selection on PC Specialist and im shocked. I see there are laptops on there that weigh less than maximum carry on luggage on a flight and the prices are actually decent. So i play with the configurator and lo and behold for my budget I can get an i7 with a 1050ti in a 17″ form factor and 16GB of ram with a bunch of m.2 SSD goodness and a 1TB SSD to boot. Now needless to say it want all smooth ailing. with these companies there is always something to improve. But to be fair this gripe is not with PC Specialist themselves. My gripe is actually with the financing company that they use. they have a hard limit that you have to be living at the same address for at least 12 months. having moved in august this excluded the option to finance. However after all of that palava i ended up just going for it. Will give an update when it arrives but for the price at least it looks like a decent little powerhouse that I can take on the plane and kill the 8 hour flight to america with a game of Civ V.