Technological Carpe Diem

I'm a terrible person! I had an opportunity so I dump the "love of my life" for another......the X300 for an X301. This is what happened. I had a "contract" in hand for a "new" laptop from one of my old customers (repeat business is awesome). She had just emailed me "out of the blue", stating that she's ready for another computer. The ThinkPad R52 that I sold her 4-5 years ago has been great, but now ready for an updated machine since she's about to start a new degree program this summer. Her needs were the same as before ("Office" type apps, Internet, and a little light photo editing), but she just needed this machine to operate the newer OS (Windows 7, which is what she has at work) and an updated version of Office ....and she had a $300 budget. All that sounded very much like what I do on my X300 which these days sells in the $250 range on a regular basis. So I showed her my machine, which I had upgraded to 4Gb of RAM and a 128Gb SSD vs. the original 2Gb of RAM and 64Gb SSD. We agreed on $285, cleaned up, reloaded with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, MS Office 2010 Professional, and ready to go.

So, this is where the Frugal Propellerhead part comes into play. Now, that I knew I had $285 to work with, I needed to find a replacement for the X300. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you've probably guessed that I've been researching for the possibility of this situation for some time now. First, I didn't just pull the selling price out of my hip pocket. I knew that the X300 routinely sell for somewhere between $200-300, and that's for a "stock" version with either 2 or 4Gb of RAM and a 64Gb SSD (the 128Gb wasn't available at the time it was introduced). So, an upgraded one like mine would be at the top of the range and that's not including Windows 7 OS much less MS Office. So I knew even if my buyer checked on the pricing, I'd keep my reputation as offering a good product at a good price intact. Secondly, I also knew that I could find X301s selling for between $250 and $350. Therefore, if I'm lucky, or good, then I should be able to buy my replacement for around my X300 selling price.

As it turns out; I was lucky AND good. Last week, I was watching a handful of the X301s on eBay of which I quickly narrowed field down to two likely targets. They both had 4Gb of RAM. One had a 128Gb SSD, but the other seemed to be nicer (it's usually hard to tell from eBay photographs). Besides, I had an almost new 128Gb SSD sitting in a drawer. As luck would have it, I missed on the first (128Gb SSD) which sold for about $230, but didn't feel too bad since the second one didn't appear to have many bidders and it ended at an awkward time of the afternoon on a weekday when most people would be at work. It was at something like $185 when I entered a max bid $235 and won it at $200 even! I'm betting that one of the issues was that the seller set the shipping at a rather high $30, but at $230 total, I didn't much care. I got the machine I wanted at a great price.I upgraded and made $55 in the process! The shocker was when I opened the box and found an almost pristine laptop. 

Why did I go through the trouble of all that work to upgrade to a machine that's basically just like the old one? Other than the fact that's it's newer, more powerful while running cooler; it takes DDR3 RAM. That means I can upgrade to 8Gb for less than half the cost of doing it with DDR2 that the X300 takes. Oh...... and I can't afford the X1 Carbon......yet.......

Which leads us to the history lesson. Other than my love for ThinkPads, I love ultra portables. Above you see a stack of them. Starting at the top, you have the PC110, then the 235, 240, the S30, the X301 and finally, the X1 on the bottom. Over the years you can see that they've basically taken the same volume and kind of Pizza-dough'd-it. Actually, only 3 of the 6 have been available here in North America, with the other 3 being "Japan Only" models, but you get the idea. 

I love undersized laptops. It goes back to the first one I ever owned; the great IBM ThinkPad 701 "Butterfly". You know a design is great when it receives a name.....and when it's immediately ensconced in the Museum of Modern Art! That was only the beginning of this obsession.

It was so bad, I even owned the weird "ugly duckling" twins, the ThinkPad 500, and 510c which were really not very good computers but they were fun .....and small.

Some years later when I was already in the mid-sized ThinkPad stage of my computing life with the T2x series, I acquired a 240e through a trade. It was cool, and small (compare it to the FDD that it's attached to), but seriously underpowered by that time.

However you can see by comparison to some of the other machines of that era, how small it really was.

Then came the "X" rated part of my ThinkPad life: beginning with the X20 (that you see depicted here attached to it's "Ultrabase") which was a work acquisition for departmental travel. Over time, I'd own most of the models in that series including the X21, X22, X30, and two X31s, the last of which is still sitting under my desk. In the more modern idiom, I currently have my daughter using an X61.

Of course, ThinkPads don't have a monopoly on ultra portable innovation. There's the amazing Fujitsu "U" Series that are smartphone sized, and Apple with the iconic Macbook "Air" which just beat the X300 to market. However, I'd have to say that probably the company that got there first, with the least (?) is Sony with the X505! This amazing computer came to market almost 5 years before the similar, was thinner than Air (can you say that?) by quite a bit, and essentially had no competitors in the market.

As for me though; I'm not quite ready to give up the admittedly, rarely used optical drive. This in combination with the "must haves" of the famous ThinkPad TrackPoint and other features such as high resolution display, and it's portability make the X301 the right Ultra Portable for me. Well, and a for profit trade-out doesn't hurt either!