I arrived on this topic to create a post with when I am given the task by my cousin to look for a new laptop. At first, I am surprised. Oops! Are you gonna change my laptop now? That will be so lovely! (Since she’s the one who bought the laptop I’m using. And that was more than three years ago.The laptop is still good except for its battery anyway.) But then she told me that it is for her daughter. Ow. You gotta kidding me Ate! Your daughter just entered Grade 7 in a Montessori school. Just saying the name or type of school makes me drool and think of lots of money that will be spent for tuition and miscellaneous fees alone.
Her daughter, who is not legally allowed to have a Facebook account because she wasn’t thirteen yet will now have her own laptop.
The Story
It was June 12 and there are no office work nor classes due to Independence day celebration here in the Philippines. My cousin told me to accompany her daughter and we will look for a laptop. Since I am the techie person in our family, most of the gadgets or appliances being bought do have my personal touch and opinion. I am given the task for that day and I only have the morning to look for that laptop since she says “so that this afternoon, I will meet both of you and we will buy what you have chosen. I will run into some office errands first this morning.” Ugh. That was fast. As I spent a week of research and comparison when we bought mine. Seriously.
So, the search for my niece’s laptop began. I have one thing in mind. I am focusing on the brand Asus since it is really doing well for the past months. Personally, I have an Acer Laptop but it failed to impress me in terms of sound quality and battery performance. Asus is quite good in that field and it will be a good and nice choice to opt for that brand this time. After minutes of window shopping, I remember one lovely unit I really adored months ago. The Asus TransformerPad T100. It looks nice and one thing great about it is that the unit is convertible to a standalone tablet. I think my niece will love it. I am perfectly correct but her mother, doesn’t want it. She rather instructed me again to look for another one, a real laptop with the same brand – after questioning me about the brand that she says it is not famous or reliable. Hey. Asus is dependable and has solid reliability. Wait. Is that statement made any sense?
We stumbled upon many tech stores in the city. Basically, around and within SM Tarlac only. 😛 Since the temperature is freaking high and unfit for travel! I am not satisfied with them. Some offers good models but pricey. Some are obsolete hardware. Some doesn’t fit my taste. Some does have sales officers that I am more knowledgeable than them. I am not being arrogant here. But seriously, you should be speaking credible facts about the product you are selling. And others do not accept credit cards – as my cousin tend to pay via CC at first. Lastly, we entered a store named PCworx. Now, my cousin already joined us. It is a small computer store. Hence, the name “PC…”. The store only display 4 laptop units. Asus, HP, Acer and Cherry Mobile. Uhm. Yeah. the Cherry Mobile Alpha. It looks like a laptop for me. A convertible one like the ASUS Transformer Pad. The HP brand is a no no since they are much known for overheating problems. The Acer unit is fine but as what I say awhile ago, sound quality of Acer laptops (mostly but not all) really sucks. I almost insisted to go out of the store right after seeing the display but one unit caught my attention. It is is the ASUS model. To be more specific, it is the X455LD. It looks great and have decent above midrange specifications. It sells for P33,900 SRP. My cousin did not specify any budget range for her daughter’s laptop but she told me to look for “a real laptop that will last.”. I think this model is definitely a good buy. Decent specs, up to date processor, GPU etc. But well, it is still pricey. The salesman told us that the price is for installment basis. And what is really surprising is that it is only P28,000 when you pay in cash. This is the first time I encountered such thing. A huge difference of P6,000 when you pay for cash instead of using a credit card. So, the P28,000 price is a bang for the buck. You get a 14 inch ASUS laptop, a Haswell generation Intel i5 4210U CPU, Dedicated GeForce Nvidia 820M GPU, 500GB HDD and the other usual things a laptop has. Given the price, this is a bargain. My niece also like it. I told my cousin that it will gonna be a great buy. She then paid for cash and destroyed the budget. HAHA!
Not So Lucky But Blessed
You are possibly in question why I am telling this story. The main point here is a 12 year old kid does now have her OWN laptop. Hey. I manage to own one (via my cousin. LOL) when I was already 18. We are not a rich family that can buy anything we want. But still, my cousin insisted to buy one for her daughter. I am in a self argument if a kiddo really need one but it is how blessed the today’s generation are. They are blessed enough that most of things that are not offered to the teens before are now readily accessible. Before, students can hardly use a computer to finish an assignment or a project. I remember the days that I would cut my budget for a meal just to pay for the 1 hour rent on a computer shop. This is not a sort of a resentment with my parents. It is not like that. Parents today try their best to provide the needs of their child/children to cope up with the present world. The generation today is so blessed but not so lucky. Why? They are blessed to have these things now but not so lucky that they haven’t experience things a kid or a teen do before. They are getting stocked in the new technology and hardly experience to love the real environment they had. Like my niece, she hardly know any household chores and cannot appreciate the beauty beyond the ugly faces of things around her. This is partly figurative anyway. As she is loved by her parents – providing her the comfort and everything she needs. The generation today is not so lucky. As they are missing tons of simple things in life.