I bought a laptop in 1999, and it was quite liberating, because I could make a lot of my own decisions.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The reason I'm an I.B.M.-type guy today is that I really needed a laptop back in 1986, and I just couldn't wait for the Powerbook.
I'm pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.
I had Dell for four and a half years, and its sales are still phenomenal, but their operating margins started to contract, so I sold it in early 1999. There's nothing wrong with Dell! It's a fine company. It's just the business risk they took.
My biggest mistake was when I started up easyEverything, a chain of Internet cafes. The idea that people would go to a shop to use a computer was revolutionary in 1999. It worked for a while, but cheap technology almost killed it. One silver lining of the problems I faced was that it gave me experience of turnarounds.
I have used Lenovo since I wrote my first novel. My old laptop broke, so I bought a new one, but still a Lenovo. It is one of my most essential devices.
The first PC that I actually bought myself was a Toshiba Papman in 1985. This model was one of the very first laptops; I remember that it was a revolution at the time!
I see people with laptops as being enslaved to something they can't live without.
I only buy a computer when it's two years old, after the glitches have been worked out.
Two to three years down the road, other companies not on a model like Dell's will be in trouble.
I remember having computers at my parents' house growing up. We had different desktop PCs, but my first laptop was an IBM ThinkPad laptop. It was big, bulky, slow and terrible.