The Horrors of Buying A New Laptop

On spilled tea, useless influencers, and who technology is really for.

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This past Tuesday, tragedy struck when I accidentally spilled tea on my laptop. I immediately did what you’re supposed to do in these situations: I blotted up whatever was currently on the keyboard, saved everything I was working on, turned the laptop off, and dried everything to the best of my ability. Not having any uncooked rice on hand in my office, I then realized that the next thing to do was to take my laptop apart, remove the battery, clean the internals, and let everything air-dry overnight. Unfortunately, I lacked the tools to remove the bespoke torque screws that held my Lenovo 7i together, so I promptly abandoned my office hours and wandered the various engineering buildings in search of one. To my surprise, none of the students in the chemical engineering department had the right tool, and neither did the metal shop accompanying our Senior Lab space. After frantically running around campus for an hour asking numerous different people for advice on where to find the right screwdriver, I finally ended up at the UMass IT office, where a kind human named Stacey helped me void my warranty (just kidding, I highly doubt I had a warranty), take my laptop apart, and remove my battery.

Finally, a sense of peace. With my battery separated (and thankfully bone dry), I could let all the internals air out overnight on my desk. I had scraped back some level of control over my future and two possibilities lay before me: I would find out in the morning whether I would have to blow off work to drive to the nearest Best Buy, or whether Stacey had heroically saved me from having to suddenly drop a band. I borrowed a laptop from the ChemE office to teach my evening class, then spent my night on my phone doing some preliminary research on what may be my next computer.

I also spent some time sitting with my emotions. Much like the technological habits of most young people, this was not just my work laptop, but my Everything Laptop. I’ve had this device since 2021 and it’s been with me through everything from the last year of grad school to the start of my passion for DJing to the first post of this very newsletter! However, it wasn’t just the potential loss of files (mostly music and sentimental pictures) that I was processing: suddenly, I was confronted with the current state of technology, specifically the horrors of buying new technology in 2024.

Being on the market for a new phone or laptop forces you to reckon with some pretty big questions. What’s the deal with these new “Copilot PCs”? What’s the deal with new technology in general? Does the latest consumer tech do anything truly new, or are we just getting iteratively better cameras every year? Why is AI being shoehorned into everything despite not being useful to the average person, while headphone jacks and USB-A ports are being taken away?

Ethics-wise, I would of course recommend buying used technology whenever possible. With chip manufacturers like Intel being BDS targets, most new tech only being possible because of exploitative conditions in Sudan and the Congo, and e-waste contributing to global ecological disaster, buying the latest iPhone is becoming less defensible by the year. Still, I wanted to get a sense of what the latest in tech had to offer, mostly to see whether the claim that “all new tech is the same but with a slightly better camera every year” is actually true, or simply a vibes-based assessment.