Even more recently I bought a new laptop. This time, I made the same sheet, multiplied the score from the hard drive by 23 because 512 GB is enough for anyone and that seemed intuitively the amount I prioritised extra hard drive space compared to RAM and processor speed, and then looked at the best laptop before sharply diminishing returns set in; this happened to be the HP ENVY 15-ep1503na 15.6″ Laptop—Intel® Core™ i7, 512 GB SSD, Silver. This is because I have more money now, so I was aiming to maximise consumer surplus rather than minimise the amount I was spending.[1]
Surprisingly, it came with a touch screen! That’s just the kind of nice thing that laptops do nowadays, because as I concluded in my post, everything nice about laptops correlates with everything else so high/low end is an axis it makes sense to sort things on. Less surprisingly, it came with a graphics card, because ditto.
Unfortunately this high-end laptop is somewhat loud; probably my next one will be less loud, up to including an explicit penalty for noise.
It would have been predictable, however, at the time that I bought that new laptop, that I would have had that much money at a later date. Which means that I should have just skipped straight to consumer surplus maxxing.
Even more recently I bought a new laptop. This time, I made the same sheet, multiplied the score from the hard drive by 23 because 512 GB is enough for anyone and that seemed intuitively the amount I prioritised extra hard drive space compared to RAM and processor speed, and then looked at the best laptop before sharply diminishing returns set in; this happened to be the HP ENVY 15-ep1503na 15.6″ Laptop—Intel® Core™ i7, 512 GB SSD, Silver. This is because I have more money now, so I was aiming to maximise consumer surplus rather than minimise the amount I was spending.[1]
Surprisingly, it came with a touch screen! That’s just the kind of nice thing that laptops do nowadays, because as I concluded in my post, everything nice about laptops correlates with everything else so high/low end is an axis it makes sense to sort things on. Less surprisingly, it came with a graphics card, because ditto.
Unfortunately this high-end laptop is somewhat loud; probably my next one will be less loud, up to including an explicit penalty for noise.
It would have been predictable, however, at the time that I bought that new laptop, that I would have had that much money at a later date. Which means that I should have just skipped straight to consumer surplus maxxing.