A Milestone of Sorts

It used to be whenever I bought a new computer, I went into it thinking it'd run around $2k. My Kaypro 4-84+88 was $2k in 1984, my Amiga was $1500 or so in '86 or '87, but came in around $2k with accessories (RAM, 5.25" floppy, etc.). I bought a few PCs from the '90s to a couple years ago that were all in the $2k ballpark. Of course, each one was far more powerful than the one before. Lately when I've priced desktops it's become clear that $2k is now excessive for my needs, or at least as long as I'm not running Vista. I've also bought laptops (kinda in the Kaypro spirit), and the constant was that a laptop would be noticeably more expensive than a comparable desktop. This doesn't seem true anymore. I just bought a Samsung NC10 Netbook, $480 from Amazon. This is a sweet little machine, weighing under 3 pounds and having long battery life (I haven't quite figured out how long, yet). It does come loaded with useless junk, but not as much as my Dell laptop did. And it came with XP, so I've still managed to completely avoid Vista. Speaking of Vista, xkcd just weighed in: Anyhow a dual core CPU, surprisingly low energy consumption, a GB of RAM, and 160GB of hard drive space for under $500. This is good.