Buy some new hardware, seriously.

Just recently I blogged about this:

I don’t understand why otherwise smart professionals with (I’m assuming) plenty of income would choose to use such outdated equipment.

I run into this in my own professional life as well. If you are a successful Ruby on Rails developer and don’t yet have an SSD drive in whatever machine you call your primary workstation… what the hell? If you don’t think you need it, you’re wrong. If you don’t think you can afford it, you’re wrong - or not charging near enough for your work.

For $137 a month you could be using a completely loaded 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro ($3,299 1 with the assumption it will last you at least 2 years). My completely amazing 13-inch Retina Macbook Pro (now two years old) cost only $1,999. That’s only $83 a month (using the same 2 year math). If for some reason you don’t love Apple I assume your options could be even less expensive - and I haven’t even explored the possibility of used equipment.

If you do professional work (esp. programming) using your computer and aren’t using a computer built in the past few years with plenty of memory and a fast SSD drive then stop right now and order one.

You’ll thank me later.

  1. I think it might be even less with the new Macbook Pros just released.