Battle of the Laptops: The Pursuit of Coolness

The Lenovo Ideapad Slim 5 Gen 10 (model no. 13ARP10), with its 13.3-inch WUXGA IPS display and Ryzen 7 processor, is perhaps the Windows laptop to buy for those who want an M4-powered Apple MacBook Air but don't want to spend Rs 1.20 lakh

Last month, I’d written about my son’s laptop. Or rather, the fact that the old one was broken and we were looking to buy a new one. Having told my son that I’d been using computers for close to 40 years, had set up and run an animation, video editing and computer graphics training institute in the mid-1990s and had once headed the writers’ team at CHIP (a leading computers/technology magazine back in the late-1990s), I assumed he would be sufficiently impressed. And that he would not question my wisdom in selecting a laptop that would be best suited to his requirements. Clearly, I was clueless about just how hard - perhaps even impossible - it is to impress the young these days.

My son has finished school about a month ago and will soon be starting college. Which would mean some homework, maybe a few college assignments. Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel sheets, web browsing, emails, video chats and watching videos. That should be about it, right? So, I suggested we get something with an i3, i5 or Ryzen 5 (hexa-core) U-series processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, 15.6-inch screen and a good display, ideally a full-HD IPS LCD. A fair number of such laptops are currently offered by manufacturers like Acer, HP, Asus, Lenovo, Dell and MSI, at prices ranging between Rs 35,000 to 45,000. Laptops with an IPS display are a bit more expensive than those with non-IPS displays but still cheaper than OLED displays.

What’s With the F***ing Loudspeakers?!?

One of the things I miss most from the past, from my growing up days in Lucknow, is… peace. Peace and quiet. I was born in Lucknow and spent a good 20 years in that city before moving out to Bareilly. And in those 20 years, we lived in four different houses, in different residentials areas across the city. And in all those years, wherever we lived, I don’t remember ever being subjected to loudspeakers. Not once. Sure, people still celebrated all festivals, happy new years, birthdays, anniversaries and… whatever else there may have been to celebrate. People celebrated with joy and enthusiasm and with a genuine sense of neighbourhood camaraderie. But without the noise. Without massive loudspeakers blaring out jarring music at earsplitting levels of volume. Without the incessant noise, which today makes me want to get the hell out of Delhi-NCR and move to some small, remote village somewhere up in the mountains of Himachal.