Decisions, decisions, decisions.

So I've been looking into a new laptop for personal use. 

Actually, it's better to say I'm looking to purchase my first laptop for personal use in well over twenty years. 

That's not to say that I don't have laptops around, work has plenty sitting about that I can grab, play with, and could potentially make use of. I just don't like the idea of mixing work and personal data on the same device and try to avoid doing so as much as humanly possible. So over the last couple of months I've been going over options and I'm sitting here unable to decide on what to do.

Looking into what I want on a laptop I really want something smaller, lightweight, and with a very good battery life. 

I would also prefer not to have the device being a slow piece of crap or built like a flimsy piece of crap. I can't stand laptops where the entire device seems to twist and flex when you open the screen or type on the keyboard. 

One option that I've been looking at is the current crop of Apple's Macbook laptops. 

While I have a general preference for Windows, since that's been my primary OS for many decades, the recent things that Microsoft has been doing with Windows has me less and less impressed and willing to consider what Apple has on offer. For most of what I do the "work" is done either in a browser, a terminal session, or some other type of remote session. This means that a lot of what I do is rather platform agnostic and being on Windows vs. MacOS or even a Linux system doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. 

On the Windows side the new Quallacom based devices are a interesting option, however I remember the first time that Microsoft attempted to move into running on a ARM derived CPU with Windows RT and that was a huge flop. Even the more recent Surface Pro X hasn't really made a lot of waves from what I've been seeing. While these new Snapdragon processors sound promising software vendors still have a lot of stuff to catch up on to get everything working. Given that nobody seemed to bother with it the first time around and how Microsoft managed things the last time they tried to make ARM cpu's a thing for Windows I'm thinking that I might pass.

And with the news about the latest problems on the 14th and 13th generation Intel stuff hitting the fan right now I'm kind of gun shy about getting in on anything running Intel's latest stuff. 

AMD is an option, and I've been running Ryzen processors in my desktop machine and on my work laptop for years now and I have been quite happy with them overall. However the laptop side of things has had enough quirks that I'm not just ready to jump right in again. From a performance standpoint the AMD stuff is great, but the battery life leaves a lot to be desired if I'm going to be running around with the laptop in my bag over the course of a day. Having a highly portable system kind of becomes moot if you have to plug in for anything more than a hour or so.

I think I'm getting close to a decision, but I'm probably going to sit on this for a bit more and make sure that I've let things bake in my mind to make sure that everything is good.