I bought my ThinkPad T400 eight years ago, to replace an iMac and an R61. Almost 4.5 years ago I bought my Surface RT, and I got my Surface 3 probably about two or two and a half years ago. This year has been a bad year for hardware. First, my T400's display broke when it fell to the ground. Second, my Surface 3 has sustained several falls such that there's a huge crack in the display, the touchscreen now doesn't work, and at around 20-30% battery capacity, it randomly just turns off.
The Surface RT (and side-project, Yoga RT) are working and get good battery life, but the main reason I stopped using the RT was because it's just too slow. It barely loads SharePoint 2010 pages, and those haven't changed in years. I would be able to write with it, but I would not be able to do my typical blog writing workflow on it, which consists of a lot of research. I also rely on a few pieces of software that need an x86 Windows computer. Chiefly, an SSH client for Windows RT exists but works very poorly.
At least one of my colleagues scoffed loudly when I mentioned I need a new laptop. I have a few newer laptops, particularly from the Sandy Bridge era, but those laptops aren't particularly good. At least one is a downright bad experience. The other is a better experience (despite having extremely similar specifications) but it's a physically huge machine that doesn't fit in any bags I own. Neither of them gets particularly impressive battery life, either. I would need to dump some money into that, whether it was via an outboard power supply, a new internal battery, or both.
Given that it's tax season, and a young, uninformed version of myself looking to make things easier changed my tax withholding rate, I'm about to get a relatively healthy cash infusion. It's enough to make a dent in my debt, buy a better backup system (including a USB 3.0 card) for TECT, or perhaps some combination of those things. The trouble is it's not enough to go quite as insane as I did in 2009. That particular level of insanity would involve a high end Dell Latitude with five years of a good warranty option, a huge solid state disk and a lot of memory, or something like a Surface Book.
It's tempting to question whether I really need a "laptop" at all and start looking at new iPads. At the core, it should do everything I want: edit Word/Excel documents stored on my local SharePoint server. View web sites, read and reply to e-mail, listen to music and video videos, last a long time on battery, and the newest iPads should be able to quickly switch between these tasks. The real trouble is that the most obvious choice for this is the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which with a keyboard equipped and a generous allocation of storage, costs more than a similarly equipped MacBook Air or Dell XPS, even more than a Surface Pro 4 in some cases, and will end up suffering many of the same problems a Surface Pro would. Plus, an iPad and a good keyboard (either Apple's own or the Razer one) will be at least as big as most good laptops, meaning the only real advantages are in either iPad-unique software, or in the simplicity or physical durability of an iPad. My iPad 3 was with my Surface 3 for most of its falls and although there's a pretty big dent on the case, the display has not suffered.
Something I'd love to look at more is the new ThinkPad lineup. I realize they are thoroughly over, but the X270, T470/P and L470 look like pretty exciting machines. They bring ThunderBolt 3 to the table, have great battery life, and
I realize that ThinkPads are thoroughly over, but I also really want to take a look at the upcoming ThinkPads X270, T470, and E/L470. There's a certain nostalgia to the idea of getting a mid-sized ThinkPad again. The T400 was one of my best computers ever and it is often a little easier to use something that has a little heft on the lap, certainly in comparison to Surfaces.
I think some of the real questions are in what is going to be done with a new laptop. Is it going to be a daily driver at home? Will it be docked to a keyboard, monitor, and mouse at home? Will it complement existing laptops that will continue hanging around as endpoints in different places I go, or will it be the computer I pull out at every opportunity?