My home computer (the laptop I'm typing this on) is older than my eldest child, who is starting school in September. It has become obvious over the last few weeks that I should buy a new one (four-and-a-half years is a long time in computing), and the release of the new MacBook Air last week has brought replacement to the forefront of my mind again. The Air is probably good enough for me to work on. My main use is tinkering with various programming languages (in the last 12 months I've played with Objective C, Java and Scala in addition to my staples of PHP, Ruby, Javascript and HTML/CSS, which isn't a language but needs to be mentioned), but I also do a fair amount of photo editing, using Aperture and Photoshop. I'm fairly sure that these two cpu hogs will run really well on the new Air, but they won't like the small screen estate; which leads me on to the subject of this post. If I get an Air, then I'll probably need to get an external screen for the photo work (I can usually manage with the 15" screen on this machine). Our home office is upstairs in the wee girl's room, so I can't use it in the evening. I'll need to re-configure the house to accomodate a downstairs office-space, but we don't have any space downstairs. So that's it then. Because I need a new laptop, we need to move house.