Remember my husband's MacBook Pro that got coffee spilled into it while visiting our grandson a week and a half ago? It's functional--the local tech dude charged $95 to clean the innards, but DH doesn't want to do anything important on it any more like write code or edit photos. Just using it now for semi-mobile (well, around the house) checking of RSS feeds, news, email.

Anyway, DH retired a couple of months ago so he got his retirement gift this week instead of waiting for our state tax holiday in August...a 27" iMac, which he's been looking forward to acquiring and loves already. It's so much easier to cull bad photos, not to mention the blazing speed.

I filled out the online form with the configuration he wanted and printed it, and he took it to our local Apple store. They had one in stock (presumably a common configuration), but when he brought it home and set it up, he discovered it had 8 gigs of memory instead of the 16 he ordered and paid for. So he packed it up and took it back to Apple. To compensate for the inconvenience, they gave him 24 gigs of memory--whoa :-)

While the laptop seems functional for now, it's 7 1/2 years old so we're planning for the next "mini-me" device. I've heard that online stores can determine your OS, and some give lower prices to Windows users (presumably less affluent than Mac owners as a group, but I don't see it IRL). So one point in favor of a cheap Windows laptop. I'd also like a Kindle in the house as Amazon provides many Kindle books that you can download for free with Amazon Prime only to an actual Kindle device, not on another device running Kindle software (I have an iPad as my travel/waiting room device/book reader).