Tech Evolution… Online Purchase Experience
This post is how to determine a good tech purchase online and how I have been relying so much on online commercial sites for my purchases. Amazon, being on top of the list. What factors to determine your purchase when placing an order online when it comes to tech products? Through the years I have shopped for clothes and I have mastered the art of shopping online for clothes, for its distinctive features from prints, to sizes, to dimensions to fabrics and materials. But buying new tech can put one in a questionable situation.
Nonetheless, I am a online shopper for tech too, now that it is. I became comfortable with the idea and gained confidence with experience. This somewhere around 2014 where I laid my hands on my first every smart phone with my very first salary. The online market was trending during the time and I wanted to hope on to that bandwagon, but I was cautioned of all the factors like what if the product delivered was defective or would they provide a warranty for the product or will you get any accessories for free. Overall, would you get your money’s worth. I had to step back and should buy the smartphone the traditional way from a tech store. Samsung as a brand was a profiting a lot, thanks to their Galaxy lines of phones. I was not keen on spending on a high-end phone, heck I didn’t know what I was getting my hands into. So I laid down my minimum budget and a basic camera for capturing the moments. The sales counter lady just gazed at me and said, “why don’t you go with this?”, pulling out a boxed phone from the glass show case and handing over the box that read Samsung Galaxy Grand 2. A budget smartphone which was just basic for day-to-day tasks like calls, SMS, WhatsApp, email notifications, light gaming like Candy Crush (I remember being addicted to it while on that phone) and the basic task of clicking phones and recording videos (not the best picture quality but it served the purpose). I used the phone continuously for two years.
During the end of the phone, I remember streaming a YouTube Video of a tech youtuber Marques Brownlee, whose channel name was MKBHD during the time. And he posted a video on this new phone by Google in collaboration with Huawei. The way he went on about the specs of the phone in detail and the camera quality and how this collaborative phone was the hybrid phone in the market, I was instantly in love with the phone, Nexus 6P, last in the line of the Nexuses history of phones. I wanted to lay my hands on this phone. Now this phone was only available on the online market, no offline market would sell this phone. So from being a traditional offline shopper, my love for this new piece of tech made me take the risk of spending a big amount on my card. Despite all the fears that lurked in, I was thrilled on the date of the delivery of the phone somewhere towards the end of 2016. The full aluminium body of the phone with Nexus embossed on the back and cyclopes like design of the camera, a premium hands-on feel of the phone. I had multi-coloured polycarbonate case, to avoid scratches or dents. Believe me I did not regret the purchase, in fact I felt it was way better than the previous phone. This time around I became cognizant of specs I was looking for in a phone from battery life to RAM space, to the latest android processor. How these details can affect the performance of a smartphone. Let’s not forget that a smart phone has made life so much easier carrying out a majority of our basic tasks on your finger-tips, for instance preparing a to do list/ planner/ reminder, calculator, music apps, work out apps, wireless data transfers etc, the list is endless and the possibilities are limitless that to depending upon the storage space of the phone. The whole idea is how I got comfortable ordering a phone online.
Two Years later I did an online tech purchase again. I had my phone upgraded. This time it was the One Plus line of phone. One Plus being a budding company of the time. Before making this purchase, I learned one thing, I needed the details on the specs and how it would perform. The glass back and the dual camera and the integrated UI from the brand, I had to give the One Plus 6T a shot. Love the phone to bits till it lasted for another two years. And now I am currently using Samsung S10 lite, which I purchased upon the exchange of my Nexus 6P which I kept for safe keeping purposes until I availed a massive discount during the exchange. By this time the Nexus line is dead, as it would receive no major upgrades. I purchased the Samsung S10 lite from Flipkart, during some sale and massive offers on specific bank credit cards. So with exchange I had Rs. 5000/- off along with the credit card offer of extra Rs. 5000/- off. I thought this purchase was a steal for that kind of a deal. This being one of the advantages of online stores. In addition to this, certain banks run season or period time offers of no cost Emi, or certain banks partnered to the ecommerce sites availing no cost Emi offers throughout the year, facilitating all sorts of consumers. The practicality of the online purchases makes it much easier with all the specifications laid down on the page of the product, to see if they match your preferences.
Very recently, towards the end of 2022 I purchased a laptop online and tell me tell you my experience this time. Before that let me tell you a little background story about my experiences with the Personal Computers I have owned. So my very first PC was a desktop computers from LG with those boxy type monitors and a chunky CPU and a UPS for power back up. This was gifted to me by my uncle in 2006, right around the time it was a novelty to own a personal computer. You couldn’t carry much heavy tasks compared to the kind of computers we have today. But it served the purpose for any minor school projects. We didn’t have flash drives or wireless transfers during the time but it was compensated with CD storage and Floppy disk storage. The floppy disks lasted for a short period.
I had an upgrade in 2010 to my very first laptop PC. Of course, purchased from an offline store, bundled with a Windows 7 Home OS CD, a Lenovo interface CD and bag to carry the laptop. And it was a recommendation by the sales lady at the store, the price being right for our budget. Of course the sales lady was doing her job of clearing the new stock of tech from her store. So by now you should know it was a laptop by Lenovo not a major brand during the time with the easily accessible brands like HP, Dell and Sony Vaio. I ended up with Lenovo for the budget friendly price factor. Nothing like the current day Ultra-books, seamless, thin and light weight. This Lenovo laptop was chunky, with a glass like black glossy hood and an almost mechanical keyboard (chunky enough to type and the haptic feedback was great). Most importantly the it had Intel Pentium on the inside. Although my first option was the Sony Vaio, for the variation in colours they had to offer and the way Kareena Kapoor was posing in those Sony Vaio Ads, uff I was in love with that piece of tech. But because of the low-cost tight budget I had to settle for the Lenovo. Come to think of it, Lenovo has come a long way through the years with the efficacy in performance and the flexibility in the laptop range. I never carried the laptop anywhere considering the portability of the device. I used it as a Personal desktop PC in my home.
Due coarse in time all tech comes to a stage where it becomes outdated and calls for an urgent need for an upgrade. The intel Pentium processor and load of third party software was making it difficult to operate on that particular laptop. I spoke to a friend, who told me 2 gigabyte and 4 gigabyte RAMs are outdated. The new upkeep is a 8GB RAM and the new range of processors. That’s where was made known of the new intel i3, i5 & i7 processors. Higher the number the pricier the product was going to be. Towards the end of 2014, I went out to browse around the stores for making my purchase. I visited the Dell store. I had heard lot about the brand. Now keeping the specs in mind. I wanted to opt for the Intel i5 variant. But the price did not quite fit my budget. I hoped to the opposition store, that is the HP store. They had all the right pricing with my favourite colour variant. It was the HP Pavilion notebook in white. The screen looked much better, the colours popping, the 16 inch screen, compared to the Lenovo one sitting at home. New tech always looks alluring, because it is a step, in time. My sister used this laptop for her college purpose as a computer science student. In my sister’s opinion the working time on the laptop was smooth and the battery life amazing. Another upside of this computer was that it 8 gigabytes storage RAM, and 1 TB HDD storage. Quite the hefty storage space in a laptop. It also came with CD drive, with the feature of writing on an empty disc. It was a thing during the time. Although the built quality was not at its best. The keys on the keyboard were falling loose, with errors in typing or dual typing. The screen hood was flimsy overtime (bound to happen at some point with years of wear and tear). But still not the best or premium built, considering I spent 50k in INR.
After almost a decade now, my PC was crying for an upgrade. Not many people nowadays use the HDD drives for storage. With the introduction of SDD, HDD are like to die down soon enough. I was not going to compromise, nor was I was going to spend extravagantly, but reasonably priced for the specs. Towards the end of the year 2022, I purchased my very first Dell Inspiron laptop online. So the story goes like this. There was a site wide sale on Amazon. And I availed the offer for exchange. My Lenovo laptop for a Dell Vostro. The exchange obviously failed, because the battery was downhill and the turning on time had slowed down. I contacted the customer support team and requested that I would pay the balance amount in cash instead, to which they agreed. My purchase with Amazon has always been great. The best buys are always on Amazon. But somehow this remained undelivered to the excuse of the item being lost in transit. My money was refunded to the original mode of payment within three working days. At this point I decide to place an order on the official Dell website. Instead of the Dell Vostoro which is a business laptop, I opted for the Dell Inspiron 16 which cater to my day to day work to the media consumption. And when the laptop arrived the speakers on its own were really amazing for multimedia purposes. With the speakers on the side of the keyboard. Everything worked just fine. However, within 15 days I faced the blue screen issue, your PC ran into a problem on screen message. Now all my fears kicked. Did I make the right choice of the buying the laptop online for 68k in INR I paid? I contacted the customer support on the Dell official website. I ran some troubleshoots via their software app which comes pre-installed and yet the problem was not resolved. With the one year’s warranty time, they were compelled to send a technician and have the PC tested. The technician checked the PC, dissected the PC and replaced the motherboard for free, which seemed to have run into a problem. This sits as desktop PC on my home desk, and it works smooth till date.
This month I ordered another Dell Inspiron but this time it was an easy to carry 14-inch laptop. But the specs and model were slightly different from the previous one. This is a 2 in 1 laptop which comes with a stylus in the box. The screen 360º to the back for tablet usage. I doodled my first drawing on this laptop using the stylus. You can see the picture below. It’s great when you’re working on old document, to pinch in using your fingers for accessing the calligraphy and writing. The price tag read 93k in INR and I got a great discount on Amazon. Around a 20k in INR discount, plus 12 months no cost Emi option, which when I opted for, I received 5k in INR cashback. I thought it was a pretty good deal, considering the actual price and the specs bundled in this piece of tech. This time Amazon delivered my package without any hassle.
Now the question that arises is that why two Dell laptop, even though the first one failed me? Well I cannot deny the fact that the built quality is premium with the aluminium body. The HP laptop which I previously owned although sturdy, parts of it felt a tad bit flimsy. And it is not alone my opinion I have read reviews on typing errors due to the keyboard. Dell feels different with the nice dark grey keys and the backlit feature. And I wanted something along the same lines. After the motherboard was replaced within warranty period, everything is sailing smooth on that laptop.
Let’s focus on the key differences of these two Dell laptops.
Dell Inspiron 16
16 Inch Display
12th Gen Intel core i5 1240P (P for performance)
12 core, 16 threads
Non touch screen
Dell Inspiron 14
14 Inch Display
12th Gen Intel core i5 1235U (U for ultra-performance)
10 core 12 threads
Touch screen with stylus in the box
Both these laptops have a 16:10 ratio display. Making screen looking bigger and viewing experience better. Both run the support assist app for timely checks and updates. The performance of the first one is considered to be better compared to the latter. I don’t see fast difference, because I don’t use the laptops for gaming or any heavy tasks. Yet to try video editing. The Dell Inspiron 14 Laptop, however, can be titled back completely for the tablet use. I personally love this feature, adds as a great feature for browsing data on the finger tips and for doodling purposes with the stylus. You can use it in tablet mode, tent mode and a folder mode.
Many people are now using laptops with the AMD Ryzen processors which also have the numerical 3,5,7. Higher the number, better the performance. But I went with Intel, based on the review of its longevity, durability, and years of trust. If you are wanting to try the AMD Ryzen processors you can go for it. But I request you do a thorough research, watch comparative review and list down the specs based on your preference for a better purchase. Heating issues could be concern faced with any processors based on the kind of heavy usage of the laptop where all cores and threads are at work to make the operation of the laptop convenient. Gamers should exclusively go for the gaming laptops to cater to their targeted needs. Of course, those laptops are but naturally going to be bulkier and heavier.
I hope I covered all the pointers in this post. I have just shared my thoughts and experience with the purchase I have made through the years of how tech has evolved and now the tech industry is really working to cater to the needs and target the audience based on their preferences. The kind of experience you might face with an offline purchase in comparison to the purchase done online.
That’s all for today’s post. Until next time. Continue to give your love and support. 🙂❤️🙏