The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants (Premium)

As Mehedi noted earlier today, the Microsoft Store is selling Surface Laptop for $200 off today. And $200 off the base Core i5 version of the new Surface Pro. At these prices both are seriously worth considering.

But I am particularly taken with Surface Laptop, however. And this is interesting when you consider that I picked the new Surface Pro over Surface Laptop about six months back.

What this comes down to, I guess, is the mix of logic and emotion that accompanies any big purchase.

This isn’t just true of tech, of course. As you may know, my family moved this year to Pennsylvania. But our original plan was to purchase a less expensive home in the northeastern Maryland/northwestern Delaware area, and do so without a mortgage, a major life goal. We had been living near Boston, one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country, for over 15 years, and given how housing prices have exploded there recently, we knew that we could buy a similarly-sized home in Maryland or Delaware and pay for it completely with the proceeds from our house sale. Even have money left over.

Incredible, right?

But in one of life’s great coincidences—or, what some might see as one of those “everything happens for a reason” moments—we visited family in Pennsylvania back in April, just as we were hashing out our plans to move. We never intended to move here, but a family home, my step mother’s, was going to be sold this year, we were told. We have two sisters and their families in the area, and their kids are friends with our kids. It seemed perfect … but with one hitch. The home, inexpensive by Massachusetts standards, was a lot more expensive—like one-third more expensive—than what we were expecting to buy elsewhere. So we had a decision to make.

So we did some math.

Basically, we figured that we could just eke by with no mortgage on this home, but in doing so, we’d deplete all of our short-term savings plus the proceeds from the house. And the new house needed tons of work, and we felt like a lot of it had to happen right away. So we ended up getting a very small mortgage, and, later, a home equity line of credit, in order to get that work done. I’ve written about some of that in my Paul’s Tech Makeover series.

But this is where the emotion bit comes.

We will save money by moving to Pennsylvania, overall, for sure. But we could have saved a lotmore money by moving to Maryland or Delaware. The advantages here are a known home, a family home, that we had been visiting for years, nearby family and, for my daughter, a friend, and a shorter trip to college for my son. Financially, this makes less sense that what we originally planned. But overall, it makes more sense. Because you have to factor in your well-being. It’s not just about money.

(Side-note: My wife and I have long planned to downsize when the kids were gone. We still do. But this house is actually quite a bit bigger than the one we left, which we find vaguely unsettling. So it’s worth pointing out that we have, in fact, downsized … financially. This is at least a step in the right direction from a logical standpoint too.)

As many probably know, I write a lot about the cost of things. It’s a cold and rational accounting, easily understood: These two things do basically the same thing and cost different amounts, so the cheaper one is a better value. Easy, right?

But it’s not really that easy. Finding an example where two things are, in fact, essentially identical, but have different prices is pretty rare. Instead, you have to go through a decision making process to determine what’s most important to you. And that will vary by the individual. So when I review a product, I can lay out the facts—specs, and so on—and my opinion on the product and its value. But you, as a consumer, make the actual call on “yay” or “nay” when it comes time to make that purchase. And it won’t always be logic that carries the day.

On a semi-related note, my wife and I have a love/hate relationship with the House Hunters shows on HGTV. The quality of these shows has really nose-dived in recent years, and the couples on each episode are always the worst possible stereotypes. The one that always roils me most is the budget Nazi: This is the person, when apprised that the home they’re looking at is priced at 6 percent over theirs stated budget, will say, “that’s way over my budget,” a statement that is mathematically untrue and, more to the point, unimportant given the negotiable nature of real estate prices.

I don’t expect House Hunters to delve into any nuance, of course. It’s an idiot TV show with no meaningful real-world value, and I feel stupider every time I watch it. But in discussing a recent episode with my wife, we hit on this notion of logic vs. emotion.

That is, we all have a budget, of course, and logical reasons for making the choices we make. But there’s an emotional element to these things as well. And making an emotional attachment, even with a “thing,” most certainly impacts our well-being for the positive.

With homes, that might mean spending $30,000 over your supposed $300,000 budget because the place is close to the water, and that really is what’s most important to you. (As happened on a recent House Hunters episode.) For us, it was being around family we love and want to spend time with.

With personal technology, it will vary by product. Personally—and, to be clear, this will be very different for you—a Pixel 2 XL makes a tad more sense for me than a $560 OnePlus 5T for two reasons: It has a better camera and it works with Project Fi. Those are huge deals for me, deal-breakers.

But for most people—and I mean, literally, for most people—the OnePlus 5T makes way more sense. Is, objectively, the “better” phone because of the value it delivers: For basically the same price, you get better specs, overall, a great camera, and tremendous functionality. It’s an incredible phone, and you really need to give it a shot if you’re in the market. It wins on both logic andemotion.

Now, let me bring this back to Surface Laptop. Which, again, is on sale today only for $200 off.

Logically, Surface Laptop is problematic. It has a single USB port, which is a ridiculous limitation: Even the years-old MacBook Air offers two. It has no USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 capability, which limits its expansion. And that anodized aluminum body is basically just a paint job that can (and does) scratch off. (Don’t get me started on Windows 10 S, at least you can upgrade for free.)

And with a starting price of $999—really, $1299 for the first model that’s worth your attention—Surface Laptop is also pretty expensive. Too expensive for many.

Logically speaking, the Surface Laptop is a loser.

But you know what? Surface Laptop is gorgeous. It’s thin, light, and it looks great. The attraction is visceral. There is just something about it. And when you add in the stuff that’s great—among them the great typing and touchpad experiences and the incredible display—the equation starts to shift a bit.

At $799—OK, really $1099 for a version with 8 GB of RAM, which I strongly recommend—and up, Surface Laptop becomes … interesting.

Very interesting.

The heart wants what the heart wants, right? And it may turn out that Surface Laptop is your version of a house in Pennsylvania, something that is about one-third more than you were thinking of spending, and yet will give you great joy as you use it going forward.

And it will give you great joy. It’s certainly something to think about.