I have never owned a laptop. I was given an old Chromebook to tinker with, but it's so old and incredibly slow that it's just not easy to deal with.

I was handed a laptop that has some issues including a "sometimes works, sometimes doesn't"keyboard and mostly fried GPU to the point where there are tons of tiny pink artifacts all over the screen. It technically still works, but hurts to look at. I was told it was mine, but other than some prodding to see what the issue was, (pretty sure there's a bunch of dust caked in the GPU fan) I haven't used it. So I guess I do actually own one, but I've only touched one a very few times ever.

I finished high school before dial up was completely out of style, and have only been exposed to "broadband" since college. (All 768Kbit of it)

I went to an in town college and mostly did my work on the gaming rig I built as my first computer, using their lab to print papers.

Laptops were sort of common, but still somewhat luxury at the time. Kinda like iPhones were at first. Lots of people already had a phone, but the "fancy" one was the status symbol even more than it is now.

Since then I've been rebuilding desktops ever since. I've had I think about 4 different cases now, each being upgraded with different parts a few times before moving on to the next as it fell apart. Some of my old machine parts are still in my parents' computer now. At least I think it is. That machine has changed a few times too and I haven't kept track because who cares.

So I'm right in the sweet spot of when phones became capable of laptop-like stuff, just as always having a computer available became more and more necessary. So since most people do most of their laptop stuff during school, and I never had a job that handed out company computers, I've just never really needed one.

I kinda wanna get one at some point, if for no other reason than to see the day to day of owning one and taking it places. But it's just a curiosity at the moment.

I'm totally anti Windows now (recently as of building my most recent rig a few months ago), so I would have to pay attention to which one I get because I know there can be compatibility issues with them. I know there's stuff like the Tuxedo brand which are all Linux all the time machines, but I don't want to limit my choices, so research would be necessary for all that.

I just moved my parents off Windows (their machine was really struggling as it was assembled when Win was new) because I knew they wouldn't be paying for extended security patches.

I type too much and I'm already past answering this lmao