I have more than 40GB of music I’ve ripped from my own CDs, purchased from a variety of locations (eMusic, Amazon, iTunes, some musicians' own websites) and in a few cases, yes, pirated. I listen to music at work, at home, in my car, and while running, and it’d be really nice to be able to take advantages of these new recently-announced cloud services (Google, Amazon, Apple) to store and access my music from anywhere. But no company is forever. IBM and HP are shells of once-invulnerable corporations. Microsoft no longer innovates – they follow. None of these companies (as large as they are right now) will necessarily be around in twenty years, and there’s no guarantee that any of their services will be around in even five.

I’ve got a limited connection, which means uploading music to Amazon or Google would take something like a week. And my Android phone and Linux work computer will almost certainly not cooperate with Apple. So what’s a guy to do? For now, I plan on continuing to do things the old fashioned way. I’m not sure what kind of cloud service would make me feel comfortable spending the time uploading all of my music, but so far, it’s not any of these.

My laptop at work is getting a bit long in the tooth and is due to be replaced in the next couple of months. I currently run Ubuntu on a Dell laptop. The laptop is elevated on a dock next to another screen. I have two choices:

Choice 1: MacBook Pro. Arguments in favor:

• Apple makes the best laptop hardware anywhere. Period.
• I'd be able to dual-boot to OSX, which I have nothing against, it's just not my preferred environment. I could hypothetically do things like play Steam with my OSX partition.
• Multitouch mousepad is so nice.

Choice 2: Dell E5520. Arguments in favor:

• The Linux support for the MacBook Pro is imperfect, especially wifi.
• I like the way I do stuff in Linux, and if I switched to OSX (for wifi, for instance), there will be a learning curve.
• There are docks (whereas MacBooks have some third-party stands but no real dock solution).
• 15.6 inch widescreen, instead of 13" (which I'd have to get to keep the MacBook Pro under budget).

What are your thoughts?