Yesterday we were at Lalaport, a huge, huge shopping mall in Tokyo Bay. My sister could probably spend a year in here without ever leaving or seeing the same thing twice.

LaLaport TOKYO-BAY is home to 540 stores, with 8,200 parking spaces. Committed to further development, it aims to be one of the largest shopping centers in Japan, adapting to ever-changing trends and needs and providing new experiences for its customers.

Yes that’s right. 540 different stores. It was completely insane. And they had quite awesome food too!

It’s empty in the restaurant because we ate at a weird time.

When I’m going to Japan I will have to live with a laptop as my only computer. Right now I use my iMac for anything serious and my laptop is just for bringing to school and friends when I want to have something to surf or code a little on. The problem is that I know my MacBook Air isn’t going to be “enough” for me if it’s going to be my only computer. I’m going to be doing a lot of photo editing, probably some video editing and just generally be using it all the time, so I want something more powerful.

New MacBook Pros

I came to the decision that I was going to buy a MacBook Pro to have in Japan instead of my Air a couple of months ago, since then I’ve been waiting for Apple to release the new MacBook Pro’s. They did so just a couple of days ago and there are some good news and some bad news. The good news is that they lowered the prices on the entire lineup and threw in some pretty nice stuff on the new 15″ models. The bad news is that the biggest update on the 13″ models were the battery, they got a new graphics card but they still have the old CPU’s. It sort of stings because I think the 15″ laptop is huuuge, but I don’t want to be stuck with an old CPU.

I’ve been very much back and forth on this entire 13″ vs 15″ issue, but right now I feel that I actually do want the better performance of the 15″, and hopefully I can learn to live with the size of a 15″ laptop.

The thing that has sort of sealed the deal is that I’ve compared the Swedish and the Japanese Apple stores for prices, and it breaks down as follows:

So as you can see the difference is quite a lot. I have a big problem with the fact that I want to buy it now. When I’ve decided I want to buy something I usually want to buy it right away, because there’s no reason to wait…

But as you can see, there’s a lot of reason to wait. I’m obviously not going to buy a 15″ in Sweden considering the price of it in Japan. But if I were to buy a 13″ in Sweden, I could add just 859 SEK to get the much, much better 15″ in Japan—that’s nothing!

In the end, there is simply no justifiable reason to buy it in Sweden, not even the better resale value of having a Swedish (and not International) keyboard when I’m going to sell it again; so I’m going to have to wait either way. And in Japan, I really cant find any reason for buying the 13″ when the 15″ is so much cheaper there.

So, bottom line. Even though I don’t like the size of the 15″ the performance is noticeably better, and the added screen size and much higher resolution might actually come in handy when using Photoshop and such. The 13″ has much better battery life and is actually portable, but I just can’t stand paying premium price for old hardware; no matter how “hardware agnostic” I usually am.

There will be some minor difficulties with having to sell this computer before I leave and then have to be in Japan without a computer until I’m able to buy the new computer there. But in the end, it’s going to be worth it to have the top-of-the-line stuff. I think.

I have a problem I’ve been thinking about on and off for a while. When should you stop renting something and buy it instead?

The situation in which I am confronted with this is currently when I play badminton. At the place where I play it costs 20 SEK to rent a racket. But you can buy a fair-quality racket for around 200 SEK.

When you start playing you should obviously rent because you don’t know if you’re going to keep playing, but after how many times should you stop renting and just buy a racket?

If you play 10 times you’ve spent just as much money on renting as if you would have bought a racket on day 1. The cost of the racket is then 200% of the buying price.

I don’t think you should wait 10 rounds of play before you buy, because you can be fairly sure you are going to play more than 10 times before you’ve played 10 times. But I’m not sure where to draw the limit. I think after about 5 times I’m pretty sure I’m going to play 10 times too. So then cost of the racket is 150% of the buying price.

On the other hand, if you buy the racket right away and not play 10 times, you’ve only spent 100% of the buying price but the money might be wasted. If you only play twice and bought the racket right away, you’ve wasted 80% of the cost. What’s better: Wasting some of the cost or adding to the cost?

Obviously where you draw the line varies on situation and the amount of money involved, but my question is: How do you calculate where to draw the line?

I think that when the cost is somewhere between 150-200% of the buying price it’s the right time to buy. But how do I calculate exactly where the right place is? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Update: I just found out a fair-quality racket cost more than 200, but my question remains valid.

My dad has done some food shopping, he knows me well.

Jag var nyss och handlade på Willys, det var kö i de vanliga kassorna så jag tog som vanligt i den situationen snabbkassan med självskanning.

Det gick skitsnabbt, inga problem, skulle betala — inga pengar på kortet. DOH!

Så vad händer nu?
Det finns ingen i närheten, det finns inga options för att ta bort varor, det finns inga options för att delbetala med cash och kort.

Så jag fick tag i någon på personalen och drog 70kr på kortet, jag hade 30kr cash och allt kostade 113.50.

Efter att 70 blev draget skulle hon ta bort en vara för att jag skulle kunna betala resten med cash, men här kom det problem! Ingen av dem kunde ta bort en vara efter att någonting blivit delbetalat i maskinen, den tillät inte att kvittot förändrades efter att en delbetalning hade blivit gjord.

Detta innebar att de var tvungna att ringa till någon manager någonstans i Sverige, uppge maskinnummer och att det var butiken i Staffanstorp och efter mycket om och men delbetalde vi resten med cash i maskinen. Sen gick vi bort till en annan kassa och lämnade tillbaka en vara så att jag fick “pengar tillbaka” från den, och då var det alltså ett belopp resterande som jag då kunde betala.

Tekniken kan inte vara perfekt i första omgången.