Just purchased the Lenovo W530 and aftermarket memory (16G) and SSD (256G). That is my dream machine. It turns out that I have used Thinkpads since 1997 and am quite used to the trackpoint. I've recently been using a Gateway with a trackpad at home and am ready to pitch that thing out the window! That, coupled with the power and the recent mention by Glenn Berry and you, I was sold.

Interestingly, I think the "worm has turned" on purchasing your own dream machine and attempting to use it for work as well instead of trying to convince your employer to buy more horsepower. I have for years managed my business and personal life on a single computer provided by my employer, and the "high end" laptop (as they call it) was always plenty fine. I think that was because the horsepower, the bandwidth, and disk storage hadn't reached a point where there was much you did with your laptop beyond business. Maybe a spreadsheet to track your kid's scout achievements or compare cars for your next purchase. And corporate servers were the only way to play with an enterprise version of SQL Server and really learn it. Now suddenly we have two key uses for our laptops - social media and cloud storage - that we can't live without. Many employers block both. And it is not possible to convince an employer to purchase a beast for you to install virtual box and set up availability groups for a learning experience along side a linux VM to run Oracle (where I work we use both).

I now use producteev for task management, evernote for note taking, dropbox for cloud storage, and AWS to play with cloud instances of SQL Server and Oracle. My employer blocks every one of these as well as my facebook page, my twitter feed, and so on. So I think we are seeing folks wanting to buy their own equipment and bring it to work, instead of trying to use their work equipment at home. My next step is trying to get my employer let me bring my new "beast" to work and provide me a citrix desktop to reach the corporate assets. Its a win for them and its a win for me. I think we will see a rapid tipping toward "bring your own technology".

Thanks Steve for the very timely editorial (I continue to be amazed at how you find something interesting and timely to write each day in SQL Server Central.com) and the space for us in the community to write back!