The new boyfriend
My faithful iBook James Tiberius Kirk has served me well these last six years, but clearly it was time to get a new Mac. (What, you don’t name your machines? Kirk followed Goran my Powerbook, who followed Fergus my first Mac.) Kirk’s battery died over a year ago, so he has to be kept plugged to the wall at all times. He has no DVD player and no CD burner, his cables were chewed up by my cat Saffy years ago and are held together with tape, his memory is nearly full, his iTunes version is incompatible with my iPod’s and I can’t install the newer one because memory is nearly full, he has no Bluetooth and can’t talk to my phone, and—you may want to hang on to something—he has no AirPort and is not Wi-Fi enabled so we’ve been subsisting on a slow dial-up connection.
None of which was an insurmountable problem. My requirements were very basic, just word processing, email, and a half-hour of surfing every day. For the rest I had lovely friends with Macs, and my friend Grover is the human RSS feed. Plus there are Internet cafes everywhere. So strictly speaking, I really didn’t need a MacBook with everything in it. However, a MacBook with everything in it would really make my life easier.
I’d been seeing ads for the MacBook Air, and I coveted it. I love the idea of a lighter machine, but not the fact that I can’t watch DVDs on it. So I consulted my friend Stephanie Jobs, not his real name, though his love for Steve is real. He said, “The Air is slower, and video quality is not as good as other MacBooks, but I am an extreme user.”
“What’s an extreme user?” I stupidly asked.
“I have 40 or 50 windows open at the same time. Then again, a new MacBook is due later in the year if you can wait. You could buy a Mac Air now, and if you don’t like it, you could sell it and get the new MacBook.”
“Is the Air really light?”
“Honey, it’s 3.2 pounds,” he said.
“But I never take my Mac out of the house unless I absolutely have to.”
“Then get a desktop computer. Why pay a premium for a battery if you’re not carrying it around?”
“But what if I have to cover a war in
So I went down to this vendor in QC which had the lowest prices in town. I had an address but no directions, so I called Bernard-Henri Not-Levy. “I went there last year, but I have no memory of how I got there,” he helpfully said. “All I remember is that it’s close to an intersection with five trees.”
“Thanks, you’re a great navigator.”
I texted the store to ask for directions. There was no reply. I tried calling. Their phone died. In the end, the cabbie got directions from a tricycle driver, and I found myself in front of a house with a pit in front where the water company was repairing something.
“Can I see some MacBooks?” I asked the clerks. The atmosphere must’ve been really heavy, because no one responded for a while. Finally someone attended to me. “What’s the difference between the white and black MacBooks?” The clerk opened the catalogue and read me the specs in hertz. I guess one must not assume that the customer can read. I’d bought stuff from that store in the past, and the service had been efficient, so it must’ve been my terrifying death-ray spectacles that turned them into zombies.
“May I see a MacBook black?” I asked.
“Sorry,” he said, “Our demo unit is out.”
“You don’t have the black MacBook in stock?”
“Yes, but if we open the box it’s considered sold.”
Stupid me, I thought vendors were interested in selling their products, especially if the buyer was paying in cash like The Sopranos.
So I called Stephanie Jobs, asked him to order a black MacBook from his suki, and voila! I am typing this column in a coffee shop with free Wi-fi. I haven’t decided on my MacBook’s name yet. I was going to call him Marat, but the first famous Marat died in the bathtub, and the current famous Marat is nuts, which is fascinating in tennis players but not in computers. My MacBook is my new boyfriend, except that he’s dependable and meets all demands. Most importantly, when I say something clever he does not view it as an affront to his intelligence or manhood.
