The new computer blues

New year, new computer, same old me.

*sigh*

In an earlier blog post I talked about my musings that machines might be psychic. I now have more proof that lends credence to my theory.

Since early December the geekosphere has been running wild with rumours about the impending new Apple products that are traditionally announced by Steve Jobs in his keynote address at the Macworld conference. The odds-on favourite this year was a super-light, super-slim, extra-sexy new notebook. Bloggers and cognoscenti (real as well as self-defined) opined on what they figured a new svelte Mac would, could and should have. I read the reports with bated breath.

After I saw the reports on the new uber-Mac, I started thinking about replacing my well-worn desktop PC. True to my theory, it went gentle into that good night (to paraphrase Dylan Thomas) last week, leaving me computerless.

I had decided some time ago that my next home computer would be a Mac. I was one of the earliest Mac aficionados/evangelists, going all the way back to (gulp) 1984, when I bought a top-of-the-line (well, actually, only-of-the-line) beige Mac with a whopping 128K of memory. I went through the heady days of disk-swapping, Sad Mac icons, upgrading RAM, the world’s slowest dot-matrix printers… ah, happy times. When my last Mac, a “beast” SE with two megabytes of RAM, two floppy drives and a 20MB external HD, finally chewed up its (second) power supply and gave up the ghost in about 1994 I got a home PC and have lived with Windoze ever since. But I never really abandoned my love for all things Apple.

So on Saturday I bought a sexy black MacBook, knowing that by doing so I was practically guaranteeing that all the rumours would turn out to be true.

And was I right? Steve Jobs announced the MacBook Air (who comes up with these names anyway?) to the enthralled conferenceers in San Francisco on Tuesday morning. I’m convinced that if I had held off on my purchase, the announcement wouldn’t have taken place.

One of the things that any computer buyer has to be prepared to accept is that whatever machine one buys will be obsolete within about fifteen seconds of delivery. But you know what? I’m okay with that. As drool-worthy as the new MacBook Air is (did I mention it fits into a manila envelope? And the flash memory option?), I’m perfectly okay with my not-quite-state-of-the-Apple-art machine.

Maybe this means I’m growing up. I don’t need to have the best and flashiest.

Naaah. I still want the best and flashiest.

Hey, at least I'm honest.