Aug 7, 2019
Breaking Up with My Mac
Dear Mac,
This is really difficult for me…but after 27 years of marriage, it’s time for us to part.
I remember the first time I set eyes on you. I had been dating a Hyundai PC (yes, that Hyundai) with MS-DOS, when at a ClubMed in Mexico I befriended a woman who worked at Apple. She told me she would match me up with you, using her employee discount to bring your price down to a very reasonable $2,000.
You were grey and clunky, slow (16 MHz processor), with a very short memory (4 MB RAM) and a limited ability to hold onto things (40MB hard-drive), but when I ran my fingers over your trackball, you were heaven to touch. I fell madly in love with you.
We stormed through the Nineties together like a Smashing Pumpkins solo break, hooking up to AOL for the very first time via a blazing fast 28.8K modem, churning out a screenplay that had Jason Priestly of Beverly Hills 90210 fame attached to star in and direct for a very brief and heady time, then moving up to San Francisco in 1995 just as the exhilarating dot-com boom v. 1.0 exploded.
We stormed through the Nineties together like a Smashing Pumpkins solo break.
When it came time to upgrade, I stayed in the Mac family, buying a nondescript beige box during the John Sculley reign whose model name I can’t remember. But I kept you around, my first Mac love, and occasionally took a strangely sensual geeky pleasure in booting you up by triggering your side-mounted pump-action power switch and running the palm of my hand over your trackball, until that one sad day in 2000 when I went to trigger your power switch and nothing happened. You were dead. I proudly displayed your corpse on one of my shelves like a Donatello, and delighted in seeing my friends’ faces light up at the sight of you. They’d pull you off the shelf, and like me, the first thing they wanted to do was play with your trackball.
Then Steve returned. And while my designer friends who had switched to PCs during the Sculley/Amelio Dark Ages scoffed at Apple’s chances of a rebound (accounting for stock splits, it was trading at 90 cents a share as recently as 2002), I felt my love for you being re-kindled and purchased an iMac G4.
Your hemispherical base and swivel arm, clearly an homage to Steve’s other great love, Pixar, was showy and ridiculous, like the chunky jewelry worn by an Orange County divorcee at a margarita bar, but I didn’t care. You were wild, frivolous, and even as I was pulling you out of the box, I knew you would be a short-lived affair.
There comes a time in every relationship when you start pursuing other interests and maybe start taking each other a little for granted. Mac, you and I reached that point when you became more interested in the iPod and then, the 900-pound gorilla that became the iPhone. Meanwhile, I stopped trying to write screenplays for Jason Priestly and started a career, got married, had babies.
During this period I went through a series of MacBooks, each very sleek to match the persona I was trying to project professionally, but oddly forgettable. I noticed you tried to keep me engaged by releasing fancy OS’s with lofty names, and while I may have been excited by everything you did when I was in my twenties, I no longer had the time to explore the exciting new features you promised that clearly I could live without.
I did like MobileMe, and I uploaded photos and videos of my new baby to share with others, but then — a little cruelly in my mind — you whisked MobileMe away, demanding that I take down all my photos and videos, and trying to charge me for anything over five gigs that I uploaded to your new iCloud platform.
That probably was the beginning of the end for us. I felt trapped, confined, taken advantage of, and pressured as I had to scramble to download all my media from MobileMe before you shut it down for good. I lost and had corrupted some files in the process, which I’m still bitter about. So I signed up for Google Drive. With computing becoming more and more cloud-based, I found little use for all of the things that made you distinctly Mac.
There comes a time in every relationship when you start pursuing other interests and maybe start taking each other a little for granted.
But I stuck with you, more out of familiarity than anything else. I did date a Chromebook for awhile but, as you know, it couldn’t really compete with you. And Windows? Always has been and always will be a cheap imitation of your glamour and grace.
Then something weird happened. I noticed the MacBooks I bought started having shorter and shorter lifespans. So whereas I gladly forked over two grand for my first Powerbook, I started becoming resentful over having to fork over two grand (funny how the price has never really changed) every four years, then three years, and most recently, I found myself faced with the need to purchase a new laptop after just two years.
It began with a keyboard problem in the first year of my latest MacBook Pro’s life. I brought it to the Genius Bar, and after fiddling with it in the back, the Genius was able to fix it and hand it back to me the same day, for which I was grateful, but a year later I was back with another keyboard problem. The Genius wrote up the repair ticket while repeatedly reminding me in a scolding tone of voice that if they detected any water damage using their intrusive and somewhat suspect water damage detection technology I would be responsible for the cost of the repair. Like an abused partner I nodded submissively in agreement. Oddly, though, the estimated repair cost listed on the ticket was zero as part of something called the “Keyboard Service Program.” That’s when I did a little Googling and found out about the butterfly keyboard problem.
The problem was you, not me, but you hadn’t been open with me about your problem and you made me feel bad about it. That was unforgivable.
When I picked up the computer a full week later (irritated about the extended time your repair required), you still had a few keyboard glitches for which I really didn’t have the energy to address anymore.
And then, perhaps not so subconsciously, one day you fell off the kitchen island damaging your screen. No way was I going to haul you back to the Genius Bar to have a so-called Genius lecture me that I’d be better off buying a new one since it would cost hundreds of dollars to repair you.
So once again I did a little Googling and discovered that the controversial Huawei had released a Macbook knock-off shamelessly named the Matebook that was the darling of tech journalists.
So I took the plunge. And this time, I spent a thousand bucks, not two.
The Matebook’s display is too dim, the trackpad is super klugey, Windows is like the annoying lover who tries too hard, and, as my wife slyly reminded me the first time I configured the machine, “Congratulations, you just gave your fingerprint to the Chinese government.”
But I don’t care. For what I use a computer for now, the Matebook is just fine. I’m writing this story on it, and I don’t notice any difference, really. I don’t miss you, Mac.
But oh, how I long for the trackball of our glorious youth.
