The macbook’s history is a relatively short one. Purchased the day after Black Friday in 2006, it enabled me to go wireless, which ended up really facilitating the courtship of Rob and I after we met in mid-December of the same year. My desktop, also a mac, was inconveniently located in my bedroom. Inconvenient because Dee still slept in my bed and her bedtime was early. I couldn’t be on the computer once she was tucked in for the night.

But now, the macbook is near history. Problems this summer with the blue-tooth led to its being turned off and now it’s developed some sort of corruption that crashes the internet browser every five minutes or so. It roars like a jet plane most of the time due to a fan that rarely stops running.

Sigh.

I guess it is back to PC’s for me. We have a house full of computers – literally – and financially it makes no sense to run over to the Apple Store to replace the macbook.

I will be able to archive files on an external hard drive and transfer them. Which is good. I have way too much writing and three years of photos and music on it. Rob thinks he can wipe it and reprogram it, but there is no guarantee it will fix the issue or that he will have time anytime soon to do this.

“Do you want a new macbook?” he asked. “We could just replace my laptop and use it and the desktop.”

“And the netbook,” I added.

I like macs. User friendly in the extreme as long as nothing ever goes wrong. But when something glitches? Forget it. Steve Jobs has designed them to make it impossible for the ordinary person to identify and fix the issue. There is just no mechanism for diagnostics for the user. The physical make up even is such that a person needs special training and tools just to get into the dangit things.

Much as I would like one of the new desktops. They are too expensive and ultimately they all possess the same fatal flaws that keep user in thrall to the Genius Bar* at the Apple Store.

As long as my writing is saved and re-archived on another machine, it doesn’t matter what the machine is. Computers are computers. Tools to an end.

Alas then poor Macbook, I knew it well, Horatio.

*The Genius Bar is where you take your Apple products to be fixed by in-store techs, who often can do little more than replace or box up your mac to send away to be replaced/repaired. The “genius” part is how no one questions the fact that macs either work great or just intermittently and that by getting a customer in the store periodically, more product can usually be sold to them despite the defective by design nature.