New Computer

I’ve been coveting a new MacBook for a while; the old one’s a couple years old and while it meets my needs, it doesn’t fully fulfill my desires, especially for video and audio capture, even if the likelihood of my using those capabilities is limited to sending Apple Photobooth pictures of me to myself.

So, today at the University Bookstore, where I’d gone to buy a copy of Turbotax in order to do the taxes—hey, we’ve got a whole week!—I made an impulse buy on a new last year’s model of the MacBook that they were closing out for a really good price.

I’m beginning to get set up on it and while it seems great so far, I am experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse, principally because even though I’ve got a fancier, faster computer, it’s obvious that I’m not a fancier, faster thinker or writer.

The promise of technology is that it’s supposed to make us “work smarter, not harder;” but every time I get a new piece of technology, I spend lots of time working pretty hard to get back to the place I was with the old technology several weeks ago.

Copying all my old applications and files to the new machine went relatively smoothly; naturally, the automatic process wasn’t perfect and I had to do some things manually; back in the day, I used to really enjoy noodling around with a new machine to get things just right; now, I want to do as little as possible even to the point of putting up with far-less-than-ideal configurations of things as long as I can do the work I think I need to do.

Also, it’s weird spending a big chunk of change on a computer knowing that it will be obsolete or broken in a few years. If I had made an impulse buy this big on a new bike today, I’d certainly still be riding it decades from now.