This is Dimitri.He’s about three and a half years old, and he’s been a good little iBook. He has survived a battery malfunction that blew out his logic board. He has survived being accidentally thrown across the room onto the hardwood floor (don’t ask). He has survived hours of daily use—word processing, browsing the internet, downloading music and videos, watching DVDs, burning CDs, uploading photographs, transcribing videos, preparing and displaying Power Point presentations, keeping track of finances. He’s held up well.
But as good a computer as he has been, he will soon go the way of all laptops. I have been sensing this for the last six months. There keyboard marks on his screen have become more or less permanent. The spacebar only works if you press it just the right way (and my typing skills have adapted accordingly). The CD drive doesn’t give up its CDs very easily. The battery runs down faster than it used to even just a month ago. Dimitri is slowing down, too, particularly when I use the internet (which is often). And he now only has (let me check) 956.2 MB of storage space left on a hard drive that, to begin with, had less storage capacity than my iPod.
This is why I have been eying his successor for several months now. I wandered into the Apple Store at the mall a month or two ago, and while I hate to admit it within earshot of Dimitri (actually, much closer than earshot), the moment I saw, and touched that sleek new MacBook display model, my heart was no longer in the relationship. In fact, when Dimitri unexpectedly shut down in the middle of class a few weeks ago, and my heart caught in the brief fear that I would lose all the files I had not yet backed up that month, I also felt a thrill of, well, hope. Hope that he wouldn’t wake up again. Or hope that he would wake up again just long enough for me to rescue my files, and then die. Because if he died, I would have no choice but to replace him.
I feel a little bad. The initial flame of passion in my relationship with Dimitri may have become subdued, but it has been replaced with the calm, steady assurance of his almost-constant presence in my life. He may sometimes fail to meet all of my needs, but the truth is that I sometimes fail to meet all of his (as evidenced by the hardwood floor fiasco), and when it comes down to it, no one will every be able to meet all my needs. The bond we’ve developed over time ought not to be overpowered by the transitory thrill of a new crush.
And yet.
You see, Dimitri is just a computer. And that as-yet-nameless MacBook in the Apple Store at the Briarwood Mall is a much nicer, newer computer, with upgraded features and a vast hard drive. I’m sorry, Dimitri, but my commitment only runs so deep. But I’ll leave you one last love song appropriate to the situation (thanks to my friend Richard for this link). And then I’ll bid my fond farewells and move on.
I probably will not look back.
3 comments:
You give me courage that someday I can give up my iBook too...
To paraphrase my Branch President in the MTC, "Laptops are like vegetables. Every year there's a new crop." It's hard to let go, but just think of all the new adventures that await you.
But the day will come when you will sing that song again, about yet another computer.
My laptop is five years old now, and well past the expiration date. The problem is, I can never justify spending money on a computer when I could spend that money on my bikes.
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