The latest technolust

I’m not quite sure how technolusts get started. Probably the roots differ depending on the product, but the symptoms are always the same. You spend a lot of time thinking about the object of your desire, and you just know that if you possessed this object, all your problems would go away. Today at the DJ I spent about fifteen minutes watching the old Mac I use essentially consume itself trying to do the simplest of tasks, until finally it righted itself and got back to work. My company likes to think it’s on the cutting edge of technology, but my computer is older than most of my wardrobe (which is really saying something agewise), and it runs literally no contemporary versions of any of its software except for those I’ve snuck onto it (in the documents folder because I don’t have access to the applications folder, or access to a dozen things that would make any user’s life easier, because obviously users are all idiots, except when your IT department is a number of continents away you start wondering about the wisdom of office technology mantras set back in the mid-nineties). So it becomes particularly tempting to scratch the itch of my latest technolust, the little MacAir.

Here’s the thing. I need this machine roughly like I need the proverbial hole in my head, because my MacBook runs mostly fine, except it’s old enough that I wonder about each progressive upgrade. It will probably do Mountain Lion ok, as it did the last upgrade, but that will probably be about it. (For those who wonder, Little Elvis still lives, perpetually on, outdated to its very soul but admirably acting as my iTunes jukebox, sending music throughout the chez via the AirPorts.) Here’s what I think. The Air is sooooo light, which is nice for traveling, and let’s face it, I travel every weekend, one way or the other. 128 gigs is more than enough for virtual Windows and TRPC and a few basic Apple apps, and then everything else under the sun is in the cloud. When I think about it, aside from music and photos, I have no data in my house. And for that matter, since I was grandfathered in with free storage, all my music is over at Amazon. Working on an Air would be a piece of cake. All my writing is either here or at Dropbox (with some strategic backups of some really irreplaceable stuff). I used Little Elvis for ages, and the 11-inch screen on the Air, when windows are expanded, is virtually the same amount of real estate as that 12-inch screen. And I even get a discount if I buy via the DJ. (This is about the same as the education discount, which used to be a lot bigger, and which I could also get, I guess.)

So, I battle this out in my brain. The thing is, the Air costs what we like to call a nice piece of change. Is satisfying my technolust worth the money? Time will tell. If you see me carrying a really tiny computer around at, say, the Pups, you’ll know the answer. But of course no doubt I’ll blab it here first.

(Another root of this lust may be reading the Jobs autobiography. It just makes you want Apple products, even if you’re already awash in them.)
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