Not pretty,
I have to say. And not cool, unlike the cause or object (haven’t decided which)
of the snit.
Which is
ironic, because I bought the damn thing out of sheer vanity—yes, I do have
some—and it has done exactly what I wanted it to do.
Be cool.
All right,
no fool like an old fool. The hero of this piece is a 2500$ piece of excrement
called the MacBook Pro. I bought it and fell in love with it and was instantly
intimidated.
The first problem
was turning it on.
Does anyone
remember a time when machines had buttons that said—in red letters—“power?” Or
maybe “On / Off?”
This
elegant creature before me has an almost invisible circle on the right side of
the base. Within it is a tiny grey circle—virtually indistinguishable from the
aluminum case—broken by a vertical line.
It’s
characteristic Mac. If you know it’s there—great! But for the rest of us?
Take the
little tiny dots that live under the programs on the dock. Doña Taí pointed
them out. “When they’re illuminated, that means the program is running.”
Oh!
I hadn’t
noticed them.
The same is
true for the devices. I had to have an iPod, and of course was intimidated by
that as well. What I didn’t know—until I pressed it by mistake—was where the
volume was. I mean, come on, Steve—a device to play music with no volume
control? Hunh? And how come
everyone else had theirs blaring, and mine only whispered?
Worse came
when for no reason whatsoever the track jumped—I’d be in the third movement of
a different symphony. What? Even crazier was to hear the B Minor Mass and get
the resurrection before the crucifixion.
The little
iPod has a shuffle button, you see. And just by making a sudden movement, it
jumps merrily to a random track. Oh, and by the way, Steve, notice my use of
the word “tracks?” Some of us use the iPod to listen to something other than
hip-hop, reggaeton, and the rest. “852 songs” my iPod is reported as
containing. Wrong—there are rhapsodies, partitas, suites, and lied as well.
So there I’d
be, on my morning walk, and bing! I was six movements from where I had started
(musically speaking).
It turns
out the iPod has a tiny elegant icon next to the “play” arrow.
And I have
relatively big fingers.
So that
drove me nuts for weeks—until I devoted an hour or two (OK, have that
nowadays…) to learning how to disable it.
But it was
nothing like the problem with the iPad. This device has this cool feature—it
shifts from landscape to portrait depending on how you hold it. Totally cool,
except when—as I did—I tried to open an attachment John’s secretary had scanned
sideways. It opened fine, but the screen kept changing every time I flipped the
device. The document was always sideways.
“Oh,” cried
John, “I know what to do about that!”
He was
excited to be able to tell me.
“Put the
iPad very gently on the side of the table. Then, tiptoe to the OTHER side, and
read it standing up!”
Right…and
don’t breathe on it, either.
I suppose
Steve would manage to look cool doing that in public, but me? The guy who can
barely balance a tray of food?
Nothing,
however, is as terrible, as awful, as infuriating as iTunes. That iPod I have?
It’s synched with another computer.
Now dead.
And
apparently, there is no easy way for me to sync to a new computer without
losing…
…those 852
“songs.”
I’ll tell
you what this feels like. High School! Remember the cool kids—the kids who
never got acne, who had the right cars and clothes, who got the right girls?
(OK, not a big issue for me….) That’s what the Mac experience is all about.
And guess
what! I’ll never graduate—never! I will ALWAYS be 17, pus-filled, acned,
gangly, and seven-footed (most of them tangled with the others….).
So, Steve?
This is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go find—if I can—my computer whisperer.
I’m gonna have him rip out the guts of your beautiful machine. Then I’m gonna
put the innards of a decent machine—Toshiba, maybe—in your gorgeous,
eviscerated beast.
And look
totally cool in the coffee shop!
