Mac Dreams at Zero Euros

Every time I flip through a Mac magazine and see that desktop—the clean dock, the considered spacing, the way it all looks like someone actually cared—something in my chest does a small, embarrassing thing. I don’t know what to call it other than desire.

Next year I’m getting a new computer. The sensible answer is Windows Vista, the new Microsoft system arriving in 2006. I know Windows completely. I have years of programs, files, habits, and muscle memory built into it. But "sensible" is doing an enormous amount of work to justify something I increasingly find exhausting. Windows is the beige of operating systems at this point—something you accept rather than choose, something everyone has because no one thought hard enough about it.

Apple means something different. Not just hardware, not just software, but a whole other relationship to the machine. Which sounds exactly like the kind of thing someone says right before buying into a lifestyle brand, and maybe that’s true, but I’m past caring. The desktop is beautiful. The PowerBooks are beautiful. Even the Mac Mini, the cheapest thing they make, has that quality of looking like it was put together by adults with opinions.

I need to start saving. Christmas, maybe. A PowerBook, or a Mac Mini at minimum. My heart has already made the decision; my bank account just hasn’t caught up yet.