The Wanting

Watched the Apple keynote. They announced an iPad mini, a new iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro. Each one looked perfect. Design at that level is almost offensive—it makes everything else look cheap.

I don’t need any of them. I know I don’t need them. But there’s that moment right after a keynote where I’m already holding one in my imagination, already deciding which coffee shop I’d work from, which friends I’d want to see me with it. The object hasn’t even shipped and I’m already three months into owning it.

It passes after a while, the wanting. I close the browser tab, move on to something else. But I remember what it felt like. That’s why they do the keynotes, I guess. Not to sell the thing itself—to sell that specific feeling of wanting something beautiful, something that seems like it would make me different somehow. Better organized. More serious. More me.

The weird part is understanding exactly how it works and still falling for it anyway. I’m a designer. I know how these things are put together—the choices about materials, about simplicity, about what you see and what you don’t. I can see through it. And I still want it. Knowing the trick doesn’t make you immune to the trick.

I’ve never been seduced by it badly enough to actually buy. But I’ve gotten close. Closer than I’d like to admit. And I’ll probably watch the next keynote too, knowing exactly what’s going to happen.