Tag: mac

My wife’s seven-year-old iMac has slowed to a crawl, spinning that cursed “wheel of death” like a medieval torture device. My own seven-year-old laptop, lashed to a monitor like a patient in an ICU, hasn’t exactly delivered the clarity and comfort I need at my desk. For years I procrastinated on upgrades for the usual reasons—data migration, password authentication, DPI settings, monitor heights, the question of whether the mouse goes left or right. Every new computer setup promises productivity but arrives with a Costco-sized migraine.

At Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law delivered the slap: “Get off your butt and replace them. RAM prices are exploding. AI is eating the supply.” He said it with the urgency of a man who has watched a tech apocalypse montage on fast-forward.

I went back and forth between a Lenovo business mini PC and a Mac Mini, like a man choosing between two religions, neither of which he fully trusts. In the end I rolled the dice on Cupertino. I bought two identical Mac Minis—M4, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD. I’m either a pragmatic genius or the biggest sucker Apple has netted since the butterfly keyboard years.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the dark obsessing over the only question that matters to men of a certain age: Does it have enough ports? I have a mechanical keyboard, a mouse, Edifier speakers, two 27-inch monitors, a printer, an SD reader for my Nikon Z30, and ethernet. Eight connections. The Mac Mini has two USB-A ports and some USB-C wizardry that feels like a riddle designed by a monk from the USB Consortium. So I bought an Anker multi-port hub. But of course the hub isn’t self-sufficient—you must also buy the 100W charger, and the 100W cable, like tech accessories sold separately from your dignity.

Then there’s the setup. I’ll have to dive into Apple System Settings and tell the machine who I am: configure the mechanical keyboard, calibrate the Dell and Asus monitors, coax the printer to speak in the dialect of Cupertino. I haven’t used macOS in years. My engineering friend—who worships his MacBook Pro like it’s Thor’s hammer—assures me, “The extra you pay for Apple is stupid tax.” I’m not sure whether I’m buying ease of use or a velvet rope to my own humiliation.

But the final boss isn’t the ports, or the migration, or the learning curve. It’s the aesthetics. I will have a quiet four-inch metal cube powering two gleaming monitors. I want the desk to look like a minimalist command station, not the back room of a RadioShack circa 1997. Every cable threatens the illusion. Every adapter is a serpent in Eden. The rat’s nest must not be allowed to encroach.

This is why I waited so long to replace the old machines. Not because I feared expense or inconvenience—but because I feared myself. The arrival of a new computer flips my OCD switch like a Vegas neon sign. For the next week, I’ll be pacing my office like an engineer at Cape Canaveral—sleepless, wiring my life together one USB-C at a time.

I never imagined my $3,000 Acer gaming laptop—armed with an RTX 2080 and given to me as a review model back in 2019—would still be chugging along like a caffeinated mule nearly seven years later. It was supposed to be a flashy fling, not a long-term relationship. Yet here we are, the old beast still running my digital life as a home desktop replacement, while newer machines preen on YouTube reviews like showroom models whispering, “You deserve better.”

Recently, I started the ritual again—tech research as performance art. I even discovered a comment I’d left a year ago under a Mac Mini review, declaring with absolute conviction that it would be my next computer. A year later, I’m still typing this on the Acer. Why? Because the damn thing refuses to die. Sure, I’m not exactly rendering Pixar films here; the most demanding task I throw at it is uploading Nikon footage. But still—seven years? That’s geriatric in tech years.

Then came the unnerving thought: what if this laptop outlives my enthusiasm? What if it just… keeps working? The fantasy of upgrading evaporates under the weight of practicalities—transferring files, wrestling with two-step verification, updating passwords, the tedium of digital reincarnation. Let’s be honest: the desire for a “new system” might be less about performance and more about the dopamine of novelty.

A darker impulse lurks beneath: part of me wants the Acer to fail, to give me permission to move on. But it won’t. It boots up every morning like a loyal mutt, eager to serve. And really—what are the odds that a new Mac Mini or Asus A18 Ryzen 7 would deliver another seven trouble-free years? Slim to none. So, I’m waiting. Not quite ready to buy, not quite ready to let go. Maybe the pursuit of new tech is its own kind of seduction—the chase more intoxicating than the catch.