When I started showing some interest in a Mac a friend who was instrumental in turning me into a Mac-head told me something I found quite bizarre about people who used Macs -that they developed a relationship with their computers. People had a connection with their Macs and generally couldn’t part with them when the time came to upgrade or something.
Now I’ve always been happy to turn in my elder PCs or PC-parts whenever I upgraded in order to keep the junk at home to a minimum so this didn’t make any sense to me -was he joking? Developing a relationship with a computer, a machine? Come off it!
But hey, I got my iBook (the cutest, sexiest laptop ever made ;)) and I really liked it. I like (almost) everything about it and those things I do perceive as shortcomings I tend to look upon them more as “character traits” rather than actual faults. And the more I work with it the best it feels. I really, really love my Mac. And being a geek I am always looking at what is newest, best, faster, so I know there will come a day when I will just have to upgrade. This day is probably far away, but it will come and when I think about it now it makes me sad. Yes, it actually makes me sad to know that I will have to part with my trusty laptop, the one I carry around everyday, the one I work with, I play with, I use as my digital media box, that goes away on vacation with me…
So it slowly dawned on me that I had <gasp> developed a relationship with my Mac. Just like that, it didn’t even take too long for it to happen, it was just so natural. Oh Apple designers are truly the devil incarnate! Or maybe just devilish good. :)
But then this disturbing fact happened today: as I was talking with my wife about this, explaining how I had actually been caught in this crazy Mac-love thing she asked me a simple, innocent and yet disturbing question:
-“so what’s it called?”
Excuse me? What’s it called? Well, it does have a name on the network but it is merely for identification, it doesn’t count as a name… So I guess it doesn’t have a name.
-“But everything we care deeply about has to have a name, it is just part of the process and it makes it even dearer to our hearts.”
Boom! Just like that with that feminine logic which is just always right she brought me to a halt.
When I think about it I have to admit that I had in fact though about giving my Mac a name, I though it was special, different than any other computer I had ever had so it might be fun for it to have a name (after all some people name their cars…) but I had dismissed it as just a crazy though and forgot about it. Until today.
So what should I call my Mac? I’m really bad at naming things (any thing, from a project to a person to a service) so this should prove to be quite a challenge, but I am decided and I will not be led astray from my quest: my Mac has to have a name, it deserves a name, and so a name it shall have…
Only not just today. In fact it might take a while… Hum… I’ll let you know! :)