Shouldn’t this guy look happier? Please, having a moment. Saying good-bye to my trusty ten year old Macbook. Another moment, please. Okay, better.

When I ordered it over the phone from my local Mac store in Seattle, the woman dutifully asked many qualifying questions.

“No, just the MacBook Pro, the 1099.00 one, please.”

“Sir, you can got much more memory, and stuff like the retina do hicky, and. . .”

Those are things I don’t need,” I said, politely.  She paused. “You’re right, sir,”  she said, after I told her that I had made my current machine last over ten years. She respectfully sensed that I had done the homework and found the computer I needed. She was kind of impressed.

“Why now?”

“It can’t be updated anymore.” Mac and all computer manufactures have done a great job of making their machines obsolete almost as soon as they go to market—in marketing terms of course. This I said to myself, not wanting to seem like an asshole. I didn’t tell her about my twenty six year old car or the other things in my life I have treated with enough respect to keep from early graves.

“You realize, the new machine, in its stripped down version,” I said,  “has a bazillion more bits and bytes than my old one; the one with over 7,000 photos on an iPhoto program I haven’t updated for years. And over 2,000 items on the iTunes thing I have not updated since before forever. I’ve been using iMovie since it’s beta version and through all of it, have never run out of memory. Okay, a teeny tiny lie–I save most of my movies on a separate drive. I stopped upgrading iMovie after iMovie HD came out with that horrible upgrade–and I’m still happy with iMovie HD.

Mac has finally worn me down. I can’t continue using the things I need without upgrading. And it’s getting slow, just like me. So please, nice sales clerk person, just the basic thing, in any color you have. When you compare it to the first Performa class 550 I owned, with five mb (that cost twice as much as this new one) it is a bit faster and will now probably outlast me.

In a few minutes I will begin to transfer everything to the new machine and hope that it goes as easily as instructions indicate. But the old machine will rest easy, in a place of honor, nearby.

Sorry, didn’t mean to go all mushy.