My new appellation

“I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but some­times wish they did. Macs are glor­i­fied Fisher-Price activ­ity centres for adults; com­puters for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper com­puters work; com­puters for people who earn­estly believe in feng shui.” — Charlie Brooker, writ­ing in The Guard­ian.

I will con­fess to feel­ing a little con­fused, not to men­tion over­whelmed. Have I joined a strange new cult, full of bene­vol­ent smiles of recog­ni­tion and secret hand­shakes? Have I, altern­at­ively, signed my name in blood on the applic­a­tion form to become a cit­izen of the most evil of evil empires? Or have I just bought a shiny new piece of con­sumer tech­no­logy, but sin­gu­larly failed to grasp what all the fuss is about on either side of the argument?

Hope­fully it’s the last of the three, although I do feel myself increas­ingly power­less to res­ist being drawn into the realms of hype and hyper­bole. Oh, but you see it’s so beau­ti­ful. So per­fectly designed. So inspir­ing. So user-friendly. So intu­it­ive. So shiny. So sleek. So. Just so …

Ahem. Please con­trol your­self. No drib­bling in public.

The past few days have been full of more than a few pal­pit­a­tions, as I have found myself spend­ing a shock­ingly vast amount of money — sig­ni­fic­antly, though, not real money, but rather the sort of hire pur­chase loan agree­ment sums that don’t count as tan­gible pounds and pence either in my pocket or in my sweaty palms — on buy­ing a Mac­Book Pro. An Apple com­puter. Mine, all mine. Well, mine in three years time. Until then, Apple Fin­an­cing and I will just come to a mutu­ally bene­fi­cial agree­ment where I get their laptop and they get a por­tion of my soul on a monthly basis. Which seems fair, all told.

Geek inter­lude: If you’re a nor­mal per­son, please look away now. Gone? Right. 15.4″ matte screen, 2GB memory, 160GB hard drive and, er, some sort of pro­cessor type thing of no doubt amaz­ing speed, since you ask. These details were help­fully provided for those of you who care about such things, and would only have asked in the com­ments if I hadn’t told you. Happy now?

This morn­ing, the credit agree­ment turned up in the post, fol­low­ing a nervous ten minutes spent hanging on the phone on Fri­day morn­ing, dur­ing which I swore I was about to hear the fate­ful and demean­ing utter­ance: “I’m sorry, but there appears to be a slight prob­lem with your applic­a­tion for fin­an­cing. You’re broke, aren’t you?” But no. Not a word of it. They couldn’t have bent over any more back­wards to give me what I wanted without frac­tur­ing some­thing nasty in the pro­cess. And what I wanted was an Apple Mac. Now. Give me it. Give me shiny tech­no­logy. Mmm.

Oh dear, I can feel that tell­tale trickle of saliva again. Excuse me just a moment whilst I embar­rass myself by dab­bing at my mouth with a moist tissue.

Finally, all those long, lonely years of loiter­ing sus­pi­ciously on the Apple stands at vari­ous trade shows are over. No more shall I feel the need to avoid the gazes of secur­ity staff as I reach out and touch those sleek sur­faces, strok­ing com­puters in ways that most right-minded people would prob­ably deem offens­ive. No, now I will be able to indulge such lust­ful tend­en­cies in the pri­vacy of my own home — and when I finally receive the item in ques­tion, that is very prob­ably what I’ll spend the first few days doing: drool­ing in an unseemly man­ner. It could well be a whole week before I even dare to gently open its vir­gin lid (as it were) and cor­rupt the key­board within with the touch of my filthy, unworthy fingers.

I sense that I’m get­ting slightly car­ried away again. Look, all I did was buy a com­puter. A heap of plastic, metal and micro­chips put together in a super­fi­cially appeal­ing fash­ion. It’s silver-grey in col­our. Much like my cur­rent laptop, in fact. It’s nice. It cost an almost dis­grace­ful sum of money. Hope­fully it won’t have an internal fan that sounds like a small jumbo jet is attempt­ing to taxi down a run­way inside the CD com­part­ment. I’ll have to get new soft­ware. And accessor­ies. And feed it premium cat food and sau­cers of milk on a reg­u­lar basis so that it con­tin­ues to purr at me. Or something.

The Mac­Book Pro arrives in a few days. Things may then go rather quiet for a while. The only sound you’ll hear from this dir­ec­tion will prob­ably be sighs of sheer con­tent­ment. Who needs rela­tion­ships with real people when you’ve got Apple products?

Foot­note: Hav­ing waxed lyr­ical with such ful­some praise, it has to be said that those new Apple Mac ads fea­tur­ing Mitchell and Webb are wor­ry­ing me. Wor­ry­ing me a great deal. Con­sid­er­ing that the duo’s com­edy star has been in the ascend­ant for quite some time, why had no one who knows me thought to inform me before now that I sound exactly like David Mitchell? Exactly like him? And, worse still, that I appear to have bor­rowed his hair? I think we should be told.