In the fall of 2009 my friend Amber and I stopped in at a Best Buy, looking at laptop computers for Amber’s boyfriend. We made cursory passes by desktops, examining them in the way that all window shoppers do, when we came around to the computers adorned with little glowing apples. Before Amber went to the job of actually considering her options, she paused a moment at the Apple kiosk and stood there, as if dreaming.
The computers contrasted sharply with the simple, polished wood of their display table, which further set them apart from the rest of the brands. Everything else sat on black metal shelves, secured by black metal arms so that no one could pick them up and carry them away. The Apple notebooks had nothing keeping them there save for a thin white wire attached to a sensor. I’ve never attempted larceny, but I assumed that severing it would result in a lot of attention with loud sirens and flashing lights. Sitting that way, it truly felt like having one would be no more difficult than filling out a credit card application.
“My computer’s so old,” she said, tracing a finger along the lid of one of the shiny silver laptops. “I’d love to have a Mac, but…” She paused. “I don’t want to become one of those Mac snobs.”
I watched her finger as it followed the graceful curved edges of the otherwise rectangular lid, and I felt that familiar stirring, like heartstrings but in my back pocket.
Gadgets, to this day, are a big draw for me. As a self-proclaimed nerd, I have an eye for anything with glowing lights or blinking buttons, and the attraction is probably best described as “unhealthy.” Right up there with sugar and a mild self-loathing, technology could be described as one of my major addictions. Walking into an electronics store, I imagine that the sight of me is something like a kitten plopped into the middle of a room filled with yarn, if the yarn was dancing and the kitten hopped up on speed. God knows how much of my income I’ve squandered on technological trinkets that, really, are nothing more than flashy toys.
How, then, does one admit to already having become one of those snobs? I’d made the switch to Apple computers a year or so before, and I felt immediately uncomfortable in that moment, standing there looking at several overpriced products I had lying in wait for me back home. I went from feeling ashamed, then, to slightly defensive. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a snob, and as we walked away I ran through all my reasoning for wanting things like these and the justifications for already having them.
As a child, I loved toys that lit up and had switches and levers and made science-y noises. I would pretend that educational toys — things made of bright plastics that were supposed to teach a child how to count or multiply — instead made excellent controls for spaceships or a computer workstation at a distant outpost. Things didn’t even have to be toys. At my great-grandmother’s house, I would play with her melodica, a handheld musical instrument that looked like the result of a flute and a piano’s wild night in Vegas; the rows of black and white keys looked like buttons that would fire missiles or close a bulkhead against an advancing army of mutant soldiers.
Years later, in the middle of a camping trip where my mother and I seemed sentenced to boredom, she and I drove into town to look at the local shops. We were in the middle of a junk store, basically a glorified indoor garage sale, when I stumbled upon an entire computer priced at twenty-five dollars. The find felt like a prospector’s discovery of gold, and, without prodding, my mother asked if I’d like to have it. Never one to pass up a good deal, my mother, I think, overestimated the computer’s capabilities. When we got it back to our camper, we set it up on the foldaway dining table and plugged it in. From school and even at home, I was used to having a mouse and onscreen pointer to navigate things. But this thing was from a different era. All the monitor gave me was a black screen. That and a lime green cursor for typing commands in what I thought of as the old-fashioned way. At twelve years old and a child of the nineties, I had no idea how to work a computer that had possibly seen its prime during the Kennedy administration. So I was left typing little stories onto the screen, only to have no idea how to store or retrieve them when I shut the thing off.
The computer was a disappointment at best. Still, the sight of it, boulder-like and bowing the dining table, felt comforting in a way that got me through the rest of the camping trip. It even outweighed the fear I felt when using it, when the thought of it crashing through the table and crushing both of my legs covered me like a shadow.
In high school, when I got my first job, I passed up the opportunity to go to London on a class field trip so that I could buy my first real computer. The idea of going to another country felt promising in the way that adventure does when you’re a teenager and your departure date is still far off. Partly, it was my parents who diverted my desire to go. The trip was in the summer of 2002, not even a year after the events of September 11th. America had forced its way into the War on Terror, and being a U.S. citizen abroad — to my parents, at least — was like bringing a toasty roast beef sandwich into a bear cage.
“You could go to Europe,” my father said. “Or...you could get a brand new laptop.”
My mother chimed in, her voice masking her intention of me never leaving the country or even setting foot on a plane. “It’d be about the same amount of money. And it would last longer.”
All the wonders of the British Isles paled against the glowing promise of a shiny new computer, and in that moment, no matter how much I might have pretended to think about it, I was sold. As a family, we made the trip to a Best Buy, the nearest of which was almost forty minutes away, so that I could make my first foray into the world of zero percent financing.
In the way that these things go, the laptop ended up being outdated within eight months, and within shouting distance of its fourth birthday it quit on me, essentially retiring into the job of a thousand-dollar paperweight.
By this time I had a little better income, and so I purchased a new computer, an Apple laptop that I would turn around and resell less than a year later when a newer, better one caught my eye. I had no justification for doing it. I’d just finished paying off the desktop I’d bought, and there was nothing wrong with my laptop except for the fact that it lacked a few features of the shinier, slimmer models.
Standing there in the Best Buy, I had to wonder if I really was one of those Mac snobs. And not just a Mac snob, but a tech snob in general. What other reason could there be for my attitude toward technology? Should a man’s worth be measured in flashy gadgets, I guess I thought I might rank a few rungs higher than other people. But, as we walked away from the Macs and toward the other computers, perched on their demure black shelves reaching onward to infinity, it became clear that all my toys really are are testaments to the fact that I don’t have a life. While other people are out getting drunk in a friend’s cornfield or sleeping around in the backs of sports car, I’m sitting alone in a sea of glowing lights and blinking buttons, waiting for my next toy.
