So I bought a Macbook. And guess what: me and my Macbook fell totally in love with each other! We had some small startup problems, with Apple only wanting to bring my Macbook to my house during office hours. And since I have to work during office hours to be able to pay for my Macbook, that wasn’t an option. They wouldn’t let me pick her up, so the only alternative was to have her dropped off at the office, where anyone could sign for her and I could have lost her forever before even seeing her..

But anyway, the minute I saw her I was in love.. First of all, she was really goodlooking. She came in a beautiful box. She started up really nice and fast with stuff flying all over the screen. Everything worked so intuitively. iPhoto is just great for slideshows. Installing programs is really easy, just drag the app to your apps folder and it’s done. There’s no Windows registry stuff and no installed files all over the place, just a neat apps directory you can throw away and the app is gone. Just press f9, f10, f11 or f12 and you’ll fly around on pink clouds for an hour.. ooh baby that looks beautiful! I could install Ubuntu easily on a partition. And: for the first time in my life I got bluetooth syncing to work!

And: she was really really goodlooking.. People saw me walking around with my Macbook and said: “Damn, that guy looks hot with his brand new goodlooking Macbook!”. I almost changed my entire wardrobe, trying to live up to my Macbooks expectations in looking good. Sure, I had to buy a 25 euro sleeve (actually, it was one of the cheapest), a 20 euro Mini-DVI to VGA cable, a 50 euro keyboard because my old keyboard seemed to be having problems, but hey, when something’s as goodlooking as a Macbook, that’s no big deal!

Me and my Macbook started hanging out together a lot. I used Garageband for multiple-track recordings with real natural sounding beats, iCal and Address Book synced beautifully with Plaxo. My cameras hooked up really nice, even my printer seemed to work well, and those nice Photo Booth flix just made everyone happy! I didn’t even mind the Macbook Air showing up and trying to steal the show.. (and I still think the Air looks and feels crappy)

My Macbook disappointed me for the first time when I tried to run Time Machine. I hooked up my external harddisk with all my Windows backups, photo’s, scans and stuff and my Macbook asked me: “Hey sugar, would you like to use this hard drive for Time Machine?” I’m like “Oh yeah, give it to me..” Then she said “so, why don’t I delete your disk completely to start using it for Time Machine”. Me: “Hold up… whoa whoa honey, what’s that?” She said something like: “Hey sugar, like.. you know.. totally delete it, so you can use all fancy Time Machine!” Me: “Sorry I’ll pass on that and keep my 10 years of backup files if you don’t mind. And I’m gonna wait just one little moment before I buy a new harddrive for you , being broke because of your sleeve, keyboard and MiniDVI-VGA cable. Sorry ‘bout that babe”.

I guess that made her sour, because after that, everything changed. Sure, my wifi sort of stopped working from time to time from the day I got my Macbook, while my old Windows laptop was still online. But I thought that can happen to anyone, and she’s still reeeeeeaaaallly goodlooking! And we were so much in love, I didn’t really care that sometimes she didn’t recognize my external hard drive. Maybe it was because of the Time Machine thingy..

So after that, I started noticing my wifi dropped at least two times an hour while surfing. Sometimes I couldn’t get wifi back on after she woke from her beauty sleep. The first time she crashed (I have no idea why) I was almost in tears, being really worried about what happened. Luckily she started up real nice immediately afterwards.

One thing that began to bother me was that I couldn’t find any good p2p software for her. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t find a lot of software for her. She always seemed to want things her way: If i wanted to organise my pics in iPhoto, she wanted them in her iPhoto library instead of in separate files, that I could access with other apps. If I wanted to copy a CD in iTunes, it had to be in AAC format instead of mp3. I didn’t want her to add every song I played to my iTunes library, but I couldn’t find out how to tell her that. I wanted the font size just a little larger in iCal, and she didn’t let me. She crashed more often, while I used Garageband or.. she just crashed .

Then she really crashed.. she said she needed an update from Steve and right in the middle of Steve giving it to her, she just stopped working and some screen told me I had to restart her. When I restarted her she was all broken up. I could get into a login screen and login (she even knew when I typed the right password) but after that, she turned blue and brought me back to the login screen. After trying to start her in safe mode (didn’t work) I wanted to reinstall her and the DVD said “I’m gonna wipe your harddisk and reinstall OS X”. I thought that was kind of harsh because a lot of my stuff was on the harddisk and wasn’t backed up. I tried to get to my files using my Ubuntu install, but Ubuntu told me I couldn’t because of my Macbooks’ security policy. Since I really trusted her, I was almost OK with that. I called some friends and then.. she gave me some reeaaaaaaaaaaallly good loving! After buying a firewire cable for just 16 euro (…) I could hook her up to one of her Mac friends and use her as a separate hard drive. I could get all of my files back and she didn’t say a word about security! (remember that: if you ever want to rob someone of his files, don’t be all complicated in trying to access his account, just turn the Mac off, hook it up via firewire and access all you need..) I reinstalled her, partitioned my hard drive into a data and an apps section, so if I ever have to reinstall her I don’t have to get my files back first. Maybe my Macbook and me could have a second chance together.

At first, it seemed like wifi was working fine! So much for fifteen minutes of wifi happyness.. it quit again. To this day, I can not find a solution to that and I see a lot of people on the Internet having the same problem. Right now, I can only access my neighbours’ unprotected wifi network. Not having access to wifi is about as annoying as it gets.. My Ubuntu installation won’t work with wifi either because my Macbooks’ wifi card isn’t supported for Linux.. at least not in a way I understand..

Some things just aren’t as beautiful as it seemed in the beginning of our love affair. Whenever I save something in Preview, she’ll just say it’s a Preview file, instead of a PDF, JPG or TIFF and I have to really tell her to make it a file of my choice. My friends all get extremely annoyed using her track pad. My printer software doesn’t let me make multiple page PDF’s, which it did when I used it on Windows. Hey, that’s not Apple’s fault, but it sure doesn’t make me happier. Using Gmail in Safari is annoying, because when you use tab to go to the send button, it doesn’t go to the send button but to the subject line. And I’m still not used to not being able to maximize a screen the way I want it.

Last week she did something to me that I will not soon forget. In my 10 year business career, I have never, ever, ever had a problem with hooking up a computer to a beamer. Everyone complains about having important presentations and not getting their computers hooked up. Every time someone came up to me with such a story, I laughed: it just never happened to me! Until last week.. and I still feel bad about it.. Here’s what happened: me and my Macbook were all set up, acting slick, we had put up a neat Keynote presentation, we had hooked up our remote control, we attached our new Mini-DVI to VGA interface cable, my Macbook recognised the beamer (a Sharp xxx whatever) immediately. Everything went just fine and we were about to really hit it off..! But then: nothing happened! Nothing happened! Nothing happened! Whatever I tried, I couldn’t get it to work.. Of course I tried Apple’s help function, it said something about this and this button, but.. this and this button didn’t exist in my System Preferences. It said something like “click here to open System Preferences xxx”, but.. the link didn’t work. I think I tried everything.. After fifteen minutes of agonizing terror in not getting my Macbook to work, to my rescue came some really old, heavy, boring HP laptop.. that worked immediately with the beamer..

Since last week, me and my Macbook don’t talk anymore.. She’s still not giving me wifi. Last weekend my iPod stopped working after syncing and I had to reset it. Today I was transferring some files.. and whenever in my Windows era I wanted to add say “Directory 1 – subdirectory 2” (on my computer) to “Directory 1” (on my external hard drive), where there was already a subdirectory 1, I could just drag Directory 1 to Directory 1 and my Windows laptop would say “you wanna overwrite it?” and when I said “OK” that would mean Directory 1 would still have subdirectory 1 and add the new subdirectory 2. My Macbook asked me “you wanna overwrite it?” so I’m like.. “yeah!” and it turns out subdirectory 2 is available but subdirectory 1 is gone! And gone in the way that it’s not in my trash bin and it’s just.. gone.. And right now Safari doesn’t recognize my WordPress line endings, so unless I edit this post in Firefox it will be one long uninterrupted piece of text..

Sweet little Macbook, I really really loved you, and you still do look really really amazing (and I still love Garageband), but you’re making me feel really unhappy lately. So I’ve had about enough of you. And there’s one thing I know I can do to piss you off.. I’m installing Windows on you! And if you give me any more trouble, I’m gonna even skip XP and give you Vista.. and I’m not gonna feel bad about it! You had it coming.

And just as I’m finishing this post, Steve says he’s got a new Apple update for me.. That really freaks me out!