I Never Did Get That Mac

So I’m sitting here watching my iPhone update when suddenly it occurs to me that about three years ago I wrote a whole thing about needing a new computer but not being sure what I should get. It then dawns on me that I never did finish that story and let everyone know what I decided to do, so why not take care of that now?

One of the major reasons it took me this long to finish the story is because well, the story just finished. Yes, here in 2017 I finally got the new computer I was after in 2014. Thanks, life. Some of what happened has been covered elsewhere in pretty good detail, but the TLDR version is a whole bunch of stuff happened (about 98% of it to poor Carin) that sent get new computer system tumbling way down the priority list for more than a year. In the meantime I’d also gotten the old shitbox working again, and it was able to get me bye.

At the time I didn’t mind all of its slowness and stupidity because it was just nice to have something functional. And hey, it meant I didn’t waste the several hundred dollars I’d sunk into fixing it. But I absolutely let it go for way too long, to the point where it was becoming far more of a hindrance than it was a help. If you were wondering why I hadn’t been as talkative here or on Twitter as I used to be and have become again, mystery solved. Doing the simplest of things took sometimes 3 or more times longer than they should have because garbage ass computer.

But as of this January, that’s not a problem anymore, thank Christ.

So what’d I get?

The answer is not a Mac. Yes, I stuck with Windows, for quite a few reasons.

PCs are easier to take apart and repair, for one. I can have anyone I trust to know shit from putty in here to fix anything that goes wrong and is beyond my capabilities as opposed to lugging the damn thing all the way to the Apple Store.

I also did a lot of reading and talking to people, and I really started noticing that folks (particularly the blind ones) aren’t nearly as on board the Apple train as they used to be. Accessibility bugs not getting fixed, new ones popping up regularly, the Mac equivalents of things not working at all or not being able to do what a person needed, the lack of accessibility options (browser and screenreader combinations in particular) that I was worried about all along, the Mac Mini I thought about buying not being able to function properly with Voiceover unless it had a monitor plugged into it which kind of defeated the purpose…there were a lot of things.

But what about the virtual machine? Best of both worlds, right?

Uh…no.

I’m sure for some people it works just great, and I’m happy for those people. But I’ve seen that setup in action and let me tell you something, it ain’t fucking happening. Not in this house, not on my watch. Carin, the poor sap, runs a Mac laptop with a Windows VM as her work computer, and it’s the absolute drizzling shits. Watching her struggle mightily just to get the damn thing out of sleep mode and talking so she can do something as basic as send an email causes me physical and mental anguish. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened to me, but no way in hell was I spending that much money to take that chance.

So I’m now running a lovely new desktop complete with Windows 10, and a couple months in I’m quite confident that I made the right decision. It’s fast, it does everything I want and need a computer to do and so far at least, it’s come with none of the hassle and inconvenience it looked like the Mac would have.

I can’t tell you how awesome it’s been to be able to work up to my own speed again. I’m looking forward to using this thing for years to come, although hopefully not quite as many years as the last one.