The Pandemic Stopped Me From Buying a New MacBook

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I had a relatively efficient, established workflow for my tiny tech writing endeavor. I have a small office at home with a basic desk, monitor, 2017-era PC, and some game consoles, and that’s my main testing environment. It’s where I capture game screenshots, critically listen to headphones, and forget to plug in my Switch Lite.

Most of my writing used to occur not at home, but in that most cliche of creator places: a coffee shop. My neighborhood has a few local spots and a few Starbucks locations to choose from, with a couple even technically within walking distance. When I first started out almost six years ago, I was using an Acer Android tablet for these cafe excursions. Then I realized that I could bring headphones with me and listen to my own music. And then it snowballed from there.

After a handful of weeks, the tablet wasn’t cutting it anymore and i decided to buy a Chromebook. The lady at Best Buy asked me what I was going to do with it and I said “Write.” She said: “Ah, you’re a programmer! You’re writing code!” Not an unreasonable assumption since I live in what was once dubbed “The Silicon Forest.” You couldn’t walk more than ten feet in the Best Buy without seeing someone wearing a badge for one of the local tech companies. She was a little disappointed when I said I was just going to write text. Back then I was writing fiction, too. I hadn’t yet become a reviews machine.

You might think me mad at this point. Why would I buy a Chromebook to write text? Well, at that time my main publishing platforms were Tumblr and Medium, and both of them have adequate online text editors that I preferred using over writing my documents in another program…and there was always Docs if I really needed an outside editor. I know I know, it’s sacrilege to not use a third party editing program to write all of my text, but in the high speed world of internet content and algorithms, every saved second is helpful. Heck, I’m writing this very post inside my blog’s text editor tool. Picture for proof!

Photo taken by the author.

The Chromebook was a surprisingly capable reviewing machine. It had an adequate headphone jack and Bluetooth interface for portable headphone testing, and a long battery life. At some point though, as is inevitable, I desired more power. So, inspired by months of seeing how stupidly cool they looked in the various coffee shops I frequented, I bought a 12-inch MacBook. Yes, the one responsible for the butterfly key switches that everyone came to hate. I’ve never hated them, and in fact, I find their large size and clicky feedback is perfect for my own typing needs. I’ve also been extremely lucky, and only had to perform the “spray compressed air into it and pray” ritual one time during the last five years.

Since the middle of 2016, the 12-inch MacBook has been the cornerstone of my writing effort. Every morning after finishing the on-air shift at my “real” radio job (voice work done on contract), I’d pack it into a bag with whatever headphone was either my current favorite or the one needing its final day of field testing, hoof it to a cafe, and crank out text till lunch. Sometimes my whole schedule would get pushed to the afternoon or the evening, but that few hours of MacBook clacking was always a comfort I could count on.

The pandemic changed everything, as it has for so many millions of people. No more coffee shops. No more guaranteed stream of reader engagement. Very little societal support for contract workers. My little online business was just about to make a true profit and now it was deleted overnight. That story happened to so many people. I am one among thousands and thousands.

A stable simple schedule I’d built that was just starting to gain me some momentum in the online content world was dashed against the rocks in an instant. And I’m among the luckiest. What a big stupid mess, made worse by so many poor decisions at the top.

In 2018 I bought a midrange gaming laptop from Dell. It’s much beefier than my 12-inch MacBook and comes along with a significantly lower battery life and a huge increase in size and weight. I mostly got it to sit at home and test out games on the sort of PC configuration that most folks would actually be able to afford, and only occasionally would I drag it into the field to use for writing. The MacBook was still my main tool, dogged as it was by Apple removing 32-bit support, and setting the stage for their transition to faster ARM based processors instead of under-powered Intel mobile chips.

I don’t think anyone thought the M1 MacBooks would turn out to be as awesome or as fast as they are. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it. The TouchBar seemed like a misstep on the road to future MacBook nightmares, but the M1 turned that ship right around. It’s an awesome platform, and in spite of the fact that my writing routine is totally busted now, and my living room is now the coffee shop…somehow that lust for more power was still activated in my brain for the briefest of moments.

The total halt of my business growth in the last year in spite of steady engagement from a now-working-at-home-userbase and the complete non-need for additional portable power brought me crashing back into reality. Not to mention the recent horrifying revelation that Apple at one point knowingly used child labor for years without stopping it just to get some additional dollars. I absolutely don’t need a new MacBook, and trying to muster the enthusiasm now just results in personal disgust in spite of how powerful the machines are.

In that other prior universe that was splintered upon the proverbial rocks, this would have been the year that I happily marched to the Apple store and finally retired this well-past-its-prime machine with its worn finish and out of date OS. The speed and efficiency of the new machines, combined with slick iOS support, meant that I might have even tried something crazy like writing two articles per day instead of my usual one, spurred on by all that secret new efficiency even as I was just playing a trick on my brain.

Instead, there’s just struggle. And I don’t have any of the mechanisms in place that used to allow me to do this at high speed in spite of being one guy.

I’m still grateful. I know I’m lucky to still have a place to live, and to be able to write this story. It’s been a nightmare fight to get certain older members of my family to follow the public health guidelines, and doing my work on a computer means I’m just one click away from peeling back the nightmare curtain and seeing….everything that’s going on at any time. I’m relieved that I still have an audience in spite of my monetization falling off of a cliff, and I’m so thankful and grateful for everyone that’s reading this. Seriously. I’ll repeat these thanks again before the end of this blog. Shameless link to my support page. I’m completely reader supported, and if my audience had gone away, I would have gently bowed out of this long before today.

I don’t even know if I’ll feel comfortable sitting in a cafe again once their dining rooms are open. It’ll be too weird at first. But if I ever do get there, maybe someday, I’ll upgrade my machine again and get back into my high speed content groove. Until then I’m going to ride this MacBook’s five year old battery into oblivion in my living room for as long as I can.

I’ve wanted to write something acknowledging this whole experience for a while now, but I haven’t known how to do it without inadvertently minimizing the struggles of everyone who has it so much worse than I do. Even right now feel like this is an overly trite and selfish article, and that I should delete it, and that the title is too much like a clickbait tech web site headline.

But then I remember about how I’ve seen so many articles on Medium do huge business with premises much thinner than this one as a large portion of the writing base there rushed to cash in on endless pandemic fear and work-from-home tips articles. I’ve staunchly refused to do either one, and in sharing a little sliver of my story, I mostly want to say that I too am a small indie creator going through it and I have no idea how to put Humpty Dumpty back together, or if he ever even will be a full egg man again one day.

It also seemed super wrong to just let that Apple child labor thing go without a mention so I thought, well, why not do it all in one big blog ramble.

Thanks so much again if you made it this far. I appreciate you and couldn’t do this without you. It’s highly probable that I’ll write more fun gaming and tech content this year than I did last year. But it might not come out as fast as it did in the old days, and headphone noise isolation tests may remain problematic. Thanks for sticking with me if you’re a fan, and I hope you’re doing as well as you can be right now. If you want to reach out because you’ve had a crazy time or you just need an ear to vent to, you can find me on twitter and my email is there also.