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I’ve owned a number of first-generation Apple products in 21 years, and plan to own many more in years to come. that’s how i roll. in other words, i am extremely reckless and stupid when it comes to that sort of thing.

Assuming the MacBook Pro 17″ currently en route to my home office doesn’t burst, spray battery acid or otherwise cause third degree burns and a charred nub where my credit card-swiping hand was. For certainly the negative experience would likely not drive me away from Apple, but rather drive me towards learning to live a life devoid of thumbs.

A short list of charges:

Mac IIsi c1991 This Mac sort of just sucked. It was underpowered for its time, the internal audio was constantly failing, and was a pain to take apart, which fortunately I rarely had to do since there were few upgrade options other than RAM. It never failed completely, just failed to impress. But notably it did not throw off enough heat to blind / scorch / cook / vaporize anything. Then again, it was not on my lap while in use.

Why this Mac a “gen 1″, you ask? It was the first Mac in a sort of quasi-pizza box chassis that was neither the fx,cx/ci full-height monitorless workstation, nor the true pizzabox style of the Centrix 610 / PowerMac 6100. I think the LC (which was even crappier) was the only other model to share the form factor. I am a huge nerd.

Titanium Powerbook 15″ - c 2001 till future (on hiatus) You could hold it firmly like you’d hold a cafeteria tray, one hand on each horizontal side, and sort of twist[1] just a bit. And that was an uncomfortable feeling, followed by the other heavier, hurt-ier feeling of the battery pack dropping out the bottom of the unit like the Marine drop ship in Aliens. 24 missions, simulated. 2 combat drops, including this one. And landing on your foot. No spraying battery acid, though… at least not for me.

One night I was drunk at my friend’s house, and I opened up the TiBook shell way too quickly, instantly decapitating the monitor from its way too-weak latches back to the main body. I screamed for about a half hour straight the same way b.spears might had she just performed the same action on her child, and then I stayed medicated for a week as said friend, who was not in a state of constant panic, packaged the pieces up and sent them to some Mac experts in Cali to perform emergency surgery. I think I paid each party (friend Mike, and MacExperts) $500 for this activity.

She (Stella was, and is, her name; she was a diver but she was never down) came back from that journey (thank you brother Mike), but she just wasn’t the same. I had to treat her really gently, which meant I could no longer use the open laptop as a foot rest when sitting on a couch. When I configured the screen at certain angles, video would drop out, then I’d tweak the screen back and things were fine, but my mind’s eye was quite clear on the fact that some video signal/power cable was slowly being sawed off inside the connecting hinge. I could see the shoddy job the “experts” out west did with regards to tucking in and covering Stella’s wiry, braided lady business between the main CPU and the screen. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d be blind soon, so I didn’t. I just tool her into my bedroom, hooked her VGA port up to a relic (but perfectly-working) Apple Sony 21″ Flat Screen Tube. A new lease on visual life. She had a gig of RAM, she had Airport, she had 100Base-T to file servers, and she had a big brother external color screen and a willingness to fight and live. And she did not feel shame when I relegated her to bedroom media access center. I didn’t have to tell her it was mostly going to be about displaying p0rn, and she never complained. When I switched her off at night, the monitor and the tibook module went dark, and she was beautiful when she dreamed. Eventually the laptop’s screen (post-decapitation/re-union of screen and keyboard) blinked out a second time, and Stella knew she’d be running permanently through external video means from here on in. Maybe she considered it sort of like being on dialysis. Maybe more like having a colostomy bag. She didn’t complain. Then again, she was “it”, and it was a laptop. I hear the new ones are complaining, though.

For the last eight or so months I lived at that place, Stella was carefully packed up and tucked into my sock drawer level of the closet to rest. if the machine was going to participate in a miracle and start regrowing leads and synapses from motherboard to monitor, I could think of no richer, more maternal environment than to be surrounded by my sometimes sorted, always filthy, “white” gym socks that I wore with everything (formal, informal, sandals), for that was my impetuous personal style at the time.

When I moved out of that place last October, I was faced with a decision to make about Stella and her head-problem v. prolongued usefullness in another role, among a few other tech-will-she-stay-or-will-she-go issues. Stella, dead screen still attached, was light, and she didn’t take up much space. And she was strong, at 1GB RAM and 500GHz G4 processor. She could do …stuff… like search for aliens. And I watched The Deer Hunter (bittorrented) for the first time through her (driving the aforementioned 21″ outboard monitor). We weren’t giving up on the old girl — she’d come with us, be backed in a box between some summer clothing and comforters and stuff, kept soft and cozy and in a sort of suspended animation until we can do something about it… in the future, when Apple releases a product called iDoctor which is a robot that first kills all employees at the Genius Bar and then fixes, using nano-technology, your old computer… old Apple computer. So you can keep them with you, like your children. I wish Apple would hurry up. Meantime, Stella is packed in towels, in a box, in an attic. Far away. A sleeping giant.

In summary, some people probably think that drunkenly decapitating a laptop is not an Apple engineering problem per se, but they’d be wrong: it was a design flaw. Those hinges should have been the strongest part of the system, but they were the weakest[5]. Also, the thing was hotter than hell.

My blue and white G3 - 1998-2005 rip , Bucky (named for Buckminster Fuller), did not receive such a honored fate; I gutted the PCI cards (”What am I going to do with a SCSI card? We’ll address it later.”) and RAM, took an ice pick to the hard drives, and eased down the ramp into the dumpster, and had to goad two nagging guilt-driven realizations into getting close enough to each other to cancel out:

a) Bucky was too old / slow to do anything of modern worth. not to mention the jelly blue+white aesthetic was sort of so 1998. I guess it could have been a good target at a firing range (if packed with dynamite), but i don’t have the hardware and memberships/ready access to make that a practical approach.

b) to leave Bucky so gutted, but technically still usable, is like leaving a vampire on a ship at sea with no human crew, only rats to drink.[3] it was a disgrace. I loved the computer, and it got a lot done for me. I paid for it [2], it was paid for, and now this is happening: it’s on the edge of the dumpster/crusher sled, its sliding down, crash. the chassis is down there. i’m looking at the dumpster hole, and i can see the G3 chassis in there. i don’t believe it has any feelings about it’s fate, since the box doesn’t have a loaded OS or… electricity or consciousness of a soul. That doesn’t stop me from, momentarily, wondering how dirty I’d get if I jumped in the hole to retrieve it, or what it would feel like if, during said process, the crushing claw came down like something from that “Layla” montage from Goodfellas and cut me and my former computer in half. No, I just walked away. And told myself that computer served its purpose, I got the data off it i needed, destroyed that which I couldn’t, and we were done, and that next time I should buy a cheaper and less pretty computer, perhaps, so the eventual emotional issues present at system disposal aren’t so gut wrenching. Except I can’t; I’m an Apple user. This process is just going to continue and I need to grow (or find) a pair and move on.

So, to pause, my 17″ MacBook Pro is coming soon, and this is a machine that will mean some new things, good things. It means my wife Kelley will get my 17″ PowerBook (G4), which has a history of not exploding, to replace the G3 chicklet I got her (used; from friend Eric) for Xmas three years ago. This will be an appreciated step up for her, and I will find myself in the cutting-edge world of wielding this first-gen platform that can not only the operating system I need to primary productivity (OS X; duh), but any number of others that could come in handy (Windows, Linux…, VMware stuff?) to take my productivity to the stately pleasure dome of uber-productive.

It should be here this week. Given the goings on with exploding batteries and warp factors, I think I’m going to have to stop taking the Tylenol PM, start taking pictures, crack out the thermometer, and add some fact and opinion to the canon of this story: will my new MacBook Pro heat to hot-hot then orange then white-hot, warp, jump to warp speed, split and spray me with battery acid[4], like the Alien queen in Aliens?

Uh, I hope not, because I actually have work to do, and I like my eyes. Stay tuned. We’ll take this one step at a time. I’ll be posting other stories of first-gen Apple woe along the way. tbc.

[1] I’m not saying i’m doing this…
[2] I had probably just finished paying the Apple loan a week or two earlier. HOOT!
[3] It would also be like when Ripley ran into the cyborg in Alien III in the junk yard, and he’s “alive” but all messed up, so he begs her to shut him down, as that would be preferable to just sort of sitting there forever, rusting. That is an android with honor. Bishop, was he?
[4] Note: To my knowledge so far, I don’t think any Apple laptops in the new lines have actually sprayed acid or exploded. They all seem to have gotten the memo leaving that to Dell. For now. But we also know, from experience, that when the machines choose to rise up, they tend to all do so at once.
[5] This assertion is completely non-qualified, but sounds good.