I got a new laptop at work today. My 3 year-old one, which is about 105 in laptop years, has had more replacement parts than Joan Rivers and is not worth repairing any longer. The keyboard has loosened itself from its underpinnings, making typing anything in the upper right hand portion of the keys an exercise in frustration. The cursor will occasionally get lost and wander aimlessly around the screen, not paying any attention to my tapping vigorously on the touchpad. The latch is broken and won’t keep the laptop closed without the help of duct tape, opening up at random times, draining the battery unexpectedly. The machine itself has the attention span of a gnat with ADD on speed, getting bored with the tasks I entreat it to do, choosing to sleep instead. Maybe I was wrong – it’s not geriatric, it’s a teenager.

The new model is smaller, lighter weight, and allegedly faster. It has an external CD/DVD drive rather than having one built-in, but that’s a small price to pay for having a functioning whole rather than a set of loosely linked pieces. There is much software and data still to be loaded and I’ll have to learn its quirks (god forbid that a machine actually adapt to a user), but it does smell oh-so-new.