(This is the fourth of a nine part, self-indulgent series about me and Apple Macs. The previous parts can be found here: 1, 2, 3. Strap in, and please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. You’ve been warned.)
Oh dear. Of all the whims upon which I’ve acted, of all the snap decisions I’ve ever made, this has to be the most ridiculous. And expensive. Yes, definitely the most expensive.
Allow me to set the scene. It’s the middle of June, 2007. Kath and I were no more than two weeks married. We were on honeymoon in Hawaii, on Oahu. It was bliss. The honeymoon plan was to spend a week in Oahu at the Halekulani, fly to Maui for a week at the Hyatt Regency, then home via San Francisco, with three nights at the Ritz-Carlton. The hotel details are unimportant; I just enjoy reminiscing about magical times and places (like Tahiti). Hey, it’s my blog, so you can suffer my indulgences. We’d planned out a number of things to do in Hawaii: bus tours around the islands, renting a car (a hot-dang Mustang) in Maui to drive the Hana Highway, cycling down a volcano, but had failed to book anything in San Francisco. Hearing on the grapevine that tickets to Alcatraz weren’t available to walk-up customers, only via pre-booking, we suddenly got worried as hey, you can’t visit San Francisco without seeing the island that Connery and Cage rescued from the villainous Ed Harris.
Having an irrational fear of speaking to anyone on the phone, I decided the best course of action wasn’t to simply call up the Alcatraz ticket office and book us a couple of tix, but to put to use the gadgetry I had at my disposal to procure us access via the internet. My travel bag of electronic wizardry on that trip consisted not of a cumbersome old laptop, but my new shiny toy: a Nokia N800. This Linux-powered, WiFi-enabled little gizmo was my portable internet access device in the days before I acquired my first iPhone (the iPhone 3G, a year later, would be my first iPhone – at the time of our honeymoon, the original iPhone wasn’t yet released even in the US, and was still months away from a UK release – and my phone at that time was, I think, a Sony Ericsson W850i. Nice phone, for the time.)
So having fired up the N800 and hopped on to the free hotel WiFi (the cost of which was a novelty then, as it still is now), I seamlessly browsed to the Alcatraz website using the slick, fully-featured browser. No, wait, scratch that: I slowly and painfully crawled across the internet to the Alcatraz website using a feature-free and barely functional web browser. Oh my word. The experience was terrible. Sure, I’d tested out the N800’s browser at home, doing rudimentary Google searches, checking the whether, or browsing BBC News, but I’d not used it in anger to, say, book tickets on a not-optimised-for-mobile website. That was probably the main problem with the whole shebang: back in 2007, before iPhones were a thing, and whilst iPads were still a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye, the concept of having a mobile-friendly website (read: a website that’s in any shape, way or form readable at 800×600 or less) was virtually non-existent. Even when the iPhone was released, many, many websites were still only desktop-friendly: hark back to Steve Jobs’ introduction of Safari in the original iPhone reveal keynote, where he revelled in the then-new concept of double-tapping on a section of content in a webpage to zoom in on only that part. This is common UI paradigm nowadays, and a helpful gesture for websites that don’t have a bespoke, small-screen version (or a responsive design), which, back in 2007, was all of the goddamned websites. The browser app in Maemo (the operating system that the N800 ran) had no such niceties and shortcuts – it was clunky, navigable only via scrollbars (no inertial flicks or pinch-to-zoom), and – possibly worst of all – very, very buggy. No amount of tapping and scrolling and cursing and sobbing could persuade the N800’s browser app to play consistently nicely with the Alcatraz website – sometimes I couldn’t navigate the dropdown menus on the site, other times I couldn’t select the day I wanted to purchase tickets for from the website’s calendar widget, and finally, having once navigated all that palaver, persuading the payment form to submit my order was step too far. The browser crashed one too many times. I needed a plan B.
Plan B involved a short walk to the Ala Moana Shopping Center, specifically the Apple Store within, to throw down a not-insignificant amount of money on a frankly-unnecessary laptop. Yup, I was enough of a grade A douche nozzle that I thought dropping nearly 10 Benjamins to solve a (non-)problem (that could otherwise have been sorted with a simple phone call) was the right thing to do. Wow. Grade. A. So that’s what we did. A couple of hours later, we were back in the hotel room, hooked up to the hotel WiFi, ordering Alcatraz tickets on an entry level, 13″ MacBook (Mid 2007) in white, glossy, polycarbonate. The specs were instantly forgettable: 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1 GB of RAM, 80 GB hard drive1. But it did the job.
As it transpired, what started out as the ultimate in frivolous purchases quickly became my go-to machine when we returned home2. Sure, the iMac was bigger and a touch beefier, but the MacBook was super-portable, and there’s just something downright appealing about laptops as opposed to desktop machines. My only regret, in the longer term, about this MacBook was its finish – Apple also released a black matte MacBook alongside the white gloss version, which was a much more attractive finish. Surely it would be irresponsible of me to ditch the white MacBook within a year, and replace it with the black one, right? Right?
What Did You Do, Ray? 
One thought on “Macs and Me: Part 4 – MacBook 13″, White (2007)”