The damn thing just blew up. Mere hours after my last post went live … the damn thing blew up on me. Working one second like a champ, black as its innards the next.

My timing sucks.

I spent more than three hours waiting at an Apple store the other day — that’s three hours during which, as a freelancer, you’re not making any dough — just so a “genius” could tell me that my once-beloved laptop is going to cost at least $475 to fix. It’s a dilemma for the 21st century: Pay the money to fix a 6-year-old laptop that, very possibly, might be on its last little stubby pads whether you pay the money or not; or buy a new one. My god, I’d rather stick a motherboard down my throat.

I’ve spent much of the last couple days looking at different laptops, stunned at their prices, trying to determine:

• how much memory I need
• how much money I need
• how much storage
• whether I want a touch screen or not
• 4K? Really?
• the mysteries of quad core processors, and how much better eighth generation Intel chips are than seventh generation ones
• what’s wrong with older generations?
• what a “core” is
• Mac OS vs. Windows
• battery life
• Yoga?
• whether it’s smart to buy now or wait until the new Macs come out later this year …
• … if they come out this year
• whether I have a choice or not
• cost … did I mention cost?

Remember in the old days when we used to get excited by big-ticket purchases like this? I think it was probably my second flat-screen TV, or my third phone, or shortly after we bought the now long-dormant iPad, that I came to the conclusion that, in the end, it’s always a letdown. As much as I loved that treacherous Air up there (^), in the end it was its reliability and its simplicity that I really admired. And then … poof. Or, I think, it was closer to a bzzzzt before it went to the big Apple junkyard.

That’s the thing with all these electronics. They’ll let you down, eventually. They tempt you with promises of a better, cooler life, often end up disappointing you and, finally, always leave you.

Yet, still, we go back for more. It’s the Lenova Yoga or a Dell XPS or maybe a MacBook Pro. But I need something. That Great American Novel is not going to get done on a yellow legal pad. Not with my handwriting.

Oy. As Mary Jo and I often say: “It’s always something.”

[written on my son’s mostly discarded 8-year-old MacBook Pro that, I’m sure, is going to go keys down any minute now]