in about 45 minutes i’m going to tie off one more loose end of my being shitcanned, which is to ship my work laptop back to wherever laptops go. this was very important to my former company, who sent me an email immediately after telling me I was out to thank me for my service to the company lol jk to let me know that instructions were forthcoming for sending my equipment back.

I should be more upset at the utter disregard for my humanity in their priorities, and the way I was dropped like a sack of potatoes without warning, but truth be told i’m mostly sad right now that I can’t use this computer anymore. it was a big part of the reason I was happy to be working there in the first place.

In 2020 Apple announced a processor architecture migration away from intel and toward their own chips, similar to the ones in iPhones and iPads. Having spent a decade figuring out how to wring performance out of mobile devices with small batteries, the Mac chips were stupid good, a generational leap in power and, more interestingly, thermals. laptops are supposed to make noise and get hot when they’re working hard, but phones and tablets don’t, and neither did these new Macs. some of them didn’t even have fans, some of them did but just never used them.

The MacBook Pro announced in 2021 came with this new architecture, plus it reversed half a decade’s worth of stupid decisions around ports, keyboards, and size to deliver a beefy monster that you could hook anything up to. I watched the announcement event on my phone while driving around a church parking lot with a sleeping infant in the backseat. I wanted one of these things, and then when I got a new job I got one.

You know when you anticipate getting something a long time and then it turns out the waiting was more fun than the having? and then you know the other times when it is actually fucking kickass to have the thing? That’s what this was. I went a little nutty and bought some ludicrously expensive monitors and crafted a desktop setup that I don’t think additional money could have improved. it was perfect.

As I type this, that poor Mac is sitting in its box, saying Hello in every language it knows for its next owner, hopefully someone on my former team that is still stuck on an intel machine. I’m using a different computer, an Intel MacBook that another company I worked for forgot to ask for back, to look for a job that might reunite me with an old friend. the only noise in the room right now is my fingers on the keyboard, and a FUCKING LAPTOP FAN