Watching my Aluminum G4 PowerBook age has not been easy. It's about 4.5 years old now and it looks pretty rough. My 15 month old yanked on the power cord and ruined two AC adapters. My 2.5yr old pulled a number of keys off the keyboard. The battery failed completely about a year ago and I haven't felt like replacing it. Again.
Still, it's a workhorse of a machine. I've got it on a desk now where it's hard to bump the AC adapter and cause an immediate shutdown. It's connected to an external monitor and keyboard to get around the missing keys. It's running Leopard and it's serving up web pages now so I can learn about developing FaceBook applications. It's pulling files off my Tivo and serving up home movies I edited with Final Cut back to the same Tivo downstairs.
Meanwhile the Dell they gave me at work is only 2 years old and has already had the main board replaed twice and still can't handle having 2 monitors hooked up without severe flakiness. That and I just hate using XP. Maybe the IT guys would let me install Ubuntu on it... not likely.
If times were better and I was raking in bonuses / raises and wasn't so concerned for my financial future I'd probably just replace it. Given all that's going on, though, it seems prudent not to. Now take that scenario and apply it to home stereos, HDTVs, cars, boats, luxury goods etc... and you can see why recessions feed on themselves and how depressions spiral in like hurricanes.
The Case for (Human) Life on Mars
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