Every time I boot up either one of my Dell laptops, I think about the first time I powered up my Apple iBook. It was a couple of years ago, but I remember it like yesterday. The sleekness of the body and the simplicity of the design made my eyes dilate with desire. Not sexual desire, but the type of desire and excitement you experience when you see a high end sports car or the moment you taste a fine cheese or wine. You know, the kind of feeling that only the finer things in life can elicit. That to me is my iBook when I used it.

My wife has been using it for a couple of years now and I only have the opportunity to use it once in a while. She doesn’t like when technology refuses to work, so it was a natural fit to pass my iBook on to her. That is what you do for the people and things that you love. You do what is best for them. There are many things that my wife is not aware of that the iBook can do, but I don’t feel like there is lost potential in this… There are also a great deal of mundane things that it does which she is not aware of either and I feel that is where the beauty of the design shows itself the most. My wife doesn’t have to be a technophile or understand what a registry is and why it has rotted. She just opens and closes the lid to use the iBook at her whim.

My iBook is aging now, it has scratches, a failing battery, and a new hard drive. There are the newer Intel MacBook models that are forcing it into obsolescence and one day it will be nothing more than a paperweight. Until that day comes it will remain a classy and sleek design that refuses to force the end user to think, like the body doesn’t force us to remember to breath.