A coffee mug is settled on my desk. It is mostly empty, except for a tea bag and tea-like liquid, both uncomfortably on the closer end of room temperature. The tea bag actually contains no tea leaves; it's nothing but random herbs thrown together with the aim of providing taste and no caffeine. I'm living a lie. A non-tea tea from a coffee cup. There's something wrong with me.

I even bought a Mac just so I could install Windows on it.

Seriously, what is wrong with me?

Those things aren't cheap. They look pretty, though. Since I now own one, I can show up in any coffee shop and pretend to be working on my novel/screenplay. From what I gather, I get bonus points if I wear a black turtleneck. However, I'm unconvinced; it wouldn't surprise me if all of the real hardcore users wore suits just to throw off everyone else. De-establish the reestablishing unestablished establishment. If iProducts are mainstream, how can all of the counter-culture folks pretend to be anything else? Poor kids have been out of it for so long, they don't know anything else.

I was initially really confused by the madness brought out by “tablets”, currently defined as ipad and its ilk (touch screen laptops have been around for years; those are different, as they're typically using real components… albeit underpowered from what I've seen; still better that a glorified mobile phone). My problem was that I assumed you'd actually want it to be a computer. Something general purpose in the traditional sense. The light went off when I realized you could use an ipad as a remote. It's so pretty! Colors! And it moves around when you do stuff! Neat! Basically, it seems useful for being a mobile phone, but a larger screen. That's nice, except if it wasn't for work I don't think I'd even have one of those.

Now a computer? Well, yeah, I'm biased, but I don't see myself without one of those (or a half dozen). Programming on anything less than dual screens (with a primary screen at least at 1680×1050) seems like cruel and unusual punishment these days. Gaming is an obvious one. Sorry, tablets just don't have the horses to pull that off, although I'm sure they're great for solitaire. Writing is another huge one; small laptop keyboards are bad enough. I'm sure there's an iKeyboard or whatever, but knowing the parent company it's probably undersized and annoying (defend them if you want, but any hardware company toting their designs that can't build a decent mouse has limited sway in functional design in my book).

I do worry that gamer/programmer will become a niche category. I'd rather hate to see anemic computing devices become the de facto standard.

My cup is now empty. I suppose I've at least temporarily sated my hunger as well by taking a bite of a low hanging apple.