I Now Know How Old People Feel

I mean, irrespective of the obvious fact that I AM old.

My current laptop is going on damn near 8 years old, and it just can't run anything more demanding than Minesweeper. Not that that would usually be a problem, because Minesweeper is the best game ever invented, but the last time I went out of town on business, I couldn't get anything done because everything ran so slow. So this past Black Friday, I ordered a new laptop from Newegg. It was originally $749 with a $100 discount and a 10% Bing Cashback special, for a total of $585. And no interest for 6 months with my preferred account. Cool.

Just one problem though--nobody ever bothered to deliver it, unless the driver's Dec. 1 shift has lasted 23 days:

I think that "Brown" is exactly the right color to characterize UPS service.

I couldn't get another machine shipped to me because they were out of stock, and so I was just refunded the total and that was that. At that point, what I should have done was thank my lucky stars that I wasn't going to have to spend that much money after all. Only problem is, when you spend two weeks thinking you're going to get something, you'd better get SOMETHING. I mean, I had even ordered a laptop case.

So I went on the lookout for a replacement, and predictably couldn't find anything comparable for the same price--we're talking $800 territory here. I thought, for that kind of money, I'll pay a little extra and get a MacBook just so I could learn OS X. You can run Windows on them anyway, so it's not like there's a disadvantage besides knowing that you're paying like twice as much for generic internal hardware. But I digress.

I ended up buying the aluminum MacBook Pro (2 year financing FTW). It was more than a "little" extra, but I digress again. I will say this for Macs...they are GORGEOUS and built more solidly than the creaky plasticky PC laptops of yesteryear.

But poking around in OS X, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. Sometimes I spend like a minute just staring blankly at the thing. Where is the "maximize window" button? How can I tell how many separate Safari windows (not tabs) are open? How come when I click "X" sometimes it closes the program and sometimes it doesn't? I'm going to have a little more sympathy for old people trying to use computers from now on, methinks.