Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words
they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the
prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game
for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand
them over the net. They love words that give them a hard
time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their
attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small,
compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short
words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children.
We have a lot in common.
If you ask Ess to say “snake” she’ll say “tank”. She usually drops the sibilant “S” sound at the beginning of words; if we really try to get her to say it, she’ll go with the “sh” phoneme.
If you ask her to say “Sammy the Snake” you get “Hammy the Tank”.
Also, she put six wooden people in her diaper and when Mykala asked what was going on, Ess was very honest: “…some people in there.” The people got a thorough cleaning and a few days off on the countertop. No further uses of diaper-as-pockets have been observed. Maybe a Bill Cunningham-esque French workman’s jackets — the kind with all the pockets — would be good for Ess. Lots to carry as a toddler.
A few nights ago, Mykala drove us around to look at Christmas lights. Ess sang Christmas songs in the back. She took off her boots and then her socks, like she always does. Then she told us about how one of her feet was cold:
“Mama foot cold. Mama foot not under the blanket. Mama foot is cold.”
“Ess, did you take off your boot?”
*30 seconds of silence*
This kind of straightforward holiday outing, to go see the lights, is so much more special when you are with someone who is experiencing it for the first season of their life. You feel more hopeful when you see this little person experiencing so much wonder and novelty and joy at the same time.
In the past eight years, I’ve done everything on my MacBook: finished school, wrote tons of code. Lots of graphics work in Photoshop; audio and video editing. I store over 40,000 scanned papers, notes, and textbooks from dental school, in addition to all of my videos, movies, music, and photos. It is my only machine.
This MacBook is great.
I understand my computer won’t live forever so, over the past year, I have closely watched the new MacBooks Pro go from rumored, to announced, to reviewed, to widely available. I have seen critiques of battery life, gratuitous thinness, port elimination, and memory maximums, and it is safe to say the general mood seems a bit less, uh, positive than I expected. John Gruber astutely picked up on this with his made-you-look post, which taught me to expect catastrophizing around any new MacBooks.
But here’s my point: only one article in the months and months of MacBook Pro coverage I’ve seen has picked up on an undercurrent. Only one piece has gotten at the heart of these complaints. You see, there is one theme behind the criticism of the new MacBook Pro, and I don’t think many of those who are complaining even realize what it is: money. That was what Vlad Savov at The Verge focused on here: The future of PCs and Macs is expensive.
Vanishingly few of the concerns above can not be addressed with money. Battery life? Buy a new computer as soon as processor improvements allow improved battery life. Fewer/different ports? Buy what you need to connect your new computer. RAM limitations? Buy a workstation. Buy buy buy.
Thing is, I find myself siding with the critiques more than the endorsements. In an attempt to clear up my unsettled feelings, I decided to take my emotions out and replace them with numbers: dollar amounts for what it used to cost to own a MacBook workhorse and what it will cost in the future.
MacBook, 2008
I tallied the initial cost of my beloved MacBook, then I added in all the power bricks, hard drives, RAM, and OS upgrades I’ve made to my MacBook since I purchased it:
01/2009 $1300 Purchased
01/2010 $44.99 5400RPM 250GB HD
01/2011 $95 8GB RAM upgrade
10/2011 $79 Apple charger
07/2012 $21.54 OS X 10.8
09/2012 $99 Apple battery
10/2012 $169.99 256GB 830 SSD
10/2015 $99 NuPower Battery
03/2016 $160.68 500GB 850 SSD
04/2016 $79 Apple charger
================================
01/2017 $2148.2 Total for 8 yrs
That’s every penny I’ve spent to purchase and then keep this thing running for eight years. That comes out to $22.38 per month. Remember that number.
Now, let’s buy a new MacBook Pro!
MacBook Pro, 2016
A 13" screen makes sense, I have one of those. 16 GB of RAM — I want to future-proof this as much as possible. A 500 GBSSD hard drive because that’s what I have right now. Touch ID on the Touch Bar, because I’m increasingly storing my entire life on my machine and Touch ID makes securing all this easy. Ok, so that comes to $2,355 (with tax) for a replacement MacBook Pro.
Hey! That’s not bad, all I have to do is get eight years out of that hardware. And you know what? Given how much processor advances have slowed, how amazing that screen is: I think that is doable. Except, well, two things: battery and storage.
How do you feel about spudgering out a glued-in battery after it dies (generally after about 1,300 load cycles, as I have needed two new batteries in my current 2008 MacBook). Well, I’ve opened up my share of iPhones and replaced batteries and screens, but even I don’t like that idea! Ok, pay Apple to do it. Battery costs for two replacements over eight years: $400. And you better hope that, after five years, when Apple declares your machine vintage and drops support for battery replacement, that you can pay a third party to do it. Cross your fingers they don’t bump the logic board, because everything is soldered on. Which brings me to my next point:
iPhones generate enormous amounts of data to which I have an intense emotional attachment. I’m referring, of course, to pictures and videos of my daughter. You really think that one soldered-in 500 GB hard drive is going to be able to store all the pictures and videos an iPhone 7 (shooting 4K?!) will throw at it for eight years?
This returns us to my thesis: owning these computers is becoming more expensive. I am going to set aside my ideology, my past experience of always upgrading all my computers, and accept this: admission to the Apple garden requires I give up my ability to upgrade. Taking that as fact, I will need a place to store many many gigs of videos, photos, and music.
What do you do when you run out of space on your laptop and you can’t upgrade it? You move to iTunes Match at $25/year and Photos storage to the cloud for about $240 a year. (A note on network attached storage: it is great for Plex streaming, mediocre for iTunes, and apparently borderline impossible for storing your macOS Photos library. You can buy a Mac mini and attach a storage array to it. This is not cheap. So, as much as I am loathe to state it this way, it really is all or nothing: all the benefits (and costs) of Apple, or none. Or, stop taking adorable videos of my daughter.)
$2355 Purchase MacBook Pro
$400 Two battery replacements
$1920 iCloud photo/video storage
$200 iTunes Match
==================================
$4875 Total for 8 years
So this is what it looks like to be all-in on Apple: I can’t upgrade the storage on my device and so am faced with a choice. Do I give up all the conveniences of integration between devices using Messages, Photos, and iTunes and in exchange spend days of time to set up a real RAID 6 NAS with essentially unlimited storage? Or do I just pay more?
I still don’t know the answer to that question.
Monthly Cost of Ownership
2008 MacBook: $22.38 per month ($2,148.20 for 8 years)
2016 MacBook: $50.78 per month ($4,875 for 8 years)
This morning I watched big big snowflakes fall down outside my office window, then float up when they came close to the building, then fall down again. I walked the skyways to the bank and stood over South 8th Street, watching the same thing, transfixed. I wasn’t fixated on avoiding any thoughts or solving any problems. I had no breakthroughs about my life. But I thought I wouldn’t mind sharing peace like this with my daughter.
Ess likes to watch a movie called Curious George Swings into Spring, but she asks for it by saying something like “watch… maow… ping… and balloons UP and UP” or some other kind of variation on her summary of the plot. To translate: her stuffed monkey’s name is Marge, nicknamed Mow, so monkeys get called Mows; there are hot air balloons in the movie in many shapes, and sometimes we have only the barest hint of a guess which movie she’s referring to. There’s also ‘Crinkas Pooh’ (Christmas Pooh), ‘Pump pump Mow’ (Curious George: A Halloween Boo Fest), and ‘Ringinal Pooh’ (The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which we sometimes call Original Pooh).
Anyway, there’s a part in Curious George Swings into Spring with a big musical number about wiener dogs and Ess LOVES to clap along. She holds up a duck or a cow to us, and then that’s our dance partner for the song. She gets so excited that she starts doing rollicking little skip-hops around the floor, kicking one leg forward as she jumps off her back leg, going back and forth like a rocking horse. Sometimes we start the movie and forget the song is coming, and Ess will rush in, clapping. If I’m really missing out, I’ll hear a little voice from the next room: “Clap peez, Dada. Clap peez, Dada.” On my way, little Ess.
Ess uses precisely the same tone of voice when peril is imagined or real. It is a perfect mimc of the higher-register you would use if you were reading a book to a two-year-old and conveying that someone is in trouble, but ultimately will be just fine. You know, low-budget playacting. Also:
“Help, help, Mama Meow! Help!”
These are the names Ess has for us. They’re also our Halloween costumes she has picked out for us. She is thinking of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, where Katerina Kitty Cat is a dancing cat who wears a tutu, her mom is a cat too, and X the Owl is O the Owl’s uncle.
So, imagined or real peril. If Ess is climbing the piano (no) and reaching for something out of reach (no), and can’t quite do it and might fall (nonono), you’ll hear her go “Help, help, Dada Owl! Help!” And it is crazy, because the inflection is PRECISELY the same she uses when she takes her tiny Essie-sized fork and perches it precariously on the edge of her high chair tray, and then plays from the perspective of the fork: “Help, help, Mama Fork! Help!” If you close your eyes, they sound exactly the same.
So, if I hear Ess go “Help, help, Dada Owl! Help!”, you better bet I’m running as fast as I can to get in there before someone sustains an injury, real or imaginary.
hot-dong — carefiff dogs made by Mykala by marinating carrots, served on a bun; (they are DELICIOUS)
frawberry — the fruit or her strawberry-flavored toothpaste
bunny noonas — Annie’s Mac & Cheese, which has noodles shaped like bunnies… pretty much any noodle covered in a yellow sauce will do (dairy or non, big noodle or small). Recently, Mykala got a box of Annie’s Mac & Cheese and one of the shapes is trees: so you have to be ready to fulfill the TREENOONA, NOMAMACOOK-UP. NO, MAMA request.
And then there’s Friend, which is the name of a little Playmobil character, about two inches tall, who wears a green cardigan.
Friend doesn’t follow Ess around the way her stuffed monkey Marge does, but it is such a generic but also intimate, charming name for a figure, that we always find ourself smiling if Friend is being tucked in, or going to visit other animals in Essie’s world.
