Ironically, one of the best things that happened to me this year was my MacBook drowning in a cup of coffee. Totally my fault, but the broken arrow key that followed wasn’t. It turns out the official service center won’t replace a single key, they’d only do a full $2,000 logic‑board repair. Well, fuck Apple.
I found a local unofficial shop and fixed it for a fraction of the price, but the whole mess left me thinking: with a MacBook, I’m not really in control of my own hardware, or software.
A couple of days later, I decided I shouldn’t encourage that kind of behavior. It was time for a better laptop. In fact, more conscious consumption was one of my main themes for 2019. When we tolerate crap in the products we buy, we signal to our peers that it’s okay, and we tell companies they can get away with shady practices, like treating every piece of software as a data‑harvesting tool until proven otherwise.
I settled on a Dell XPS 13 and have been using it exclusively since the summer of 2019. That means Linux, so I’m finally Apple‑free.