I’ve talked about this off and on to [Shawn Blanc on listeners of the B&B Podcast](http://5by5.tv/bb/65), but I thought I would write up my recent experience here — should one of you find yourself to be this foolish with computer buying at any point, ever.
### The Story
On Friday June 8th, 2012 my MacBook Air started acting up. In fact, it would later turn out, the logic board was shorting out. I noticed it when I went to put away my Air in my backpack before heading to work. A quick troubleshooting at the office and a genius appointment later, I found myself without a Mac — until Tuesday at the latest, I was told at the time.
That’s OK, it was the weekend and then 1-2 days of iPad only, I would be fine. It’s not ideal, but I can make that work — I’ve done it before for a day here or there.
Sunday night I received a call from the Apple Store, bad news, they needed to ship out my MacBook Air to “the depot” for repairs — that’ll be 5-7 days starting now. *Crap.*
Since WWDC was the next day, I decided that it was time to get a new machine — that should something awesome be announced, that would be what I get — I resolved myself to getting something new to replace/compliment the Air. I just needed it to be under $3,000.
After the WWDC keynote my plans were further complicated. The retina MacBook Pro was announced and it looked perfect for me, but you could only order them online. I still needed a computer for what could be 7 days worth of work — 7 days that I now realized I did *not* want to do with only an iPad.
So I order the retina MacBook Pro, then drove to the Apple Store and purchased a Mac mini. I’ve [already posted about why I didn’t like that Mac mini](http://brooksreview.net/2012/06/mac-mini/), but there’s more to the story.
My entire idea was that I could restore the Mac mini from a backup overnight, be up and running Tuesday, for the rest of the week. No problem.
I spent all day Tuesday watching Time Machine and Migration Assistant fail to restore from my Time Capsule and from a cloned HDD. Ugh. Finally, Wednesday afternoon, I was up and running.
*(As it turns out, the issue was that I had Mountain Lion backups from the Air, and was trying to restore from that on a Lion machine — OS X doesn’t like that.)*
I used the machine happily Thursday morning, then got a call from Apple: my MacBook Air was ready for pickup.
So I purchased a Mac mini to make my life easier for a week, only to waste a day and a half setting it up, to make my life easier for 4 hours of work.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I figured my Air would be out all week — and had it been, I probably would be less embarrassed about this story, but Apple under promised and over delivered. Lesson learned.
### Why iPad Only Didn’t Work
There’s something interesting that I learned about myself along the way. There are two main reasons I didn’t want to be iPad only all week:
1. With Shawn down at WWDC with no Mac, I needed to be able to record the B&B Podcast with him — I knew I needed a Mac for that. And I didn’t want to have to push around the show. (I did get my Air back just before we recorded.)
2. I really didn’t like the idea of being iPad only for a week.
The first one is hard to get around (aside from borrowing a Mac and installing needed software), but the second really seems silly to me. I *can* and *am able to* do all of my work on the iPad, but I was terrified at the prospect of doing that for a week.
Again: I can work productively on my iPad for both this site and my day job, with no problems.
When I travel I typically only take the iPad, unless I know I need a Mac for a specific something, so this wasn’t an unproven theory. The idea of a week going iPad only was something I simply wasn’t willing to do, and I think I know why: there’s a stigma that I perceive to be attached to the iPad.
I work in an office, like a real office with older people, and I think that they view the iPad as a toy and not a work machine. I think they view the iPad as something for consumption, not creation. Who knows how they actually view it — this is how *I* think they view it. And that mattered more to me than I thought it would.
So only using an iPad for a week, well, I was worried that everyone would assume that I really wasn’t working. Turns out that in my effort to appear to be productive to others, I ended up being far less productive than I would have if I would have just used the iPad. Lesson learned.