I Want a MacBook Air and I Want it Now
Jun 27th, 2011 by Carlos
The gimmes are back and I’m trying to fight them as hard as I can.
I want one of the new MacBook Airs that haven’t even come out yet. They’re due in July and they will be spectacular.
This happened before: with my current cell phone, buying the Wii, and the laptop I bought less than a year ago.
The weird thing is I just got a laptop a few months ago and it does exactly what I need it to do. I use it mostly to write, browse the Internet, and occasionally upload some files. It’s powerful enough to be used as my main computer if I needed to. It’s perfectly practical.
And I got a great deal on it (it was something like $400 total at the end of it).
But I’m under the Apple magic spell right now.
I want a MacBook Air and I’m being totally irrational about it (except for one thing—I would also learn Macs in the process, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while). I want one because it’s such a sexy machine with incredible engineering and it’s lightweight and….just look at the picture for Christ’s sake.
But how does a person who writes about personal finance handle such an illogical, expensive case of the gimmes?
If I got an email from someone asking for advice, what would I say?
Easy: fight the feeling as much as you can and ask yourself:
- Do you really need this?
- How did you feel the last time you bought something that you obsessed about? Was it worth it?
- Stop thinking about it and move on to something else.
And if you’ve fought it and fought it and still it won’t go away, then set up some kind of a system that will pay for the purchase. That’s how I bought my last desktop computer without any guilt. It took a little longer but it was a great feeling.
How do you do that?
- Sell stuff you don’t need
- Find freelance gigs on Craigslist
- Help someone out with something you’re good at (computers, coding, an instrument, etc.) and charge them
- Work overtime if you have that option
Whatever you have to do to earn the money, do it. It’s not any way to live (in my opinion), but these short bursts of targeted savings are great to absolve yourself of the guilt involved in buying something relatively expensive that you really want.
Back to reality though—it’s me and not a reader going through this.
Giving advice is always easier than heeding it, but I’m going to try to set an example this time around. First I will fight it and if I can’t win that battle I’ll make sure I’m organized about the buy.
Wish me luck.
My deal is that I have been a PC owner since the beginning, but the hardware “planned obsolescence” is becoming more expensive than owning a Mac, and so that is how I am justifying my imminent purchase of the MacBook Air. PC’s are just too expensive to keep anymore. I am a writer. I never move my PC from it’s electrical power source. Still, ever year and a half something breaks and I either have to repair it, at great cost, or go buy a new one. Macintosh computers last forever. So, this purchase will actually be a money-saver in the long run, and I get to learn the Mac world, which I have been wanting to do for years now.