Nothing I Really Want

Living in a major city means people are constantly targeting you with advertising. When you walk down the street, people offer you flyers which you can either take out of pity and then throw away at your earliest convenience or they offer you tissues with ads stuck in them which you take because they're actually useful. That being said, people who offer tissue packets as a way of advertising will sometimes not offer them to foreigners. I'm not sure if they do this because they think we can't read the advertising or if they think we're like wild bears that might bite off the entire hand if offered a treat.

One of the other types of advertising is ads for various services crammed in your mailbox. Most of them are a collection of papers hawking (legit) massage places, gyms, cleaning services, offers to haul away unwanted items for a fee and menus from local restaurants. More often than not, I put the whole sheaf into the paper recycling bin, but occasionally, I check the menus out.

The problem with the menus are that the food that is offered is pretty much the same old thing with the occasional modest variation or seasonal add. The bento, sushi, and Chinese shops rarely vary their offers and everything is over-priced and not of particularly great quality. The pizza places are also pretty much the same old stuff with one or another disgusting new combination pizza being offered on the front of the new menu. Even if I don't feel like cooking or am so tired of my own cooking style that I don't want to eat it, the monotony of what is on the menus with so few variations bores me back into the kitchen to just do something myself.

Screenshot from the Mac Buyer's Guide

The experience of looking at the menu and not finding anything I really want is one that came to mind today when Apple released new notebooks. I've been waiting for a long overdue update on a low end (headless - that is, no built-in display) desktop model for a bit now. In fact, Apple hasn't released a new Mini for around 14 months. Instead of offering something new that I'd happily hand over the cash for right now, they offered moderately altered notebook models with slightly better specs, a new trackpad, and a new design. Now, MacBooks look like my husband's $800 Acer Aspire (silver case, black keys, glass screen). Woo-frigging-hoo. Notebook Macs were updated 8 months ago so I can't understand why they prioritized this over something which hasn't been refreshed in such a long time. If the comments on Lifehacker and Engadget are any indication, I'm not the only one who is less than thrilled by the new announcements.

Apple is very much like the local restaurants. I want to buy, but they keep offering the same thing which I'm not really interested in. I'll just get by with what I already have until Apple decides it wants my money badly enough to expand its menu.