I bought an iBook G4 back in the golden years of undergrad, when THE Ohio State University was paying for me to go to school, and I was rolling in cash. My Mac-enthusiast friend told me, “Katie, Macs are beautiful and smart and wonderful, just like you,” so naturally I had to have one THAT MOMENT.

I marched right down to the Apple store with my best friend–and by marched, I of course mean drove forty-five minutes, because we lived in the country–and bought my iBook right off the shelf. I knew it didn’t come packaged with enough RAM, but I figured one of my genius friends could buy it cheap and install it for me.

Fast forward to 2009, when my Mac is four+ years old and still has the 128MB of RAM it came with. It frequently attempts to commit suicide if I try to start GIMP while running Firefox, and it leaves red marks on my legs from all of its overheating when I’m wearing one of my many leather miniskirts around the house.

But I love it, ’cause it’s white, it has a pink gel keyboard cover, and its icons are so much prettier than Windows icons. That’s right–I love it solely for superficial reasons, and I’m not embarrassed. Everyone tells you that they love their Macs for the video-editing capabilities, for photo manipulation and other bullshit. The truth is that they just look good next to your latté on a table at Starbucks.

When I left for Ohio two weeks ago for my sister’s wedding, I left my iBook on and open at Kamran’s apartment to finish downloading some television. I didn’t think to tell Kam to put it to sleep after a couple of hours or anything, because I was too busy NOT THINKING ABOUT NEW YORK. And then I came back five days later, and it refused to accept my login password.

I politely shut it down by ripping out its power cord, and it in return politely sat at its startup screen for an entire day, its pretty grey apple icon staring me down as it refused to switch over to the login screen. I calmly Googled the hell out of the problem and seriously thought I could solve it myself by booting from an external drive, so I searched eBay for a retail copy of OS X–because apparently the copy that comes with your computer is only good on your computer, and my copy is in a barn on my family’s farm in Ohio along with all the rest of pre-NYC Katie–found out that they cost more than $3, and started asking all the Mac-owning rich people I know if they’d bought the newest version retail and would FedEx it to me from Chicago or Munich.

Finding plenty of evidence that even a boot disc was impossible to make, I ferociously attacked every single person at my software company to ask for help. My dear friend–and obviously favourite co-worker–Jack was all up on having his way with my hard drive to uncover all the things about me that even Kamran doesn’t know, claiming that he could fire up some magic Linux disc that can cure world hunger along with reading burnt hard drives. He even bought a miniature hard drive enclosure just so he could extract my drive and hook it up to another computer if needed. He was nearly foaming at the mouth in anticipation of the geekery, and I was all for it, ’cause four years of writing and photos were at stake.

So I brought the iBook into work this morning, and Jack hauled it back to his desk in his greasy paws, expecting a huge ordeal that would end in one of us sobbing. But a few minutes later, he IMed me and asked for my password. Pardon?

He brought it back to my desk and restarted it, and after two seconds of the grey apple screen, the login screen popped up, and everything was completely normal. Only a day earlier, I’d been pricing Dells and consoling myself with the idea of a pink Inspiron Mini 9, but as soon as my iBook was up and working again, all I could think about was how wonderfully elite I am for owning one.

So I guess that sure, not knowing a damned thing about how your computer works means that you don’t know a bit about fixing it, but spending an extra $1,000 is totally worth it to be able to use the phrase mount a disk image. And speaking of mounting, I asked my friend Aaron to send me some amazing photos that demonstrate his love for his Mac. And boy, did he deliver:

Aaron calls this The I-Woke-Up-And-Didn’t-Put-Makeup-On-To-Show-My-Love-For-You-And-Oh-Look-I’m-Wearing-An-iPhone-Shirt.

And this is The Come-To-Bed-Baby-I’m-Not-Wearing-Any-Pants, or as I like to call it, My ARMS Are Fatter Than This.

When I checked to make sure I could use the photos for my evil-doing, he said, “Those legs need to be SEEN to be BELIEVED.” And how.

Now if that doesn’t make you want to buy a Mac, I don’t know what will.