Shock of the New

Do you lust after the latest and greatest gadget, even if you're not quite sure what it even does or how you're going to use it? While all companies use our instinctive desire for new product against us, it seems that one, Apple , has elevated this ability to push our "new product" buttons to an artform. iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air, AppleTV, it seems that if it has randomly placed capital letters in it, we want it. And if you're like me, you probably don't spare a thought as to why.

Personally I like to think that we are closer to our monkey cousins than we want to admit. In monkey form the desire to acquire spurred fruit picking, which resulted in a well fed monkey. Standing in the glittering environment of, say, an Apple store our poor monkey brain is overcome with the instinct to pick. And so we end up staggering home burdened with more tech than NASA saw fit to embed into the space shuttle.

The benefit of this instinctive gathering is obvious to Apple as seen in their burgeoning cash pile and record sales and profits, but what do we get from it apart from wallet strain? Well gorgeous pieces of industrial design, obviously, but in many ways my MacBook Pro is already faster than I need for nearly all my day to day computing needs, my old phone still manages to connect me to anyone whose phone number I know and I CN EVN TXT 2 HWEVR I WNT.

So am I going to continue to fall for this consumer pressure to buy more and newer kit? Can I transcend my origins and overcome my inner monkey.

Of course I can. Luckily I am one of the few that actually have a real need for an iPhone. I can't actually continue to work without a MacBook Air and my old iPod no longer goes with my jacket. All good solid reasons for buying new kit.

See you in the nearest Apple store.

Welcome to the Doctor Happy Mac blog

Welcome to the Doctor Happy Mac blog. The interactive companion to the new Doctor Happy Mac website. This blog is designed to give me a space to chat about my life as an itinerant Mac support specialist. Going out and about, meeting people and seeing how and why they choose and use their Mac computers (and iPhones and iPods etc) means that I often come across items and thoughts that I consider interesting, and hopefully by reading this you may find them to be so too. While I certainly expect that most of the content on here will be in some way Mac related, I hope that you will bear with me if I dive off at a tangent from time to time as the mood takes me. After all, there is more to life than just Macs, isn't there?

In tandem with this blog I'm going to make an effort to keep up to date with interesting Apple news via the rss news feed on my new site. Feel free to visit and subscribe to the news feed.

As a first post I'd just like to get a few thank you's out of the way. Firstly, thank you to all the Doctor Happy Mac early adopters. I'm glad you found me. I'm happy I was able to help you and I look forward to standing by your Macs for many years. Secondly a big DHM "yay!" to Tom Wright, who bashed the new DHM website together in jig time and provides the back end cms that allows me to spend my time fixing Macs rather than learning how to code. If you want to look Tom up (web guru, tech genius and committed tidal bore surfer), visit him at www.severnsolutions.co.uk. A more widely interested person you could not hope to meet.

Ok. Blog one over, see you all tomorrow. Same Bat time, same Bat channel.