I finally got my first MacBook
Since I started freelancing simple web pages and graphic designs I always wanted to have a MacBook. For many in first-world countries having a mac doesn’t seem like a great thing or something. But here in Argentina, apple products are considerably more expensive than in the rest of the world. You can check for yourself:
- Argentina is the Region’s Most Expensive Place to Buy Tech
- In Argentina, an iPhone Costs 150% More than It Does in the US
For me, that meant that to buy a 3 old-year-old MacBook pro of 13′, I would have to work a full year without wasting a penny to buy one of those. You can guess that I wasn’t making a lot of money for a long time. But I also remember that I was earning the average Argentinian salary for a recently graduated Software Engineer. Which was half of what the average truck driver earns.
But even before working with other engineers, I had an even worst manual job where I printed bags. It was a very physically exhausting job for my arms if I did that for more than 7hs straight. But, the good thing is that I was able to see a lot of youtube videos while doing that because I only had to do very mechanical repetitive moves.
My favorite videos were the DEF CON hacking conference videos. Most of the time they presented very simple hacking solutions I was able to understand. I was amazed at how simple or unsophisticated hacking can be.
In those conferences, most guys make their presentations using their macs, so I got always exposed to the apple logo as a tag for developers. Most cool developers presenting their findings/projects always do that using a mac. But that was an impossible dream, I was also working on my own apps, and running a relational DB would consume all my monthly earnings just in AWS expenses.
Things also got worse with time, not only I didn’t get any more bag jobs or twitter jobs. Apparently, Twitter started to get very competitive. So, at a given moment I remember I didn’t have anything in the refrigerator to eat. I could buy food of course but I wouldn’t have enough to run a proper RDBMS. No worry, I’m fine my fathers and grandmother brought food. But still, that kind of situation makes you very defensive while using money, you don’t know what the next month would look like.
Why would you care about all of that? If you didn’t know that about me you wouldn’t be able to understand how significative is to me to be in a position where I can eat whatever I want and also type in my very own MacBook.
For me, a MacBook signified the final achievement, the only thing that can signal if I made it or not. Now I have it, I got it in my hands. This week I cried hugging my new MacBook, I walked around hugging it strongly against my chest. I’m full of joy.
You may wonder what I want next after I finally got the thing that I was desiring for 10 years. Well, it was a milestone, a point in a roadmap, the adventure just started.