Once upon a time, when the world was young, Apple announced their 17 inch G4 Powerbook with a huge screen and blisteringly quick 1GHz G4 PowerPC processor.

“It must be mine!” I thought, and so it came to pass.

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It was lovely. It was built to my scale. It was the best computer I had ever owned.

Of course, Apple kept rejigging it with faster processors and graphics cards and other goodies, but I never felt the upgrade itch; so what if there’s faster stuff out there, most of the stuff I do is still blocked on network latency and typing speed.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I typed rake on a colleagues new 15 inch Macbook Pro and watched a Rails test suite go from 0 to all tests passing in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

“Right!” I thought, “When the 17 inch version gets launched, I’m going to get one.”

And then my contract came to an end, so now I’m not getting one. Yet.

I wish I’d not seen how quick the tests ran on that other machine. Now, when I run the Typo tests and it goes away for the best part of 3 minutes, I get cross. Before I just used it as thinking time.