This week I found something else that my Mac can do for me and my mom isn’t happy about it. I found software to help me manage travel itineraries and showed it to my mom. She said, ”You’re on that computer all the time. Are you addicted to it?”

She has a point. My Mac used to be a nice little computer that let me do some graphics and a few reports and a spreadsheet or two. And play a few second rate games.

These days, my Mac is easily the center of my digital life, but is it also creating a Mac life for me? I use my Mac for so many things these days that it’s inevitable that loving family members might recognize a few symptoms of an addiction.

My Mac holds my music which syncs to my iPod and iPhone. It holds my email for personal and business use. I live on Microsoft Office. All my photos have been digitized and reside in iPhoto or Aperture.

I schedule my travel plans, do reports, edit home movies, and I’ve even taken up designing and building a web site. I have text editors, graphic editors and tools, and compose my own music in Garageband, though I’m learning to use Apple’s Logic Studio (whew, what a learning curve).

My Mac stores my login IDs and my passwords and credit card numbers and balances my check book. I have Mac software which helps me with invoicing and billing, too. The end result may be closer to I, Robot than I may have imagined. I don’t think I’m addicted to my Mac, but I hate having to use the Windows PC in the office, and I always seem to find something else my Mac can do for me.

I use Skype and iChat and I’m thinking about Twitter but I still can’t figure out if people need to know what I’m doing all the time. Except my mom, and I don’t think she’s a candidate for Twitter. She just wants me to visit her more and fatten up because nobody wants to marry a skinny little Puerto Rican girl with a Scottish last name (not true, mom!).

If I could get more of my friends interested in iChat or Skype video, I’d be using my Mac even more, just to drop in and say hello without going anywhere. See the problem? My Mac plays movies and TV shows and music videos for me.

My surrogate Mac, in the form of my iPod and iPhone help me avoid the world and communicate with it at the same time.

The latest Mac surrogate is Apple TV, and once it adds a digital video recorder function, I have no doubt that I’ll be watching more television.

Is my mom’s suspicion for addiction justified? Since the amount of time I spend on my Mac has increased in recent years, at least somewhat in line with how much I ask my Mac to do, am I becoming addicted to my Mac? Or, is my Mac addicted to doing things for me and are we seeing the effects of I, Robot from a 10,0000 BC perspective?

Increasingly, I ask my Mac to control, manage, store and become more involved in my daily life, which has become heavily digital. How much worse will it be with iPhone 2.0 or 3.0 when my Mac’s soul truly resides in my iPhone?

How is your Mac life? Too much? Too little? Total addiction or mild infatuation?

My Mac is definitely an addiction for me. The first thing I head for when I get up is head to my Mac Pro desktop. I use my Mac’s for a wide variety of things such as, “.mac -mail”, “ I Web “, “ I Tunes ( big time ) “, surfing the net reading for hours when I get curious about how something works, then the subject is somewhere to found in google search engine and reading is knowledge isn’t it? I use 1 password to handle all my credit cards and website passwords. I have Office Mac 2004 and I find myself mostly using Microsoft word most of the time, I don’t use Excel or Power Point because I am not much of a business person or I just have never found use for them but don’t get me wrong I have opened the programs up and learned the basics of them. I also I Work 08 I find my self using Pages to use as a text editor over word once in a while. I use Sari most of the time because they added spell check in everything in Leopard (thank god for me) but if I use a different browser such as firefox then I loose the internet spell check and I hate that. I have almost 25 movies I have bought on I tunes so I do allot of movie watching. I have the 23 inch high definition monitor witch has very crisp clear screen although I want to upgrade from the ATI Radeon X1900 XT: graphics card to the newly released true high definition video card.

I never leave the house with out my Mac Book. I invested in a $150 laptop back pack, I have small power inverters ( plugs into your cigarette lighter in your car and converts dc current to ac current) to keep my Mac Book on ac power for long trips if I am not driving and want to do something on the book. I am not shy to break out my Mac Book at a restaurant before the food arrives and work in I Cal on stuff and events I have planned. I always try to find a place to eat near a Motel 8 or Extended stay when I take road trips they usually have unsecured routers.

Yes I am addicted to my Mac and could not imagine life with out a computer these days. I even buy  of stuff online, I have been doing it for years and never had any problems with credit card fraud. Most people that I talk to till this day are still afraid to use the credit cards online. I am a member of a credit fraud monitoring system so yes I have taken some precautions.

Let just put it this way and don’t take it wrong way. For all you Mac users who are under the Mac Pro desktop, you have to sit down and play with one in your house for a week or so and it just sucks you in. Fast as a speeding bullet, stable now that 10.5.2 has been released and lots of room for expansion.

It’s the internet. Before, my life was like Kate’s. A spreadsheet here and there and some graphics. Actually, I ran a small company that produced Indian artwork for 10 years and was on the computer LESS than I am now, without the company. Now I can hook in easily to everyone’s computer so troubleshooting has gone up. There is more available news so reading has gone up exponentially. There are funny videos so I can watch the funny stuff other people do as they live their life while I’m not living mine!

I admit to being like Pro~Dual above in that when I wake up, the first thing I have to do is load up my few dozen sites, check my mail, read a bunch, and THEN wander into the kitchen for grubbin. I feel strange and incomplete when I don’t at least check my email first thing. Repeat the pattern before bed.

When I drive, it’s podcasts podcasts podcasts. Updated daily. New stuff, every day. Every minute. I passed Information Overload 10 years ago.

That said, I never take my cell phone into a restaurant and basically spend as little time on it as possible. To make more time for my Mac. My hobbies are even digital in that I love playing piano. So I bought one of those cool Yamaha Clavinovas. You can download files that will set it up just like the pros prefer. You can download songs and learn to play them yourself. More online.

So yeah. I think having all these bits zipping around has changed the face of our lives considerably. And that’s before generation 5 of the iPhone. Just imagine.............

‘ve been using computers a long time , I started with a commodore 64 and now have a new Imac. Computers have gone from a novelty to an integrated part of your life as Kate points out in the article. That being said I will say I love this Imac, it makes it easy and fun to get things done. I have not really enjoyed any computer since my Tandy 1000 tx and thats quite a few years back. Osx is a refined and easy to use operating system that does not get in the way!!  Like a phone or tv it just works and thats how it should be. Keep up the good articles I enjoy this site as well.

Recent Mac convert here.  Got tired of the constant need for security updates.  I’m an engineer and I use my MacBook like I use my toolbox.  It’s full of tools I need to get the job done.  Office Mac, Matlab, DEdit, and Perl are the main tools.  The rest of the stuff like iLife, iWork etc is just gravy.  I have a company issue PC that lets me do email and get information.  I quickly move the information to my Mac for analysis and complilation into a final report.  Then I move it back to PC for permanent storage and distribution.  That’s about all my PC is good for.  I can’t even print because of some weird config setting in Acrobat reader that I can’t seem to iron out.  My Mac can print to my corporate network just fine and it’s not even authorized to do so.

The real crowd pleaser is presentations.  Most of the corporate PC’s are IBM Thinkpads.  When you hook those up to a projector for presentations you have to go through all these configuration settings and BS.  MacBook?  Plug in the adapter.  MacBook automatically sees and optimizes the projector resolution and extends the desktop onto it with nary a button pushed.  Excel and Powerpoint are displayed seamlessly.  Notes are taken, information updated, and redistributed without flaw.

Then I get to take it home with me!  It does my bills, lets me do really neat looking newsletters for my son’s Scout Troop, (thank you Pages) or lets me do freelance publishing (thank you Adobe CS3).  And if that’s not enough, I get to take over someone else’s life in Sims2.

I’m a Mac fan.  2 months after I got my MacBook, I sold off my 2 Dells at home and replaced them with Mac mini’s with wireless everything and 22” widescreen monitors.  My kid is home schooled and likes the environment much better.  My wife wasn’t so enthusiastic about the change, but she has gradually adapted and is generally pleased with the new setup.  Everything is faster, easier to use, and doesn’t need to get rebooted every couple of hours.  Life is grand.  Then our Apple TV got upgraded so we can rent movies without getting off the couch!  The only thing my Mac doesn’t do is make popcorn and fetch beer!

There are clinically defined addictions to computers and the internet, but that doesn’t mean Kate or any of the other commenters are addicts. Consolidation, I think, is largely what Kate is pointing to. Where once we had a VCR, a stereo (or Walkman-type portable device), a television, graph paper (spreadsheets!), and other such things, now we have computers for everything. As the computer has become more capable, we have asked the computer to do more.

Let me put it another way: Is this something distinctly Apple? We had people using Palm handhelds and Blackberrys (I love how that pluralizes like Maple Leafs) as convergence devices, but, as with Kate’s situation, we still are not talking about a single device. Even the crew of the Enterprise had tricorders, medical tricorders, communicators, phasers, and all manner of other tools, to the point that I wondered, at times, whether Bruce Wayne’s descendants were developing utility belts in the 23rd century.

Let’s face it, modern devices aren’t modern; they are simply replacements for devices that came before. Some people celebrate that, and others hold to more Luddite sensibilities. Neither is superior, on balance.

Andrew brings up an interesting topic - Consolidation.  Computers do such a myriad of things it’s easy to consolidate all your tools into one laptop.  I’ve been a freelance publisher for over 15 years.  Back then the old Mac Quadra’s were the publisher’s dream.  Photoshop, Pagemaker, Quark express would do 90% of the work.  The other 10% had to still be done by hand to get the layout from the computer onto the press.  Now, even that step has been bypassed with auto-stripping and direct printing to plate.  My day job uses the exact same MacBook I use in publishing to crunch through huge volumes of data, collect selected variables and to perform nightmare math problems.  Then represent the answers in graphical form.  All my tools to perform my daily tasks are consolidated into one very nicely styled tool bag that’s easy to access, and easy to use.

Another example is the all-in-one Printer/Fax/Scanner contraptions out there that are actually getting quite good at what they do.  You don’t even need a USB cable anymore.

Marketing people want to consolidate everything.  It makes life easy.  It’s not a question of if you CAN do it, it’s a question of if you should.  I don’t want to watch TV on my refrigerator.  I don’t want it to keep track of how much food I’m eating, tell me about the weather, do a self inventory, or strike up a conversation with my toaster.  I want it to keep my beer cold.  Simple job, simple machine.  Entertainment centers should be about entertaining, playing music, watching movies and broadcast programming.  They should not be interfaced with the house to control how often my lawn gets watered or tell me what’s in the mailbox or if the garage door is open or closed.  Use a home control system for that.  And for Pete’s sake, I don’t want my phaser to tell me how dead the dead guy I just blasted is, how long it took him to die, or ask me if I’m sure I wanted to kill him in the first place.

Consolidation is fine as long as it consolidates a group of related activities.  You don’t bring an electrician’s toolbox to work on plumbing.  Neither should you expect your computer to drive you to work or ask your car to print your latest bank statement.

DCBlstr - 19 March 2008 04:40 PM

You don’t bring an electrician’s toolbox to work on plumbing.

Trust me when I say that this is a union issue. When a roommate dropped a screw in the disposal, the plumber would not work until an electrician unplugged (wall plug, mind you) the device.

Yeah, silly comment, but a true story.