Yes this is me, holding a Windows machine


Ugh. I can’t believe it. The mystery of the Chinese uber laptop has been solved. It’s not a startup. It’s friggin Lenovo. They’re putting out this psycho ultraportable ThinkPad Reserve Edition that costs $5,000. That’s not a typo. It’s aimed at the Sand Hill Road, master of the universe, hedge fund types. Loaded up with a bazillion gigahertz processor, terabyte of RAM, or something like that. Windows Vista of course. The real kicker is it comes wrapped in this super leather that’s handsewn by the Japanese saddlemakers who made saddles for the samurai. Of course you get your name embossed on the case and on top of that you get white-glove service, like if you have some customer support question (and it’s Windows Vista, so you know you will) they air-lift in some butler and drop him at your house. Or a team of ninjas. Or something. Naturally Larry ordered one; and then as a ballbuster he ordered one for me, too, complete with my name on it. I’m like, “Dude, I’m not going to use a StinkPad, I can’t believe you even brought it into the building, forget about it.” He’s like, “Jobso, just check it out, because first of all the Vista Ultimate is pretty much a clone of OS X, and second of all, the fucking thing flies, it’s way faster than a MacBook Pro, I did all these side by side tests, blah blah blah.”

A while later I found Jon Ive and his boys in the design shop ogling the thing. Ive goes, “Steve, did you realize this was designed by Richard Sapper? Jesus Christ. The guy’s a mad genius. And I hate to tell you, but this machine is pretty cool. And it’s light. Feel it. Honestly. If I had shitloads of money and didn’t work here I’d probably get one.” I’m like, “Um, guys? Does it have a MagSafe power cord so that you don’t pull it off a desk if you trip over the cord? No, I don’t thinks so.”

Then Larry and I went to my office and started calling Lenovo’s white-glove tech support line, telling them things like, “Uh, we can’t find the ANY key,” and “Can you send someone over to install OS X on this thing?” Sure enough an actual butler type dude showed up. We told him we were only kidding. He was totally cool about it. Gave the machine a once-over anyway. Nice touch. Thanks, Lenovo. I will be calling every day for the next year, so keep a technician ready, 24×7. And thanks Larry. You dick.