M1.MacBook.Pro — As yet unsettled

In an example of both alarming inattention and ultimately beneficial mishappery (a successful failure?), I bought a MacBook Pro with the wrong keyboard.

In my defense, I do what I never do: I deeply considered a purchase. I put a new M1 MacBook Pro into the shopping cart on my phone, on my iPad, on my regular-ass and dying MacBook, on my aging iMac – and not just a single time in each place. I configured it multiple ways, thought about it, waited, then later did it again.

I ultimately settled on the one I wanted: the 13" MacBook Pro with a 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. And then I hit buy. And then I waited almost three weeks for it to be delivered. And then it was delivered. And, as with all my big purchases, I felt a pang of guilt – as if it's a luxury, not a well-considered upgrade. So I opened it. The box it was shipped in is nice: there's only one sticker on an otherwise clean, brown box. There’s nothing extraneous. Apple doesn't do messy.

That's when I saw the problem: it has a Japanese keyboard. I'm in Japan. Each time I configured the computer, I had to select the US English keyboard, changing the setting from the Japanese-default. Evidently, I didn't do this the final, impactful time. And I didn't notice it in any of the e-mails or info-screens about my order. Somehow. God dammit.

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I put off returning it – from laziness and pragmatism. I'm not a returns-things type of person, but also I figured I should live with my mistake for a week or so, to see if it was something I could tolerate – and I suppose, to suffer a bit from my own dipshittery. (Self-loathing runs deep with this one.)

And then I kinda realized that, y'know, I do live here. And I do learn Japanese, albeit slowly, poorly as fuck. And perhaps having a Japanese keyboard will help in that effort. Also I'm lazy.

So I decided to keep it.

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In all honesty, it's not that big of an issue. I already use TextExpander, so I just built some more snipets to deal with the common fuckups while I learn the subtly different layout. (The apostrophe is on the 7-key. And where the apostrophe is on the US keyboard is an unshifted colon. So typos like "don:t" are the most common. The kana key is extremely close to where my right thumb thumps the spacebar, so I sometimes invoke it, resulting in a long series of nonsense – in any language.

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That aside, the computer is awesome – it's lighting-fast, can do more things at once than I can, and has more energy remaining after finishing than I begin with.

I dunno who you are Internet Person, but if you're in the market for a new computer, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's incredible.

Just order the correct keyboard.

終