I took this wreckage to a repair tech who knew how to remove the battery and not get himself blown-up. I brought the thing home and found that the Bluetooth works intermittently, the unit takes forever to boot-up and to shut-down, and opening and running applications is glacial. The only thing that it continues to do as it should is copy files between drives. I'll try to sell it, parted-out, on eBay. The 1TB SSD should be worth about $100, alone. That and the carcass with a good display should defray the cost of disarming the lithium bomb. I'll have to sell-off some other stuff to defray the cost of an used iMac, which doesn't contain a battery.
This sort of sudden expense usually comes at the wrong time. Not only am I presently somewhat financially vulnerable, I had been about to sit down and do another album or two, not having made any music all year, having been preoccupied with other matters that slurped-up my creative juices. I am typing this on a "lesser" model, a 2012 Macbook Air, which I own because I know how important it is to have back-up. I could, realistically, commence my musical project on this machine and transfer it over to the new one when I get it.
I hate owning stuff. After a long time of not being able to own stuff, I tend not to acquire stuff that I don't need. If I don't need something, I sell it off, or I give it to someone who needs it. Not that I can afford to own much stuff that I don't need. I do overspend on food, because after having gone without food, I am afraid of not having enough. I also hoard food – rice, beans, pasta, canned soups and vegetables – because I don't want to go hungry if I'm ever too broke again to buy it. Inanition is traumatic. So is having to apply for public assistance in the office of an angry Black woman with "Afrocentric" art all over the walls, and watching her gloat over making a White guy grovel for food. I have more pairs of shoes (from thrift stores) than I need because of humiliation of having to borrow money to buy new shoes and then not being able to pay the person back on time. Because of this, however, I once gave the shoes I was wearing to a barefoot homeless man who also wore a size 12. I had other shoes; he had none. It sucks shit to have no shoes.
When I have to sell-off some cool thing that I own in order to defray the purchase of a necessary luxury such as a replacement computer, or even to pay for something like food or rent, I can easily tell myself, "It's just stuff." I've worked as an online salesman in electronics warehouses, where I had to try to get the highest price possible for the stuff before it was rendered junk by obsolescence. Everything is eventually junk. It's really already junk once it comes off the assembly line, with products designed to supersede it already planned or being developed to come soon behind it. Technologies are withheld from the public in order to milk the market-value of those presently available. It's a big scam – like how "recovery" programs and "rehab" centers are probably owned by the same people who own alcohol manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.
I'm all about the trailing-edge tech, however: milking it for its usage-value, and beating the system by paying 1/2 or 1/3 of what it had originally cost, five years after it had been released. I'm even still running Mac OS Mojave on Intel Macs, when they're now up to OS El Supremo on M1 architecture, for which hardly any music-making software has been fully developed. Culturally, I'm stuck in the '90s, anyway, so it makes me feel all sci-fi 'n' stuff to marvel at the technologies that are being unloaded at a loss. If I can't eat it, wear it, pet it, or call it up at 3AM and tell it that I'm gonna kill myself without its hanging-up on me, it's ultimately not worth that much.