Power to the People, Right On.


I spent £79 on a replacement charger for my MacBook today; expensive, much?

It’s not every day you send nearly eighty quid on a lead with a plug on the end of it…and it’s never a good day when you do; there are so many things I would have rather used the money on. It’s like when someone buys you a functional, yet dull household appliance as a Christmas or birthday gift; you know it’s useful, but you’d rather they’d given you anything but. Not so long ago, my dad treated me to a dehumidifier, and while I was grateful for a marginally less steamy bathroom, it was hard to work up much excitement about it; it would have been cheaper just to push the window open a bit.

Unfortunately, the new charger was a necessary evil, as one of the two I own decided to fray to the point of no longer being usable a few weeks back, and I’m sick of having to carry the other with me each time I walk to my office, instead of keeping one of them there. I also need to have two fully functioning adapters for when I decamp to Edinburgh in a month, as my show will be a darn sight less entertaining if my laptop battery goes dead in the midst of it.

Annoyingly, I thought I’d nabbed a replacement at the bargain price - well, relatively speaking - of £30 on Amazon the other day, but it turned out I’d been misled, as while the blurb had implied it was an official Apple product it clearly wasn’t, plus it only charged intermittently and gave me a low-level static shock when I typed; no-one wants their laptop to share the properties of a Van der Graaf Generator. Having said that, there’s one on sale on eBay at the moment for a little shy of £150, whereas if I’d kept the dodgy charger I could have had two products for the price of one; think of the science lessons I might have led if I survived using it.

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