Refresh Rate Is a Made-Up Word and I Will Not Be Saying It

First of all, before I even get into the meat of this, I want it on the record that MacRumors dot com has redesigned itself for the ninth time this year and every single time it gets one notch uglier, one notch more like a gas station receipt, and nobody there has ever once apologized to me personally for it, and I think that says something about the character of that entire operation, though I couldn't tell you what. Anyway. They're saying the new Mac Mini goes to a hundred and sixty-five hertz now. A hertz, if you don't know — and most of you don't, and that's fine, that's not a shame on you, it's a shame on the whole system — a hertz is a unit named after a German fella, Heinrich, dead a hundred and some years, who never in his life imagined his good name would end up stapled to a computer the size of a coaster bragging about how fast it can flicker a picture of a spreadsheet at a man in Ohio. A hundred and sixty-five of them. Per second. You want to know what refreshed a hundred and sixty-five times a second in 1982? Nothing. Nothing did that. The world moved at a reasonable pace and I was better for it and so was everybody I knew, though most of them are dead now or in Arizona, which some days I don't see the difference.

I had a paper route in 1982. I want to say that up front because it's going to come up, it always comes up, and I'd rather you know I'm not some fraud who's just heard about paper routes secondhand. Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays, and Sunday was the killer because of the coupon inserts, they weighed as much as a cinder block, and there was a dog on Verplanck — big head, small legs, wrong proportions entirely, like somebody had assembled him out of two different kits — and that dog took a piece of my jacket sleeve clean off on a Thursday in either March or possibly April, I've gone back and forth on this for forty years and I am not going to resolve it today, and the owner, a man named — well, I want to say Pemberton, but that might be the fella from the Chevrolet lot, they've sort of merged in my head over the decades into one large disappointed man — the owner came out and didn't even apologize, just said "he don't usually do that," which is what everybody's dog owner says, every single time, "he don't usually do that," like the dog's got a union rep and a spotless record and this was some kind of wildcat action nobody saw coming. And I still, to this day, forty-some years on, cross the street when I see a dog with legs that don't match the rest of him. That's not nerves. That's earned wisdom. Anyway, refresh rate. A hundred and sixty-five hertz. For what? You tell me. You tell me what a man does with that.

And another thing — nobody at Apple has ever, not once, explained to my satisfaction why the computer is now shaped like a hockey puck when for years it was shaped like a nice sensible book, or a brick, something a man could respect, something with heft, and I don't trust a company that keeps reshaping its own products like it's ashamed of what it made last year. That's not innovation. That's a man who can't sit still at dinner. My uncle couldn't sit still at dinner — different uncle, not the Chevrolet one — and it turned out later he had a thing with his inner ear, some crystal that got loose in there, they explained it to me once at a barbecue and I understood it for about eleven minutes and then it left me completely, the way most explained things do now, they just slide right off, I think because of the screens, I really do, I think the screens have sanded something down in the part of the brain that holds onto explanations, and nobody in Washington is going to stand up and say that plainly because there's too much money in the screens, there's money in both parties' pockets from the screens, and that's the one thing I'll say that sounds political and I want to be clear it isn't, I don't trust either one of them, I trust 1982 and that's the whole platform, that's the entire ticket, and if you want to write that on a bumper sticker be my guest but leave my name off it.

Now — a hundred and sixty-five hertz means the picture updates a hundred and sixty-five times every second so that when you drag a little arrow across the screen it looks "smoother," according to what I'm reading here on this deteriorating website, and I want to ask the obvious question that apparently no one in that entire building in Cupertino stopped to ask, which is smoother than what? Smoother than the last one, which was already smoother than the one before that, which was already — you see where this goes, there's no bottom to it, there's no year where somebody at that company is going to stand up in a meeting and say "gentlemen, I believe the arrow moves smoothly enough, I move that we adjourn and go outside." That meeting does not happen. That meeting will never happen. And meanwhile my mother, who is ninety-one and sharp as a new nail, cannot get her thermostat to stop asking her if she's "still there," which is a rude thing for a thermostat to ask a woman who raised four children and buried a husband and a sister, and I have complained about this thermostat to three different men on the phone, in three different countries as far as I could tell from the accents, and not one of them could tell me why a thermostat needs to ask a woman if she's still there. She's there. She's always there. That's the house she's lived in since Carter was president. The thermostat is the one that's new. The thermostat should be asking itself the hard questions.

There was a fella — I want to say his name was Dale, or it might've been the name of the store, I've lost the thread on that one — who ran the arcade on the corner near the shoe repair, and he had one of those machines, I believe it was the one with the spaceship, the vector graphics, the green lines on the black screen, and Dale, or the store called Dale's, whichever it was, he had a rule that you could not touch the machine with a wet hand, there was a sign, hand-lettered, taped to the coin slot, NO WET HANDS, and to this day I don't fully know what circumstance produced that sign, what event, what tragedy of moisture led a grown man to letter that sign and tape it to a machine, but I respected it, everybody on that block respected it, and there was a kid — not me, a different kid, redheaded, I want to say his name was Gary but it also might've been the name of his older brother, they blur — who got banned for a summer, an entire summer, for showing up with a slushie and not wiping his hand first, and nobody thought that was harsh, nobody's parents called anybody, it was just understood that the sign meant the sign, and I think about that sign more than I think about most things I was taught in an actual classroom, and I could not tell you why, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend the thread connects to anything, because it doesn't, that's just a thing that happened near an arcade that isn't there anymore, it's a nail salon now, or it was a nail salon, I haven't driven that road since the bypass went in and frankly I don't intend to.

So back to this Mini. A hundred and sixty-five hertz, and the website is treating this like V-J Day, like there's supposed to be a parade, and what gets me — what really, truly gets me, and I want this in bold if this paper still does bold — is that not one person asked whether a computer that sits on a desk doing spreadsheets and email needs to refresh faster than the human eyeball, which by the way I looked into once, briefly, the human eyeball tops out somewhere around sixty of these hertzes for most practical purposes according to a magazine I was reading at a dentist's office, and if that's true then everything past sixty is a man selling you air, dressed up as innovation, and I don't care if that magazine was three years old and possibly about something else entirely, the point stands on principle. My eye is not asking for a hundred and sixty-five of anything. My eye would like a nap.

And another thing — and I'm not going to be able to finish this one either, I can already tell, because it ties into a whole business with the county fair and a man who sold transistor radios out of a station wagon and got run off by the fire marshal for reasons that were never fully explained to the crowd, something about the wiring, or the tires, one of the two, and I was maybe nine, and my father wouldn't buy one, wouldn't even look at the table, said "that man's radios will be in a landfill by Christmas and so will he," which was a strange and specific thing to say about a stranger, and I never did find out if either prediction came true, and that's sort of the story of my whole life, not finding out, and I think that's what these companies are counting on, honestly, they're counting on nobody following through, nobody asking the second question, everybody just nodding along at the hertz number and going back to their lives, and I am not going to be the man who nods.

I don't have a conclusion. I want that on the record too. The dog is still out there somewhere, or its descendants are, meaner probably, faster too, probably runs at a hundred and sixty-five hertz.

—Edgar, watching the arrow move too smooth across a screen that never asked to be this fast