It's one thing to lose a gadget and know where you lost it. It's another thing to have the thing seemingly vanish.
Such was the experience I had last December with the iPod Touch I had shelled out $400 for just a couple months earlier. I had it one night and went to look for it the next day and it was gone. For weeks, I thought it might be somewhere in my house or the friend's house I was at that night. But it never turned up either place.
Newsweek's Steven Levy recently had a similar experience with a MacBook Air he had on loan from Apple.
Now, it's not that losing tech products is anything new. I'm sure the value of cell phones, cameras and other gadgets left in taxis alone would be enough to build a lot of schools and libraries.
The only thing that I think Apple's products have added to the mix is a thinness that makes it possible to lose the things without even knowing you have lost them.
It's not the first time the thinness of Apple's products has wreaked havoc in my household. There was an incident a couple years back where an iPod Nano was left in a back pocket of some jeans and went through the washing machine. It's still a sore subject, so I won't go into details. Suffice to say, it is the cleanest, whitest, nonfunctioning Nano you've ever seen.
Now, I'm not blaming Apple. And I freely (or expensively) admit that I am more forgetful than most. I just think that the next time you see the ad and lust that the MacBook Air is small enough to fit in a manila envelope, remember one thing: it is small enough to fit in a manila envelope.