Apple announces its new tablet computer next week
The first computer I ever bought for myself was an Apple laptop battery Macintosh Color Classic. It was cute and anthropomorphic, so I named it "Banana Jr." after Oliver Wendell Jones' computer in Bloom County. I even replaced the hard drive icon with a little .gif of the walking, talking PC from the comic strip.
A few years later I bought myself a PowerBook 150. I called it Deep Thought. Soon after, I upgraded to a PowerBook G3, one of the cool ones in the Wallstreet Series. I called it HAL, set the desktop image to a screenshot of HAL 9000's iconic red eye, and installed system sounds so it would speak in the psychotic AI's voice. ("I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" is a pretty awesome error message, at least the first hundred times you hear it.)
I've owned a number of machines since then, and continued to name them all after fictional computers. At present, I own three computers; a Toshiba Satellite notebook Latitude D810 battery ("Bender"), an Acer Aspire One netbook ("Holly"), and a mammoth Dell XPS desktop gaming rig ("Joshua," after the artificial intelligence in War Games.)
I also have a name for my work PC, but it does not follow the existing pattern, and I would get in no small amount of trouble if I printed such an impolite word anywhere under a Forbes masthead.
That small departure aside, my computer naming convention holds strong. And when Apple announces its new tablet computer next week, I will probably buy one Latitude D820 battery, and name it The Guide. I will place it in a case, and I will inscribe the words "Don't Panic" in large friendly letters on its cover.
All of this leads to the question: Do you have a naming convention for your computers? What is it? And what's the name of your current PC?