How I name my computers

The first computer I remember naming was a MacBook Air. I was young and foolish, and I thought it was a good idea to install pre-release builds of Mac OS X on my only computer. (It was not.)

Every summer, Apple would preview the next version of Mac OS X at WWDC, and I ran the developer betas until it was released to the public in the autumn. The early versions were very buggy and crashy (as you’d expect from beta software), and my machine was pretty unstable for several months. Things improved when I could install the released version, and I always swore off installing the developer betas ever again – right until WWDC came round the next year.

I named this laptop Persephone, after the Greek goddess who would spend six months in the underworld, then six months on the surface, and repeat. Her dual existence felt similar to the buggy/brilliant life of that machine.

I also chose the name because I love Persephone as a character – she’s my favourite mythological figure, and I’ve always thought of her story as a metaphor for non-binary gender or genderfluidity.

This started my tradition of naming computers after mythological figures whose name starts with the letter P.

My next machine was an iMac, which I named Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. I never used this for any developer betas – I wanted a computer that was more stable, which wasn't crashing half the time. In my head, Poseidon felt like a metaphor of stability.

In hindsight, this is nonsense – Poseidon is hardly depicted as a stable character in myth. He's unpredictable, volatile, and has a wicked temper. I'd been reading about lighthouses and lifeboats at the time, which are pillars of stability, and somehow that got conflated into“sea equals stable”.

At around the same time, I got a 12″ MacBook as a sidecar computer. It had a reputation for being unreliable, but I got lucky – it lasted six years before the keyboard finally broke. I still miss carrying such a light computer.

That model was notorious for only having one port. This bothered a lot of people who never owned it, but it wasn’t an issue for me. The idea still got in my head, because I named this laptop Polyphemus, after the one-eyed Cyclops who was blinded by Odysseus in the Odyssey.

Poseidon broke in an extremely unfortunate accident when my desk collapsed. It fell three feet, the screen was ruined, and it crushed both of my backup hard drives. I was very glad to have offsite backups that day, and even more glad that I wasn’t under the desk at the time.

I replaced it with a similar iMac that I named Phoenix. In mythology, the phoenix is a bird that sets itself on fire when it’s close to death, and then it’s born again by rising from the ashes. Going out in a spectacular fashion before being resurrected felt thematically appropriate for my pair of iMacs.

My new Mac mini is called Phaenna. She’s a more obscure character in mythology, one of the Charites worshipped in Sparta. She doesn’t take up much space in the Greek canon, and this machine doesn't take up much space on my desk.

I’d never heard of Phaenna before I got this Mac, and I only know about her from the Wikipedia page. I picked the name by looking for characters from mythology whose name starts with P, and Phaenna was the first name I liked the sound of and which felt thematically appropriate.

There’s not much information about her online, and I can only find mention of one classical source that mentions her (Description of Greece, by Pausanias). At some point I’d like to read it, so I can understand her context as best I can.