Got To Glow

Updated September 2026: I wrote this in December 2022, when going back to the office was still being floated as an idea. It is policy now at most of the large Indian IT employers, so I have rewritten the post around what the mandate actually costs a person and what is worth asking for instead of complaining about it.

The original version of this post was a complaint. Four days of commuting had been proposed at my company, I had two years of working from my own desk behind me, and I wrote down why I did not want to give that up. Family time. Home food. Working in shorts.

All three are still true. None of them were ever going to win the argument, because none of them are things a delivery manager is measured on. What follows is the same position, argued the way I would argue it now.

Where the mandate actually stands

This stopped being a rumour some time in 2024 and hardened through 2025. TCS, Infosys and Wipro all moved to a three-day-a-week floor for most staff, and Infosys has since pushed senior bands further: staff at job level 6A and above are asked for four days a week, with a stated minimum of ten office days a month, spread across the weeks rather than bunched. The details are in the updated hybrid policy reported in March 2026.

The number that matters is not three or four. It is that attendance is now tracked, and in several firms it is tied to variable pay. That changes the conversation from a preference into a compliance item, and it is the reason arguing about comfort gets you nowhere.

The commute is the whole cost

I lose about two hours and fifteen minutes on an office day, door to door, and that is on a good day. Three days a week is close to seven hours. Over a month it is a working day and a half that produces nothing, costs fuel, and arrives home as tiredness rather than as time.

That is the honest version of my 2022 argument. Not that home is nicer. That the commute is unpaid, unproductive and invisible in every productivity number anybody presents in a town hall. If you are going to push back on a mandate, push back on that, with your own figure, measured for a fortnight. A manager can argue with a preference. Two hours fifteen is harder to wave away.

What I genuinely lost

Two things, and I still think they are the real ones.

The first is small conversations with my family during the day. Not long ones. Five minutes over a coffee, hearing how school went, being in the house when something needs doing. My kids noticed when it stopped, which told me more than any survey would.

The second is control over the working day. At home I could take a call at nine at night because I had eaten with everyone at seven. In the office the day is a block, the evening is a commute, and the late call still comes.

What the office gives back, honestly

I resisted writing this part for a long time. Three things have been better since I went back.

Onboarding is one. A new joiner picks up in three weeks sitting next to the team what took three months over chat, and I say that as someone who spent two years insisting otherwise. Escalations are another: a stuck issue that would have run for a day in a thread gets settled by walking to a desk. The third is visibility, which I dislike as a reason but cannot pretend is not real. People who were in the room got the interesting work.

If the argument is going to be won by people like me, it has to be made by people who will admit that much.

What is actually worth asking for

Asking for zero days is not a negotiation any more. These four have worked, for me or for people on my team.

• Choose which days, not how many. Anchor days that match your team's working pattern cost the company nothing and save you the worst traffic.
• Protect the no-meeting block. If you are commuting for collaboration, the office day should not be eight hours of calls you could have taken at home.
• Get the release week exception in writing. Most teams already work from home during a cutover. Having it stated stops it being a favour.
• Ask what the attendance number is used for. If it feeds variable pay, you need to know the threshold, not guess at it.

None of that is a victory. It is the difference between a mandate you can plan around and one that plans you.

Setting up so the two days at home still count

The mistake I made in 2022 was treating home as the default and the office as the interruption. It is the other way round now, which means the home days have to be worth something. Mine are the days I do the work that needs a long uninterrupted run, and they are the reason I care as much as I do about the machine I do it on. My notes on living with the 14-inch MacBook Pro cover that side of it, and the longer case for the arrangement itself is in why work from home can be a win for both sides.

If you are earlier in your career and the visibility argument is the one being used on you, the piece on what a project team is actually for is worth a read first. Knowing where you sit in the delivery chain changes which days are worth being in the room for.

Where I have landed

I go in three days. I picked the three, I do the deep work on the other two, and I stopped arguing about the principle some time in 2024 because the principle had already been decided.

What I have not stopped saying, and will keep saying, is that two hours of commuting is a real cost carried entirely by the employee, and that no company I have worked for has ever put a number on it. Until someone does, every productivity comparison between home and office is missing a column.

Updated September 2026: the original version said genuine Apple parts are impossible to get outside Apple. That was already wrong when I wrote it, and it is corrected below.

Most advice about buying an Apple device is about the buying. Which model, how much storage, is this the year to upgrade. That part is easy and everyone covers it.

The part that decides what the device really costs you is what happens the day it breaks. That is where an iPhone or a MacBook is genuinely different from the alternatives, and it is worth understanding before you pay rather than after.

Accidental damage is not a warranty matter

Apple's standard one-year limited warranty covers manufacturing defects. It does not cover a cracked screen, a drop, or liquid. Neither does Indian consumer law, which protects you against goods that are faulty, not against goods you dropped.

So a cracked display is an out-of-warranty repair at out-of-warranty prices, and on recent iPhones and MacBooks that price is a meaningful fraction of the device. Check the figure for the exact model you are considering on Apple's own service pages before you buy. Apple publishes them, they change by model and region, and a number from a blog post is a number you should not trust.

AppleCare+ is insurance, so treat it like insurance

AppleCare+ extends the cover and adds accidental damage repairs for a service fee per incident. Whether it is worth it is not a matter of opinion, it is a sum.

Compare the plan cost plus the likely service fee against the out-of-warranty repair price for the screen, which is the thing that actually breaks. If you have cracked a phone before, buy it. If you have carried the same phone for four years without a mark and it lives in a case, you are probably better off keeping the money.

One thing people miss. AppleCare+ has to be bought within a limited window after the device, so the decision is made at purchase whether you think about it or not.

The correction: genuine parts are available to independent shops

I originally wrote that Apple keeps genuine parts out of the open market, so any third-party repair means counterfeit components. The first half is roughly true of walk-in spare part shops. The second half is not true, and repeating it does readers a disservice.

Apple runs an Independent Repair Provider programme, which it expanded globally in 2021, India included. A shop in the programme buys the same genuine parts, tools and diagnostics that Apple Authorised Service Providers use. It is not an Apple store and it does not have to price like one.

So there are three tiers, not two. Apple and authorised providers, independent repair providers with genuine parts, and everyone else. The third tier is where the salvaged displays and mystery batteries live.

Before handing over a device, ask the shop directly whether they are in Apple's Independent Repair Provider or Authorised Service Provider programme, and check the result against Apple's own verification page. It takes two minutes and it is the whole difference between a repair that holds its value and one that quietly doesn't.

What India still does not get

Apple's Self Service Repair programme, which sells parts, manuals and tool rental directly to owners who want to do the work themselves, runs in a few dozen countries. India is not one of them, several years after launch and despite India being one of Apple's growth markets and a place with a deep repair culture.

That matters more here than it would elsewhere. The practical effect is that the DIY tier available to an owner in Germany is not available to an owner in Chennai, so your options are an authorised repair, an independent one, or an unauthorised one.

Parts pairing, and why it is the thing to watch

Modern Apple devices check which parts are fitted. Swap a screen or a battery for a genuine one that came from another device and the phone may warn you about it, or a feature tied to that part may stop working. Apple has loosened this over time and added a repair assistant flow for calibrating used genuine parts, which is real progress.

Still, the direction of travel is that the device has an opinion about who repaired it. When you buy, you are buying into that. Some people are fine with it because it stops counterfeit parts being passed off as genuine. Others find it unreasonable on hardware they own outright. Both positions are defensible. Mine is that the verification is fair and the lack of a Self Service Repair option in India is not.

What I would do

Decide at purchase how you will handle a broken screen, because that decision is cheapest to make before it happens. Either buy AppleCare+, or accept the out-of-warranty price and put it aside mentally.

Find your nearest genuine-parts repair option before you need it. Verify it. Keep the name somewhere you will find it when the phone is in two pieces and you are not thinking clearly.

And keep your data somewhere that survives the device, which is a separate discipline entirely and is covered in this post on backups. A phone repair is an inconvenience. A phone repair with no backup is a loss. My own experience of an ageing Mac giving up is in this account.

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Updated September 2026: this was originally a vent about a laptop that let me down. It works better as the thing I wish someone had told me, so it has been rewritten that way.

I bought a 2012 MacBook Pro in 2016, second hand, after the 2011 one died. I picked it because it was the last model you could open up and upgrade yourself, and because it was what I could afford on instalments. For the first year the only thing I really noticed about it was the payment leaving my account every month.

Then it got slow. Not dramatically. Slow the way old laptops get slow, where you stop noticing that opening a folder takes a beat, until one day you do.

I upgraded the RAM, and it barely helped

My diagnosis was memory, so I ordered RAM, opened the back and fitted it myself. That part felt good. The result did not. The machine was a little better with a lot of tabs open, and exactly the same at everything else.

What I had done was fix the thing I could fix rather than the thing that was wrong. Those are different jobs, and I did not know the difference at the time.

On a Mac of that era, the part that usually causes this is the hard drive. The 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro shipped with a spinning disk. Every time the machine opens an application, reads a file or swaps memory to disk, it waits on a mechanical arm. More RAM reduces how often it has to swap. It does nothing about how slow the drive is when it does.

The order I should have checked things in

If an old Mac feels slow, work through this before spending anything.

Check the storage type first. Apple menu, About This Mac, then System Report and Storage. If it says a rotational or SATA hard disk rather than SSD, that is almost certainly your answer and no other upgrade will beat replacing it.

Check free space. A drive with almost nothing free will crawl regardless of what kind it is. Clearing space costs nothing and takes an evening.

Check what starts with the machine. System Settings, General, Login Items. Years of installers leave helpers running that you never asked for.

Check the battery. System Settings, Battery, Battery Health. A worn or swollen battery in a laptop that age can throttle performance, and a swollen one needs dealing with promptly rather than eventually.

Then consider RAM. It is last on this list for a reason. It matters if you routinely run out, and not otherwise.

I did that list backwards. It cost me the price of the RAM and about six months of a laptop I had already decided was disappointing.

The repair that finally worked, and the question it raised

The eventual fix was not cheap. It got the machine running properly and I kept using it for years afterwards, which means it was money well spent, but it raised the question every owner of an ageing machine has to answer at some point.

Here is the arithmetic I use now. Take what the repair costs. Take what the machine is worth working, which for an old Mac is what similar ones are actually selling for, not what you paid. If the repair is more than half of that, and the machine is already past five years old, you are buying time rather than value.

Time is a legitimate thing to buy. A repair that keeps a laptop going for eighteen more months while you save for the replacement is a good decision, as long as you make it knowingly rather than by default. What you want to avoid is three separate repairs that each seemed reasonable and together cost more than a newer machine.

What actually killed it

Old laptops rarely die of one thing. They accumulate. A drive that is slow, a battery that is tired, hinges and ports that have been used ten thousand times, and a logic board that has been through years of heat cycles. Each one is fixable. All of them together is a new laptop with extra steps.

Mine reached that point and I replaced it with a 14-inch MacBook Pro, which has been the better machine by a distance. I do not regret the years I spent keeping the old one alive. I regret the six months I spent guessing.

What transfers to your situation

Diagnose before you buy parts. The part you can replace easily is not automatically the part that is failing, and a self-installed upgrade feels productive even when it changes nothing.

Know the replacement cost before you approve a repair, not after. And if you are about to buy Apple hardware with a plan to keep it a long time, the things worth checking before you pay are in this post on buying Apple devices, particularly the part about what happens when something breaks.

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Updated September 2026: in 2022 I complained that new versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote dropped support for older Macs, leaving files made on newer devices unreadable on my older Mac. I have rewritten it into the practical workarounds, which still apply every time Apple raises the iWork system requirements.

I have used Pages, Numbers and Keynote for years, mostly for the easy handoff between iPhone, iPad and Mac. I use Numbers to track personal expenses and bank transactions. The problem I hit in 2022 was that newer iWork versions required a newer macOS than my older Mac could run, and files saved with the latest features on a newer device would not open on it.

Why do new iWork files not open on older Macs?

Each major iWork release requires a recent version of macOS, and older Macs stop receiving macOS updates after several years. A document saved in the newest file format, especially one using new features, may not open in the older app. Apple does not keep a separate compatibility mode, so the older Mac is simply left behind.

How can you still open and edit these files on an older Mac?

• Use iWork on iCloud.com: the web versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote run in a browser, are kept up to date by Apple, and can open current iWork files. This is the most useful workaround and it needs no new software.
• Export to standard formats: from the newer device, export to Word, Excel, CSV or PDF. Anything can open these.
• Keep shared files simple: if a document must work on both Macs, avoid features introduced in the latest version.

What should you do with important files like finances?

Keep a copy in an open format. A Numbers spreadsheet of expenses or bank transactions is exactly the kind of file you will want to open in ten years, on whatever device you then own. Exporting a CSV or Excel copy every few months means your records never depend on one app's compatibility. It is the main reason people in my situation move key spreadsheets to Excel or Google Sheets.

Is it time to replace the older Mac?

Not just for iWork. If the Mac still does everything else you need, the iCloud.com versions cover most editing. The stronger reason to upgrade is security: once a Mac stops getting macOS security updates, browsing and banking on it carries more risk. Check which macOS version your Mac can run and whether it still receives security patches.

What should Apple change?

A simple option to save in a format older iWork versions can read, even with new features dropped, would solve most of this. Until then, iCloud.com and regular exports are the reliable answer, and they would have spared me the frustration I wrote about in 2022.

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