Second-guessing Myself at the Apple Store: A Broken Laptop, the Berenstain Bears, and the Nature of Reality
I recently took my laptop to the Apple Store. When I tried to open it, I heard the startup sound—the chime that indicated it was booting up—but the display was black. When I arrived at the store, I looked around the bright white room, bustling with people of every age, race, and gender. There were excited tech enthusiasts, creative professionals, and frustrated Apple Care seekers.
I fell into the last category.
I sat down with my bearded forty-something Genius, Richard. I described the problem, and he conducted a few initial tests on my laptop. He then asked me if I had spilled water on my laptop. Was this why my display stopped working?
“Nope,” I told him. “Definitely not. I would have remembered that.”
Richard shared that even a small drop of water can damage the sensor display so that it cannot detect when the lid is open.
“So you’re sure nothing spilled?”
I shook my head and reiterated that my laptop had just spontaneously stopped working.
Richard took my laptop to the back room for more troubleshooting. That’s when I started second-guessing myself. Maybe I did spill water on my laptop? Or some other substance? Is it possible that I just didn’t notice it?
He came back 20 minutes later with the news that my display was dead and would have to be replaced. “How did this happen?” I asked. “Parts fail,” he somberly replied.
I left my laptop at the Apple Store and was promised it would be fixed within 48 hours. But as I was driving home, I was still wondering about the spill.
The Mandela Effect refers to a phenomenon where a large group of people remember something differently from how it occurred. It was named after Nelson Mandela because many people mistakenly remember him dying in prison in the 1980s, even though he actually passed away in 2013 at the age of 95.
One well-known example of the Mandela Effect is people remembering the Berenstain Bears (with an “a”) as the “Berenstein Bears” (with an “e”). It was always the Berenstain Bears. Another instance of the Mandela Effect is the “KitKat” logo. Many people recall the KitKat chocolate bar as “Kit-Kat,” with a hyphen. However, the official brand name has never had a hyphen; it's always been "KitKat.”
The causes of the Mandela Effect are not entirely clear. Psychologists and experts have attributed it to:
Memory distortion—the brain’s tendency to mix up facts, experiences, and details.
Social reinforcement of false memories when they are shared by large groups of people.
Cognitive biases that cause people to recall events or details incorrectly.
What’s clear is that our memories are not as reliable as we like to think. This is especially true today, as our lives are split between the physical and virtual worlds. As technology continues to evolve, especially with the advent of AI, the line between these two worlds becomes less and less obvious.
Knowing how fallible our memories are raises intriguing questions about the nature of reality: What, if anything, can we know to be true? Can we trust our perceptions? How do we know that our beliefs are grounded in reality? And what does all this say about who we are?
These are most likely unanswerable questions. There are few things of which we can be certain in 2025, as the ground beneath our feet is constantly shifting. One thing I can say with confidence, however, is that I did not spill water on my laptop. But maybe one of my kids did.