So long, Steve Jobs.
I’ve always loved computers. Since my first experiences using TRS-80s in the 6th grade (cassette drive AND floppy disk drives!), I loved the idea of these machines that could be made to act as a faster, smarter extension of our own ideas…and that they could be used to further and refine those same ideas.
The first piece of fiction I ever wrote was on a computer. It was a story called “The End” and it was a fast-paced story where you are dropped into the middle of a lot of things happening and then, just as you figure out what’s going on, a bomb goes off and kills everyone. The end. Done. Even in the 6th grade I was a pretentious little art nerd who loved pulling the rug out from under people. Ha.
I used my first Mac in 1995, when I first started working for Lofty Pursuits, a kite store in Tallahassee, FL. The entire shop ran on Macs, and being unfamiliar with them I really didn’t like them at all. OS 9 was definitely different, but it didn’t impress me yet.
At home I had a Compaq Presario laptop. It was awful, and I hated it, but it was as good as it got at the time in my price range. I had some friends who tried to get me using a Mac, but the price put it out of my range and besides…OS 9 wasn’t really an improvement, in my mind. Different but not better.
That Compaq was on the verge of dying, and I was ready to get a new laptop. I started looking at Macs, on a whim really. They just looked so pretty…all white and awesome. It was 2002, and I’d split with my first wife. She had previously kept me from getting one, citing the price and claiming that her computer and mine “wouldn’t work together”. I didn’t argue the point, surprisingly for me, because I didn’t really care one way or the other…I just wanted something that worked.
I strolled in to Micro Center and took a look at their bottom-of-the-line Macbook and was blown away. This was NOT the Mac I’d seen before, not even close. It was an operating system that made sense to me, that felt natural and looked clean and simple. It did what I wanted it do, and it did it as naturally as though I’d simply thought it into existence. It was effortless.
I bought it, immediately. I didn’t even transfer files over from my old computer. I left them there, to die a dusty data death. A clean start. A new beginning.
After that was a couple of Powerbooks, both used, and now my current Macbook. 2nd Gen iPod changed the way I interacted with my music completely….then a 3rd Gen iPod blew my mind. There are two iPhones and an Apple TV floating around my house, as well as Jenni’s MacBook Pro.
Apple products changed the way that I interacted with technology, and the way that I use it in my daily life. Every single video you’ve seen on this blog was edited on my Macbook. Music dragged from iTunes to iMovie, exported to YouTube. So simple, so obvious, so exactly what I wanted to be.
I don’t love Apple for their marketing hype (I’ve still never watched any of the Macworld Expo product launches), I don’t love Apple because they’re cool. I don’t love Apple products because I don’t like Microsoft products….their old ones certainly didn’t appeal to me but I hear positive things about Microsoft’s newest OS and haven’t used it to have any kind of opinion on the matter.
I love Apple because for the way I need things to work…they simply always do. They are my tools, and I require nothing of them but their efficiency and simplicity.
And since OS X, I’ve never found another set of tools that so effortlessly did everything I required of them. From the native icons on my iPhone to the set of world clocks on my Dashboard, everything simply does what is does, and always when I need it.
Thank you so much, Steve Jobs. What you built has allowed me to exercise my creativity in countless ways without ever needing to worry about my tools failing me. You have pushed the world so magnificently forward, and given so many of us the tools and platforms to do amazing things. You rewarded our creativity by sharing your own, and it’s the finest gift anyone has ever given me.
So long, Steve. Give Tesla my best.