A Conversion to Apple
Apple crossed the five decade mark this past week. I saved so many retrospectives to read this weekend, but first I wanted to jot down some of my own thoughts. Since it was clearly finally okay for Apple itself to look back, I figured I would too.
I've previously written about how I was a full-blown PC kid growing up. People seem to find this funny since when I was a tech reporter, I in no small way made a name for myself covering Apple. My inbox and the comment sections of TechCrunch and VentureBeat from about 2005 to 2011 were constantly clogged by the term "fanboy". Which truly never bothered me. I was a fan!
Anyway, the backstory is a bit more nuanced. While the first computer our family owned was an IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX (eat your heart out with that branding, Microsoft), the first computer I actually used was at school. My elementary school in Ohio, like most schools back then, was filled with Apple machines. Specifically, the Apple IIe, the third iteration of the Apple II (after the original and the Apple II Plus). That was the first computer I actually used in my life.
Throughout school, the computer labs slowly sprinkled some Macs into the mix as well. And while I always appreciated the UI – the trash can in particular – I was a full-blown Windows aficionado at that point. The Mac just felt foreign to me.
By that point, we were well into the 1990s and Apple had started struggling. Seemingly piecemeal variants of the Mac started showing up in our computer labs. And some Mac clones – the horror – started showing up in the computer stores I would frequent. At the same time, Microsoft stepped on the gas. As a teenager, I lined up at midnight for the launch of two things: Pearl Jam albums and Windows 95.
Apple receded further into my computing background. One of my friends was a Mac loyalist – and we constantly made fun of him for it.1 The cool kids had Gateway 2000 PCs shipped in their big ass cow print boxes. Or, at the very least, you were getting a Dell, dude. Specs were king in the age of Pentium. Much like today, RAM reigned supreme. Apple seemed lost.
And then... the Mac crept back into the computer stores of the world. Rumor grew of a new operating system being worked on in the west. Whispers of a new UI. And Steve Jobs perceived. Apple's time had now come.
Still, I went off to college with a new Gateway tower PC and 44-pound, 19-inch monitor (yes, seriously). Paired with the rocket-fast ethernet connection in the dorm rooms, I was in computing heaven. This was also, I should point out, the heyday of Napster, LimeWire, and every other P2P file-sharing variant.
One day during freshman year I recall seeing some banners around campus to come check out the latest wares from Apple. Out of curiosity and boredom, I swung by a computer lab dotted with new iMacs, where some Apple reps were showing off early builds of OS X. It looked amazing – on the surface, not too dissimilar from how it looks today, 25+ years later – but also seemed fairly slow and buggy. I took a "Flower Power" iMac banner – yes, the banner, not the Mac – home with me.
While I didn't go to the midnight launch of Windows XP in 2001, I did buy it on day one. And Best Buy had a launch day deal where you got a free MP3 player with the purchase. It was the Intel Personal Audio Player 3000. Yes, my first MP3 player was not an iPod, but rather was made by Intel. Yes, Intel!
Amazingly, this was just two days after that original iPod was announced on stage by Steve Jobs.2 I remember thinking it was strange that Apple was making such a big bet on a music player.
It was not strange.
Like so many, that ended up being my entry point into the Apple ecosystem. The year was now 2004 and I had just graduated from college. I would be driving all the way across the country by myself. The nearly 2,400 mile, 10-state journey would take about 35 hours spread over a few days. I needed something to kill the time. Like, say, a thousand songs in my pocket.
Technically, by then, it was far more than 1,000, more like 10,000, as I bought the 40GB fourth-generation iPod for $399. And technically those songs weren't in my pocket, but attached to some crappy third-party FM transmitter which required a station change every few hundred miles due to radio interference. But my god was that device glorious. It stored every song I owned!3 It made my old Intel MP3 player – with 64MB of memory – seem like a piece of junk.
If those OS X demos laid the soil, the iPod planted the Apple seed.
I made it to California in no small part thanks to that iPod. And by the time I started working doing various jobs in Hollywood, it was all Apple, all the time. While the Dell laptop that made the journey with me was far faster, I was slowly learning about Apple software that simply wasn't available on a PC. It wasn't one thing, it was a million little touches that only became clear upon using these Apple products regularly: there was care put into the process. These devices were thoughtfully designed. A joy to use. They were everything a PC was not.
Before too long, I broke down, despite being basically broke, and bought an iBook.
No, not one of the fun candy-colored variety – I was a bit too late for those. Instead, I had a pristine, all-white iBook G4. It was tiny – 12.1" screen, just under 5 lbs – and beautiful. My Dell started to gather dust.
That was the last PC I ever owned. The iBook led to an iMac. And that led to a few dozen other Macs over the years, the most recent being the new MacBook Neo, on which I type this right now.
It seems wild to think now that the iPhone launched only a few years after I bought my first iPod. Perhaps because I was still so new to the Apple ecosystem, I also wasn't sold on the latest and greatest – despite Jobs' masterful presentation. Believe it or not, I was basically in the Steve Ballmer camp; $500? For a phone?!
Then I happened to find myself in an Apple Store on launch day in June 2007. I've never so quickly gone from thinking I would not buy something to buying it. Simply holding it for a few seconds was enough. This sounds hyperbolic or ridiculous. But it really was almost like an out-of-body experience. I just knew I was holding the future.
From time to time I'll pick up my iPhone – I've now bought one every single year since 2007, which seems like a problem, but I justify it with the notion that it's the most important device I own and use it far more than anything else, so always having the fastest version seems like a no-brainer – and I still feel this way. I still remember the hours spent every night on my PC waiting for things to load. And the hours spent trying to connect to the internet via dial-up modems. And the internet before there was even the world wide web. This context still makes the iPhone seem like magic. It's hard to imagine it will ever stop feeling that way.
From that Apple IIe in elementary school to now, that's roughly 40 years of Apple usage out of Apple's 50. But it has been heavily back-weighted, with really the past 20 years being all-Apple, all the time. I undoubtedly give Apple more grief these days, which I view as both warranted and an accurate reading of the broader room as they've grown into what has been the largest and arguably most powerful company in the world for much of the past decade. But I still absolutely love the products.
Yes, even the Vision Pro, which I believe Apple erred in releasing when they did. But I was actually using it last night for the first time in a few weeks, and they continue to refine it both software-wise and content-wise, to the point where it actually is getting more impressive with age. Granted, I still wouldn't recommend anyone spend $3,499 on it right now. But you no longer have to squint to see a world in which a far more svelte variety is in the future cards.
My only real concern now for the company is that Apple could get lapped if they don't fully control their own AI destiny. I think the Gemini partnership is a good (and necessary) step. But it probably needs to be a stopgap and bridge to buy them time to get to where they need to be internally. I believe they understand that, but I also believe no one yet fully knows how this will all play out. And it's probably the biggest risk for those next fifty years as the robots take over the world and whatnot.
For now, Apple remains positioned well. With the iPhone as the overall most-used device (that will continue to evolve into the central computing hub as new devices come), and the iPad as the main computer for many people, and with the Mac as the main machine for "real work" for an incredibly still growing number of people. Happy 50th, Apple.
1 Though that same friend did get a Power Mac G4 Cube at one point, which we all agreed looked amazing. That CD slot! But we also agreed it was the most beautiful paperweight ever created. ↩
2 And yes, this was all just a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. ↩
3 We'll use "owned" loosely here. See also: the aforementioned Napster days... ↩