Today would have been the 57th birthday of one of the greatest innovators the world has ever known. I like many others, never had the opportunity to meet Steve but his vision had a major effect on my life. Like many people my age I was first fascinated by the products before I was fascinated by Steve.
The first Apple products I encountered were the Macs used in my elementary school’s Macs in the early to mid 90’s. They were probably Quadras that were eventually replaced by Performas, I cannot remember at this time, and let’s be honest they weren’t memorable products. In that time there were so many Macs with different model numbers and their product lines were a total mess. Even still, I think there was a bit of Steve’s touch to these devices in that they looked better than the Windows boxes of the day. Take for instance the Quadra 605, it looked pretty good for it’s time. I cannot attest to the reliability of such devices, but they never felt laggy.
Around this time my family bought their first computer, an IBM Aptiva with Windows 95 (my research shows it may have been an Aptiva 2168-M40, because of processor speed). It had a then top of the line 75Mhz processor, or at least it was the fastest IBM PC in the store, and was far above anything in the Mac section. Besides, Windows 95 was the future. It had major success right out of the gate and dwarfed Apple’s Mac marketshare almost instantly. All the best programs (my dad was going back to college at the time) and games (my brother and I were 8 and 13 years old at the time) were going to come out for Windows, there was no advantage to getting the Mac. We get home, not knowing a thing about computers other than that we just bought the best (and most expensive) one at the store, and quickly got to connecting everything and trying to get everything to install. It wasn’t a difficult process but it took long. The sound the processor made when doing just simple tasks like opening a document folder, was really loud. Opening a folder wasn’t just loud though, it was slow. The “hourglass” was visible more often than the arrow, and we seemed to try to convince ourselves that it was a good decision. “Oh it’s really fast” we’d say when simple things like hitting the Start button worked like they were supposed to. And when installing a program like a simple children’s game took long we comforted ourselves by saying “well at least we didn’t get a cheaper computer it would have take even longer!” And this was pretty much our life with Windows from then on.
We got that Aptiva on a weekend, and the following Monday going back to school, I bragged in my journal about the computer we had just gotten. The teacher wrote in a comment “I’m so jealous!” Sometime that week we had computer class (essentially Mario Teaches Typing). The Macs in that classroom were inferior to my Aptiva, but they never felt as slow. 8 year old me knew something was up but didn’t know what. Later that year the computer teacher told us that we were going to upgrade our computers. Although I was a total nerd, I was never the best in computer class, and was pretty nervous of what “upgrading” entailed. Although I bragged about the IBM, I never touched it. It was too fickle. It made noise and froze often. the teachers first warning to us was to follow the instruction he gave, and that the instructions weren’t hard but starting over would be difficult because there would be nothing on the computer after turning it off. Anyway. Upgrading apparently entailed screens with a 2-D man asking questions and us hitting “Yes” or “No”. Before we knew it we were done, and everything looked, well, like normal. It took less than the 45 minutes between bells and felt like we did nothing at all. Only until recently did I realize what me and a class full of 8 year olds (many with no computer at home) had done: we installed System 7.5 from scratch.
Flash forward to 2000. My dad got me an iMac DV+ (with a matching printer!) for reasons that remain a mystery to me to this day. I never really wanted a Mac. If I wanted anything, it was a Windows PC so I could play games on it. The iMac was relegated to homework duty and the occasional game of Nanosaur and Bugdom. The Windows PC (by then it was an updated IBM Aptiva running Windows 98 that wasn’t as finicky) did everything though: homework, spreadsheets, gaming, web browsing and IM. Perhaps because it did everything it also caught everything: viruses, trojans, malware, blue screens you name it, it got it. The custom build that replaced, was faster and would go on to run Windows XP but eventually succumbed to similar problems and poor drivers to boot. The iMac was rock solid and we could browse the web without worry. Slowly but surely I was falling in love. I put up a last stand in 2004, I got a Windows laptop (Sony Vaio TR3A, an awesome laptop) and while it wasn’t bad it lacked the perfection of my iMac. It too got malware occasionally, and the build quality just wasn’t quite there. Installing free apps, even from CNET at times proved perilous. A few months later I would get my first iPod, an iPod Photo. That is when I decided I could not deny it. I wanted to go Mac.
In the summer of 2005, I was entering university and attended my first orientation. During that orientation we read the text to Steve Job’s Stanford Commencement speech given just a month and a half earlier, and were asked to write our thoughts on it. I have no idea what my written response was and didn’t think much of the speech even knowing Jobs was CEO of Apple, a company I was slowly falling for. Later in life I would come to obsessively watch his keynotes and product introductions. Watching keynotes for products that were several years old and yet you could still feel their magic.
The iMac was starting to show it’s age. The more I loved my iPod the more music I crammed into its hard drive. The more I played with Mac OS the more applications I would install just to try out. I wasn’t completely a techy then but I was getting there. Eventually I would have to expand. I researched heavily what my options were and decided it would be most cost effective to get a hard drive and external enclosure (firewire, natch). Got a hard drive and screwed it into the enclosure, messed with iTunes settings and voila my storage problem was solved! The more I was able to play with it the more I came to appreciate Mac OS and Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive.. It all just seemed so genius. Soon that didn’t become enough things had to be a little more perfect and I gathered my courage and decided it was time to crack that iMac open and replace the drive. I did it using tutorials from iFixit. The internals were amazing, unlike anything I had seen until that point, everything so thought out. My iMac with that upgrade and my increased appreciation for its design, reached “perfection” in my eyes. That was my full blown communion in to the tech world. I’ve since given Powerbooks, iBooks and G4 Cubes new leases on life, and still have a desire to fix even more. And to this day I try to scratch that itch to tinker with things and make them ever closer to “perfect”.
When Steve passed I first heard by way of Twitter on an HTC Sensation running Android. I do have a bit of guilt in that sense because I didn’t learn of his passing through a device that he touched. Not directly at least, since without his influence the device I was using probably wouldn’t even exist. However there is one thing I don’t regret from that moment. My wife and I were preparing to bathe our newborn son, and I think to an extent it made the moment a bit deeper. Someone once said that new life makes losing life easier to understand, and I kind of agreed in that moment. It made it all the more profound: life, death, and technology and information in between. I’m sure Steve would have appreciated it.
