The Story of my Mac

When Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh 30 years ago — or, perhaps, should I say the Macintosh introduced itself — the world was a different place. No one in the audience was carrying a phone in their pocket, and few in attendance likely used a computer daily. There was no internet as we know it today, no live tweeting of the keynote. Photos of the event were shot on film, and Jobs himself likely listened to music on a cassette tape on the way home.

It was a different world.

Bill Gates’ stated dream of “a computer on every desk and in every home” was still a dream, a seemingly far-fetched one at that. And he, along with IBM and the rest of the industry, was dreaming of that in terms of DOS PCs on every desk.

So Steve Jobs and the incredible Macintosh team shipped a computer that could introduce itself, one that could be a canvas for artists, a bicycle for the mind.

The Mac has never taken over PC sales in marketshare. But most popular? That’d be easy to argue. They — along with the NeXT computers that formed the foundation for today’s Macs — have always been the aspirational machines that you aspired to own, that other tech companies aspired to copy.

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I’ve a confession to make: I’ve only been using a Mac for three years now. It’s strange to say, perhaps, since my day job was being the editor of Mac.AppStorm for the past two years, writing about the latest and greatest Mac apps from a relatively shorter perspective than many. My first Mac was a 2011 Mac Mini, followed the next year by a mid-2012 MacBook Air — the Mac that’s still my work machine today. And yet, that was far from my first experience with Apple’s products.

The first memory I have of Apple would be of an aging Apple repair center in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, with a fading classic rainbow Apple logo. That, along with grocery store banners about donating “Apples for Students”, was the only Jobs influence I can remember for the first 10 years of my life. My dad had an Amiga, which I can remember having to swap floppies while it was booting, and playing Marble Madness and some basketball game. That was followed by a Windows ’95 PC, with a stack of floppies to install Office, and an Aol. internet connection that proved more trouble than it was worth. Personal computers were too much trouble — heavy and cumbersome — and seemed far more at home at Dad’s office.

When I was 10, though, I remember our neighbor had an original bondi blue iMac, and that computer fascinated me. I never used it, but who wouldn’t be interested in a translucent, colorful computer that was easily portable? And then, a few years later, my grandfather got an iMac G4 — the most stunning Mac ever, in my opinion. It was simply incredible that the Mac could be that much nicer than any PC.

In the mean time, though, I’d gotten my own hands-on experience with some of Apple’s magic, by means of a Newton Messagepad 2000 my uncle gave me in, incidentally, 2000. That little machine wasn’t the most useful, perhaps, but I kept a journal on it, learned to write in Graffiti, and discovered the tiny touches I’d see again later on the Mac and in iOS — the poof of smoke when you erase something, just as you see when you drag a file off your dock on your Mac, and the suck-into-trashcan animation that was standard in Mail and Notes through iOS 6.

My first computer of my own was a Compaq LTE laptop, which I used to type papers in Word through 2007 when I finally purchased my own PC — a custom-built PC for $500 with a student-discount copy of Windows Vista and Office 2007. Vista didn’t give me as many headaches as most people complained about, but it also didn’t give me anything to be that excited about. Microsoft had hyped Vista as much as possible, and yet, when all was said and done, there was still next-to-no new indie software on Windows. I’d envy Notational Velocity and Keynote, Quicksilver and Marsedit and Writeroom — there was always new software to be excited about, but it was always on the Mac, not the PC.

And so, my original dream of buying a Mac lingered. College finances didn’t permit it, so I’d play with Linux, tweaking it to look like a Mac — but that was never as fun, and there still weren’t exciting new indie apps there, either. I was likely one of the very few users of Safari for PCs, just because it brought the Mac look and feel to a little corner of my PC. And that only increased my Mac envy, with its classic Mac-style slide-out dialogs and auto-resizing settings window. I’d read everything on Folklore.org, watch Steve Jobs keynotes, and attempt to Hackintosh my PC despite my hardware being wildly unsupported. And finally, when I figured out I could get OS X to run fine — if somewhat slow — in VirtualBox, I was hooked. I, at long last, had Notational Velocity, and Spotlight search, and Helvetica.

Along the way, I picked up a 3rd Gen iPod Touch, won an iPad 1 (which held me off from buying a MacBook right off, since I used it as my on-the-go computer for my last year of college), switched to an Apple wireless keyboard (yes, on the PC), and finally bought my first Mac Mini. It was, in true form, the perfect switcher’s Mac, since it worked with my existing monitor and carried a price tag that was easier to justify.

After years of flakey sound, driver errors, dead video cards, annual DVD drive replacements, and countless lost hours to updates, the Mac really did just work. Installing a program took one click, not a mirage of confusing dialogs. Sleep mode actually worked. The little things — the beautiful selection of fonts, the copy of “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” on TextEdit’s icon, the text editing keyboard shortcuts, the ubiquitous spell check and dictionary, the text substitutions and transformations, the power of Spotlight and its built-in calculator and Quick Look — themselves made the Mac so much better than any PC, it’d be impossible to imagine using anything else. I mean, the Mac could read Thai out loud, of all things. It was incredible.

Apple isn’t perfect, and neither are their products. It’s insane, perhaps, to wax poetic about a corporation’s products. And yet, the Mac, with its deep hardware and software integration and dozens of tiny things that truly make your life and work better, is something it’s easy to get attached to. I only wish I’d switched sooner.

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When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, ushering in Apple’s new age by, incidentally, killing off the very machine that introduced me to Apple, the company’s future was far from certain. He cut to the bone, trimmed Apple’s product lineup, and focused resources on the design-led iMac. At the same time, he commissioned a new ad campaign: the “Think Different” campaign with its “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” commercials — ones that were originally to be narrated by Jobs himself. They defined Apple as the company that made machines for the thinkers and changers, the scientists and artists and musicians and leaders that make our world great. At its close, it said:

“While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

And that was Steve Jobs and the Macintosh team. They were crazy enough to think their little computer could change the world. 30 years later, I happen to think they were right, and am rather glad they were crazy enough to think outside the beige box.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.