The Apple of My Eye

For many years I regarded Apple as a cult. People who bought the company's machines seemed to be a large group of devoted followers. A colleague at work could often be seen reading a trade publication called MacAddict (later MacLife). It was my sense that Apple had a relatively small share of the personal computing market, but what it lacked in market share was overshadowed by the passion of those who believed in the company and its products.

My experience with personal computing was limited to personal computers - by which I mean the original IBM PC, my first one, acquired in the early 80s, and its descendants. The early PCs were not what I would later call user-friendly. Everything I wanted the computer to do had to be entered as a command from the keyboard.

Meanwhile, a company called Apple was revolutionizing personal computing with something called a graphical user interface, which was remarkably intuitive and easy to learn. Microsoft was trying to stake out its own territory with the earliest versions of Windows, but it seemed Windows was a poor attempt to make the Microsoft operating system look and work like the Macintosh OS, and it fell far short.

Each version of Windows seemed to bring with it new maddening flaws, while each new version of the Mac OS seemed a real advance over the last, and the Mac always functioned beautifully, never inciting its users, with infuriating error messages, to throw it out of the window of an apartment on an upper floor. But I didn't know about any of that. I plodded along using Windows-based computers (after I traded "up" from my original IBM PC), unaware that it wasn't really necessary for my computer to enrage me periodically.

I came late (2005) to the everyone-owns-a-laptop trend. It was a Toshiba PC running Windows XP. It lasted a bit more than four years. Early on it had a hard drive failure, but the data turned out to be salvageable, and a new hard drive kept it going another few years before it started doing things that made me wonder if I could find an exorcist for a computer. By then I had taken note that more and more of my friends were using the MacBook. In June of 2009 my older daughter bought one. Two months later my Toshiba PC died, and Diana enthusiastically endorsed the idea of replacing it with the latest MacBook Pro.

More than two years later I am pleased to report that there may be no such thing as "Error Message Withdrawal Syndrome." I can't really be sure about that, because while I never get error messages on my Mac, I still use Windows-based computers at work, and they fill the void - some days often enough to make me glad I don't have ready access to a sledge hammer, because I'd probably get fired, or at least tranquilized.

Steve Jobs, the driving force, the genius, the wizard at Apple, is gone now. And everyone is talking and writing about him and his extraordinary contributions. He changed the world, they say. He was the most important force in technological advancement since Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. He believed that the machines his company built should be physically beautiful and function flawlessly, with seamless integration of software and hardware. He was not interested in giving his customers what they wanted. Like ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, whose famous statement (about skating to where the puck was going to be) Jobs liked to quote, his approach was that Apple should build the things its customers would want if they could envision them, and they would prove him right by buying Apple's new products once they learned about them.

I've always been a bit - sometimes more than a bit - behind the curve. Never an early adopter. When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, I sat back and watched - at least partly because I was a loyal customer of a wireless carrier that didn't offer it. And the most interesting part of watching was how other players strove mightily to bring to market something that could compete with the iPhone. The first device that was a legitimate contender, I think, was the Droid X. From there the proliferation of 4G smartphones that offer serious competition for the iPhone just took off.

Some day I may buy a tablet, either an iPAD or one of its competitors, if I ever become convinced that a device that falls somewhere between my MacBook Pro and my smartphone would fill a void that I currently do not perceive. We shall see. My future smartphones may be iPhones, or they may (like my Droid Bionic) be competitors that measure up. After two-plus years with a Mac, I cannot imagine ever buying another Windows-based computer.

I suspect this is the contribution made by Steve Jobs for which I will always be most grateful: producing machines that show what the state of the art can be and driving the competition to try to emulate his vision of perfection.

Thanks, Steve.