Steve Jobs
I never did post an update on my laptop-buying dilemma.
About four weeks ago, I finally made up my mind and bought the 13" MacBook Air, and I'm incredibly happy with that choice. It's a gorgous machine. It's fast, it's sleek, it's beautiful and it's so freaking light. A month later, I'm still amazed when I pick it up. The first couple of times I picked it up, my mind kept blurting, disconcerted, "It's cardboard!" It doesn't feel flimsy like cardboard, but it feels light and thin like cardboard. And in truth, I still have that 'cardboard' moment every couple of days.
I'm a product of a particular generation. I expect computers to take up a certain amount of space and weigh a certain amount. But this computer has been, for me, one of those moments when I realise that I live in the future. I don't have a jetpack, sure, but I have a computer that is amazingly fast, powerful, and sleek, and feels as thin and light as cardboard. How fucking crazy is that?
When I got home with it, I turned it on, I plugged in my backup drive, and the computer migrated all my data and all my settings in ninety minutes while I read stories on AO3. And that was it. I was transitioned. Even my browser history was there. Everything was how I wanted it. I re-opened what I was doing before I went to the store, and got on with it. My old MacBook sat on the floor by my bed for three weeks, because I thought I'd need to open it to get stuff or use something, but I never did. It was most seamless computer transition I've ever made. It was so seamless, in fact, that it actually has been the least exciting computer transition I've ever made. It's hard to explain this, but if you invested less time setting up and settling in on your new computer than you did driving to the store and buying it, some kind of threshold has been passed, you know? It's like when you got bandwidth so fast that you could download music faster than you could play it, or a few years later, when suddenly you could download video faster than you could watch it. The excitement of watching the minutes tick down on a download, or the thrill of spending an entire weekend copying all your old files into shiny new folders and going into all your settings and setting them all again, is something that I'm never going to experience again. In the software as well as the hardware of this machine, I'm realising that there used to be a past that I assumed would always be present, but I live in the future now.
So.
I'm sitting on my couch with the TV on and my cardboard-light laptop on my lap. My iPhone has been tossed onto the couch next to me. I realise now that I literally tossed it, this amazing device, from the kitchen a few metres away, without a thought. I've already used my laptop to accomplish a dozen different things this morning, and my iPhone for a good half-dozen, from texting my friends to checking facebook, to looking at photos of me and my nephews that my sister took with her own iPhone and then transferred to mine, to updating my to-do list, to timing my breakfast steak. This technology has made my life better in so many small, barely measurable ways, and I have used it all morning without thinking about it - it just worked. At heart, that's what Steve Jobs did for me. And he really, actually, did it for me; he was driven to do this for me and millions of people like me, and I know this because if he hadn't been, this morning wouldn't have happened the way it did. From the personal computer, the graphical user interface, through the Macintosh Portable and AppleTalk to the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, Apple didn't invent everything (although it invented a lot), and it didn't get there first with everything (although it got there first a lot), but what it always, always did was relentlessly drive technology towards the experience I had this morning - far-reaching, seamless, life-enhancing, easy.
There's something very rich and very deep about the user experiences created by Apple. There's something very elegant and simple, powerful and balanced. There's a phenomenally thought-out philosophy of form and function that resulted in this amazing device that I used to time my steak while I organised my day, and then tossed across the room to land on the couch and wait for me to join it there. There's something they've achieved that I don't know how to put into words, but when I stop and think about it, it's just profound.
There is so much that is extraordinary about Apple products, about the Apple company, and about Steve Jobs, and an incredible amount to learn from them, but in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death, these are the words that resonated with me the most:
And so more than ever, I find myself inspired. Steve’s untimely death reminds us we can never give up. He could have given up at any point in the seven years since his first cancer diagnosis, but he did not. The vast majority of Apple’s unprecedented resurgence took place while Steve Jobs stared death in the face. How many of us could have lasted this long at all, let alone accomplish all that he did along the way?
Ten years ago today, we still had not yet met the iPod. The last of Steve’s five decades on this Earth ended up being his most accomplished by far. Remember that whenever you think your best days are behind you. We can’t control when our lives begin, and we can’t really control when they end. All we have is what’s in between. Make it count.
Steve did.
This entry was originally posted at dreamwidth (
comments).
About four weeks ago, I finally made up my mind and bought the 13" MacBook Air, and I'm incredibly happy with that choice. It's a gorgous machine. It's fast, it's sleek, it's beautiful and it's so freaking light. A month later, I'm still amazed when I pick it up. The first couple of times I picked it up, my mind kept blurting, disconcerted, "It's cardboard!" It doesn't feel flimsy like cardboard, but it feels light and thin like cardboard. And in truth, I still have that 'cardboard' moment every couple of days.
I'm a product of a particular generation. I expect computers to take up a certain amount of space and weigh a certain amount. But this computer has been, for me, one of those moments when I realise that I live in the future. I don't have a jetpack, sure, but I have a computer that is amazingly fast, powerful, and sleek, and feels as thin and light as cardboard. How fucking crazy is that?
When I got home with it, I turned it on, I plugged in my backup drive, and the computer migrated all my data and all my settings in ninety minutes while I read stories on AO3. And that was it. I was transitioned. Even my browser history was there. Everything was how I wanted it. I re-opened what I was doing before I went to the store, and got on with it. My old MacBook sat on the floor by my bed for three weeks, because I thought I'd need to open it to get stuff or use something, but I never did. It was most seamless computer transition I've ever made. It was so seamless, in fact, that it actually has been the least exciting computer transition I've ever made. It's hard to explain this, but if you invested less time setting up and settling in on your new computer than you did driving to the store and buying it, some kind of threshold has been passed, you know? It's like when you got bandwidth so fast that you could download music faster than you could play it, or a few years later, when suddenly you could download video faster than you could watch it. The excitement of watching the minutes tick down on a download, or the thrill of spending an entire weekend copying all your old files into shiny new folders and going into all your settings and setting them all again, is something that I'm never going to experience again. In the software as well as the hardware of this machine, I'm realising that there used to be a past that I assumed would always be present, but I live in the future now.
So.
I'm sitting on my couch with the TV on and my cardboard-light laptop on my lap. My iPhone has been tossed onto the couch next to me. I realise now that I literally tossed it, this amazing device, from the kitchen a few metres away, without a thought. I've already used my laptop to accomplish a dozen different things this morning, and my iPhone for a good half-dozen, from texting my friends to checking facebook, to looking at photos of me and my nephews that my sister took with her own iPhone and then transferred to mine, to updating my to-do list, to timing my breakfast steak. This technology has made my life better in so many small, barely measurable ways, and I have used it all morning without thinking about it - it just worked. At heart, that's what Steve Jobs did for me. And he really, actually, did it for me; he was driven to do this for me and millions of people like me, and I know this because if he hadn't been, this morning wouldn't have happened the way it did. From the personal computer, the graphical user interface, through the Macintosh Portable and AppleTalk to the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, Apple didn't invent everything (although it invented a lot), and it didn't get there first with everything (although it got there first a lot), but what it always, always did was relentlessly drive technology towards the experience I had this morning - far-reaching, seamless, life-enhancing, easy.
There's something very rich and very deep about the user experiences created by Apple. There's something very elegant and simple, powerful and balanced. There's a phenomenally thought-out philosophy of form and function that resulted in this amazing device that I used to time my steak while I organised my day, and then tossed across the room to land on the couch and wait for me to join it there. There's something they've achieved that I don't know how to put into words, but when I stop and think about it, it's just profound.
There is so much that is extraordinary about Apple products, about the Apple company, and about Steve Jobs, and an incredible amount to learn from them, but in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death, these are the words that resonated with me the most:
And so more than ever, I find myself inspired. Steve’s untimely death reminds us we can never give up. He could have given up at any point in the seven years since his first cancer diagnosis, but he did not. The vast majority of Apple’s unprecedented resurgence took place while Steve Jobs stared death in the face. How many of us could have lasted this long at all, let alone accomplish all that he did along the way?
Ten years ago today, we still had not yet met the iPod. The last of Steve’s five decades on this Earth ended up being his most accomplished by far. Remember that whenever you think your best days are behind you. We can’t control when our lives begin, and we can’t really control when they end. All we have is what’s in between. Make it count.
Steve did.
This entry was originally posted at dreamwidth (
comments).