I consider myself a bit of a medium-term adopter when it comes to technology and never really felt like a ‘fanboy’. Indeed, it took me a long long time to get around to sampling Apple.
My first purchase was a 15GB ipod that a work colleague bought for me on a business trip to the US back in 2003. It had a black and white display, was pretty boxy and a click wheel that really did click when you ran it around.
I quickly ran up more than 15GB of music in iTunes – as everyone at work shared their albums and synched their iTunes libraries. This meant I had to switch sync mode to manual rather than automatic updating of all new material. This became rather time consuming.
I flirted with various incarnations of shuffle based devices when I was into going to the gym before the kids came into our lives, before settling on the 160GB iPod Classic in 2009. The opportunity to listen music, podcasts, my favourite radio shows, audio books and other forms of content was of huge appeal.
More recently I treated myself to a MacBook Pro following a period of self employment, ironically not really used for the video editing and photo retouching work I had planned [but I will at some stage].
Then in January, I brought the iPhone4 into my life giving me tangible and usable internet on the go for the first time in my life.
Oscar, who’s three and a half, loves daddy’s iPod and now watches his programmes on long car journeys. I suspect we’ll introduce an iPad to the home some time soon.
My point is that I’m a mainstream consumer and exactly the type of person I think Apple has worked to nurture. Love it or hate it, Apple products are beautiful. They work, and when they don’t the service is often second to none. Waiting at the Genius Bar is quite unlike any other retail store experience.
So, thank you Steve Jobs for having the vision and passion to deliver products that are crammed full of form and function, and that make life more enriching and more interesting. I think you will be missed and the world is a slightly less creative place today as a result of your passing.
