STEVE JOBS CHANGED MY LIFE

My parents were PC folks (still are) so I spent most of the 1980s, staring at a profoundly ugly, tan IBM computer and jealous of my cousin who had an Apple IIe. When I went off to college in 1990 though, I broke out and got my first Mac, one of the compact series with its 20MB of hard drive memory ¹

In the time since, I’ve owned somewhere around…8 other Macs, to say nothing of iPhones and iPads. And in thinking about how the creations of Jobs and Woz have intersected with my life, I realized that since 1990, an Apple product has been behind:

• every piece of journalism andscholarship I’ve written as an adult.
• every email, IM or text I’ve ever exchanged in correspondence with friends and peers.
• (almost) every love letter I’ve written.
• every song I’ve ever digitized.
• every blog post I’ve written.
• almost everything that documents the birth and life of my daughter.

Basically, most of the content of my adult life has been created and/or stored on an Apple device. That’s kind of crazy. ²

All I know is that my creative, professional and personal life has been deeply intertwined with craft and vision that Jobs played a heavy hand in. I doubt I’ll ever say that about any other entrepreneur for the remainder of my days. I mourn the passing of a man (too young at 56), celebrate the epoch he helped bring about and I thank him for helping make what I do possible.