Happy birthday, Apple.

Apple turns 50!

I’ve always been really into computers, and I’ve loved writing code and making computers do things since I was a kid. This infatuation started off innocently enough, with MSWLOGO.

When I was 9 I taught myself BASIC, and a few years later moved on to Scratch. The computer I had at the time, an old Lenovo, wasn’t really equipped to run Scratch, with its whole three gigabytes of RAM and a spinning hard disk. This was still a time when Scratch relied on Flash to work – but I pressed on.

A couple years later I got my first Mac.

My 2017 MacBook Air

Sure, I started with Scratch, but the amount of things I’ve done on this little computer is insane. Nobody really finds the best tool on the first try. Neither does anyone serious about their work use their first set of tools particularly well. No no, obsession doesn’t work like that. Obsession does not make you neatly write down some requirements and use the correct tools for the job, obsession makes you work with whatever’s available, no matter how absurd the gap between theory and reality might be. Of course I knew it was the wrong computer for what I wanted to do with it, but when is this really going to stop an overly ambitious kid?

I should know this, because on this computer, in no particular order, I: ran Blender, edited videos with Final Cut Pro, made music with GarageBand, ran a whole bunch of VMs with VirtualBox, made a bunch of software with a whole catalog’s worth of tools and frameworks and languages, designed useless things with Fusion 360, made schematics with EAGLE, wrote silly apps with Xcode… basically whatever I could get my hands on. I even wrote software to teach kids how to code.¹ I’ve probably forgotten a lot of what I did, really, but you get the idea.

I think it’s worth noting that on multiple occasions this machine was cooled by ice packs placed underneath it. I’ve also probably used it as a space heater on cold winter days.² A friend and I joked often about “Flying Laptop-shaped UFO Sighted: Local Residents Worried”.

Granted, I still think it’s a great laptop. Probably more than it had any right to be.

Sidenote: My original iPad

This was my first “real” Apple device, after the iPod Nano 3G. It was the first time I’d ever interacted with a touch screen, and I still love how iOS 5 looks today.

But arguably what’s more important to me than what I did on these devices is what I learnt from pushing them beyond their limits. Even today, my sense of design, my preference for simple technology, my interest in human-computer interaction, my love for the UNIX philosophy, and rather more important my love for computer science – all stem at least in some way from my using these devices.

It’s hard to understate how much Apple devices have impacted me. I’ve had the privilege to enjoy using a whole bunch of Apple devices: the iPod Nano I slung around as a kid, the first-generation iPad, the iPad Air I used through school (and still do today), the woefully underpowered late-2017 13-inch MacBook Air, its M2 successor (coincidentally the one this post is being written on), my iPhone… certainly more than my fair share of them, to be honest.

So happy birthday, Apple! Here’s to another 50.