Computers Are Fun And Useful
Originally Posted: September 4th, 2022
Computers Are Fun And Useful
Every year Apple holds WWDC, their world wide developers conference. The big show is always the keynote, where Apple reveals their plans for upcoming software. If you’re a casual Apple fan, that may be all you care about. If you’re a developer, there’s a ton of additional sessions and new APIs to learn. For a non-developer nerd like me, the best stuff comes after. My favorite thing about WWDC week are all the articles, podcasts, and interviews that come from the event.
One of my favorites every year is John Gruber’s Talk Show live. It has become a tradition. This year Greg Joswiak (SVP of Marketing) and Craig Federighi (SVP of Software Engineering) joined again, the 2nd year in row they have been guests. It is a good interview with a lot of good moments, but my favorite came at the end, when John asked how they originally became interested in computers.
Computers are Fun and Useful
20, 25 years ago I bought a goofy T-shirt, with 80’s-style clip art of a couple of kids at an 80’s-style generic PC. The slogan on t-shirt just said Computers are Fun and Useful …that phrase has been resonating…
…in addition to the fact that the computers are fun and useful, there’s a certain type of person who particularly thinks Apple computers are fun and useful. You said that’s why you came to work at Apple. You weren’t looking for a job in the computer industry, you wanted to get a job at Apple, right? And there was no plan B, because there was nothing else like the Mac.
As a final question I’m just wondering. When was the first time, way back when, when it hit you that Apple computers are different, and that you fell in love with them?
It’s been a few months since I watched this interview, but that phrase is still pinging around my head. Computers are Fun and Useful. I’ve always felt that way, but never really thought about it. For most people, they’re just a tool, a means to an end. Something you have to use to get your work done. An appliance.
I’m the complete opposite. Computers have always been interesting to me. I always want to know how they work and how they could be better. I care about how this model is different from that model, or how this brand does something better than the other. I care a lot about the differences, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a bit of a computer snob. I can’t help it though. For better or worse, the majority of my life revolves around computers.
Ubiquitous computing allows for so much of modern life, and it is easy to take all of this for granted. Sometimes I like to stop and think about how we got here.
My Personal Computing History
Ever since I had the ability to choose, I’ve used a Mac. I haven’t always had the ability to choose, though.
Growing up in the 1990s, my dad was a professional photographer who started his own business. He always used Macs, and I was lucky enough to have Macs in our computer labs in elementary school. I didn’t know that at the time, they were just the computers that were there. I didn’t care about the specifics then, I just wanted to play Oregon Trail or Number Munchers.
I didn’t realize it until much later, but I love to learn how things work, especially any kind of technology. As a kid I was always taking things apart, trying to learn what makes them tick. As I got older, this turned into a fascination with computer history. I still love learning about Xerox PARC, Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, the history of ARPANET, and how we got to the interconnected world we live in now. I also have a huge soft spot for old computer ads and promo materials.
A grove of mainframes and terminals in their natural habitat, circa the mid 20th century.
One of my first computing memories was playing SkiFree on a IBM ThinkPad 700 in “IBM beige”, running Windows 3.1. By modern standards it was a terrible computer. It was a thick and clunky laptop, with a slow, monochrome passive-matrix LCD screen. The ghosting and viewing angles were awful, as was the performance and battery life, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to play SkiFree and have fun.
That laptop was replaced by a series of PowerBooks and Mac clone desktops. I remember this weird beige tower, a UMAX SuperMac. It was the first nice computer we had. I remember playing with the disc drive and the ripples on the plastic on the front side. I liked it because it was fun. My dad liked it because it was useful — it was both cheaper and faster than other Macs at the time.
It wasn’t all good though. We also had some truly dreadful computers, including a parts-bin desktop that a nerdy friend upgraded from Windows 95 to Windows 98. Windows 98 ran like hot garbage. I still hate Windows 98 for what it did to that poor computer. For context, this was the era of America Online trial CDs, and the Internet was more like the Space Jam website than the world-dominating force it is today. Those were good times.
A computer being shockingly fun and useful, circa 1977.
Mac Genesis
Eventually, the UMAX SuperMac and Classic Mac OS left. In its place was the coolest computer I’ve ever seen. This was around 2001, and it was the Titanium PowerBook G4. I’d never seen anything like it. It looked like it was from another planet — a planet with better designers. Jason Snell covered the impact of the PowerBook G4 well in his excellent “20 Macs for 2020” series.
Imagine a slideshow of images of every portable Mac Apple has made, displayed in chronological order. It starts with the Macintosh Portable and ends with two M1 MacBooks.
For a while, the slides are of chunky plastic laptops in light gray, dark gray, and black. The G3 iBook appears briefly to provide some needed color.
And then, 12 years into Apple’s portable Mac journey, you see it. You might want to pause the slides for a moment, because the computer on the screen is undeniably a modern Apple laptop. It’s thin (at least for the time) and boxy and sheathed in silvery metal instead of plastic.
When you resume the slide show, silver metallic laptops will alternate with cheaper plastic models for a little while, but during the final decade of slides, they’ll all settle on this one basic design.
It all started with the Titanium PowerBook G4. But Apple still had a lot to learn.
The PowerBook G4 still looks modern over 20 years later.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the PowerBook G4 started forming my opinion of what computers should be. Beige Macs and PCs seemed so dull and boring in comparison. If the computer is the bicycle of the mind, the PowerBook G4 was a motorcycle. It was undeniably cool. If my dad was a Windows guy, I probably would have thought that Dell or Gateway desktop towers were the way it should be. Thankfully that wasn’t the case.
Another thing that I didn’t notice until later: I was watching one of the greatest turnarounds in business history. The NeXT acquisition and return of Steve Jobs lead to many important moments in my computing life, and a lot of fun and useful computers along the way. The redemption arc of Apple from the lows of the mid-90s to the peak of the iPhone is astonishing. I’m lucky that I was able to witness it first hand, in real time.
Eventually, I was old enough to have my own computer. Because I was a fool and my mom thought Macs were too expensive, I convinced her to buy a cheap Dell laptop. 4 broken power supplies and one iPhone announcement later, we replaced it with a white plastic MacBook. This was November 2007, right after Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard came out.
My sister thought it would be funny to race home from school and take it out of the box before I could open it, so that I would open an empty box. I am still thoroughly not amused by that. Minor sibling annoyances aside, I remember the video that played when you first turned the computer on. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. A working (and magnetic!) power supply was pretty cool too. I loved that computer.
At the time, the difference between a typical PC and a Mac was huge. Windows was in the Vista era, full of frustrating security popups and slow performance. After the Intel transition, Mac hardware was competitive, and in some areas they were far ahead of most PC vendors. They got so many things right — the 16:10 screen ratio, the full-size keyboard, MagSafe, the overall design, the standby battery life and sleep mode.
For me, the biggest difference was the multi-touch trackpad. It was the first time I wasn’t annoyed by a pointing device, and it felt like a natural extension of my hand. Swiping around with gestures, using Exposé and spaces, and smooth scrolling with two fingers made the Mac fit me in a way no other computer had before. It wasn’t just better than the Dell it replaced, it was actually fun to use.
Mac software was also a big deal to me. I spent countless hours playing with Photo Booth, Garageband, iMovie, and all the other great, free applications that were included. Opening that MacBook for the first time and seeing that video was the moment I knew I was an Apple guy. I’d suffered through Windows and dealt with the computers I had available, but I knew when I was able to choose it would have to be a Mac. 14 years later and here we are.
Modern Era
Since then, I’ve owned a long list of mostly MacBooks, with an occasional Mac mini or MacBook Air along the way. Currently, a 14-inch MacBook Pro is my main computer, and I am surrounded by others. I have a computer in my pocket, one for my wrist, and one for each of my ears. I have computers I can speak to, and ones that are always silently working on my behalf. I am surrounded by ambient computing, as many of us are.
What kind of man owns his own computer?
For most sane people, this is overkill. I’m well aware I don’t need this many computers, and I could do everything I do on a single, older, cheaper computer. But computers are how I do my work, and how I spend a lot of my free time. I care a lot about quality. That’s why I was willing to invest so much of my personal time and money into such a ridiculous collection.
While computers now are infinitely more powerful and more useful, I’m not sure if they will ever be more fun than they were when I was a kid, playing SkiFree and accidentally deleting system files on Windows 3.1.
