“This Is Not The Computer For You”
Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.
He has decided he’ll be fine.
I can’t imagine a better piece of writing to choose as my first ‘linked list’ item. It resonated with me because, once upon a time, I was that kid.
In anticipation of receiving my first iMac, I downloaded every bit of media I could find — the iMac User Guide, the Boot Camp Guide, the Apple Wireless Keyboard booklet, even a bootleg copy of David Pogue’s ‘Missing Manual’ for Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I synced them onto my iPod touch, and I read them cover to cover on the bus to and from school over the next two weeks. During the first weekend I had the machine, I broke it trying to install Windows, necessitating a restore. A few years later, I burnt out the graphics card when I tried to overclock it. But along the way, I learned how to edit videos, which led to an invitation to join YouTube’s partner program. I learned how to code, which gave me a deep understanding of modern software and the Web, and eventually resulted in me publishing independent software on the App Store and Google Play. And I discovered games like Kerbal Space Program, which reinforced my lifelong love of aviation and spaceflight. All of that was made possible by my iMac.
I still remember that the introduction video for that iMac was set to Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl. Steve Jobs had impeccable taste.
That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.
I was that kid.
He knows it’s probably not the right tool. It doesn’t matter. It never did.
The reviews can tell you what a computer is for. They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.