Living Where Apple Lives

When I told our family and friends back East that we will be moving to Cupertino, I drew blank stares. Even adding that we will be right next to San Jose did not seem to elucidate matters. But when I said that we will be living where Apple lives, that instantly brought forth congratulations and promises to visit.

In fact, we live less than one mile away from Apple headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop and can easily walk there.  When we drive by on De Anza Boulevard, we see many Apple engineers walking along De Anza sporting their Apple IDs and carrying their MacBooks under their arms. I smile when I see them and confer a silent blessing on these smart young people — I love technology and techies. I can remember back when being at the edge of technology meant carrying around a slide rule and knowing how to keep track of significant digits, or carrying your computer program in a box of IBM punch cards.

I have not always been an Apple fan. During a career in telecommunications (after being a stay-at-home Mom), I’ve had pretty impressive, then state-of-the-art, computers sitting on my desk. Starting out as a computer scientist working in artificial intelligence, I had a Symbolics LISP machine, which then cost about $150,000. Later, as I moved into software development, I had a Sun workstation, which fully loaded was probably over $5,000. As I moved into management, I had a Dell desktop computer, which was probably less than $2,000.  I thought then that Apple was not ready for prime time in the business world. But, Symbolics and Sun are no longer here, Dell is struggling against other low-cost providers, and Apple is aiming to be the largest company in the world!

I was introduced to Apple products via an iPhone my son David presented me with for my birthday two years ago (along with putting me on his plan!) My first comment was that I didn’t need another cell phone, as I already had a Motorola Razor phone, but he insisted and said this was different. How different it was, I discovered! It was not just a phone but a small computer that is super easy to use. Soon I was buying apps sufficient to fill six pages, texting to my grandchildren, reading the New York Times in bed, tracking every penny I spend with iXpenseIt, and getting addicted to several games. I love my iPhone!

When my elderly Dell desktop computer breathed its last (I think it died of a virus it caught while we were away on vacation), I decided to buy an Apple computer. Consulting with my son-in-law Andy, I settled on a beautiful aluminum MacBook Pro. He convinced me to buy the basic model and he upgraded me from 2Gb of RAM to 4 Gbs. After a somewhat slow start, during which I noted all the things that were different from what I was used to in the PC environment, I saw a book, iPhoto '09 for Dummies, at the library and checked it out. Since I am an avid photographer, much of what I do on a computer is related to photography. Don’t let people convince you that you don’t need to read a manual, even for an “intuitive” user interface. Reading a manual (especially one you borrowed from the library and need to return soon) makes you quickly learn the right way to use a program.  

That was two years ago. I have since acquired an iPod, an iPad, and a beautiful 27-inch iMac with a quad-core Intel processor.  I have upgraded from iPhoto to Aperture, switched from Word to Pages and from Powerpoint to Keynote, and am trying to decide if I should buy Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro. In short, I have joined the legions of Apple fans.

So what did Steve Jobs do right at Apple? Stay tuned for a future blog post.