Stephen Colbert has earned a huge audience and enormous success as a satirist starting with Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and now on his own Colbert Report, both on Comedy Central. He also famously flaunted the as-yet unreleased iPad on the Grammy Awards back in 2010.
In a post over at TechCrunch, they have a chunk of video from the latest Colbert Report in which he memorializes Steve Jobs … or more to the point he looks at it in what it has meant TO HIM. He steps through begging for iPhone and iPad, gloating about having them, the Grammy show, and so on.
But at the end of the clip he changes tone dramatically as he notes that he actually got an email from Jobs the day after the Grammy awards, and then replied right on camera. It was a clip that was funny, but the ending was touching and left the audience in complete silence.
The clip made it clear that in spite of everything else, Colbert had strong feelings about Jobs, Apple and the passing of a legend.
That is why there has been so much coverage these last couple of days – from the very start, Apple has been about PERSONAL technology, about ‘delighting users’ before it became a corporate buzzword. Apple took a world that was marching to the ‘functionality’ beat, and changed it to focus on the user experience. There is a reason that so many Apple fans are so very loyal, and it is NOT because they are ‘stupid’, ‘sheep’, or ‘uninformed’ as so many Windows users in the 90’s and Android users today would have you think:
It is because Apple products invite a personal relationship with technology in a way few others have ever managed.
So to further remember Jobs for that major impact on PERSONAL technology, we thought it would be a great idea to go through OUR OWN history with Apple products. Please chime in with yours in the comments, and I will add my own in there as well!
The first computer I bought myself with my own money was an Apple ][+. Aside from doing school stuff in Visicalc and Apple Writer and connecting to the school mainframe (via 300 baud!), I loved games like Castle Wolfenstein, Balderdash and Wizardry!
My next computer was the ‘Mac Classic’ in 1990. I’d had use of my dad’s SE after college (][+ was long gone), but wanted my own for music etc. Loved it, but boy even then it was limited.
In 1993 we got a Performa 475 (Quadra 605, basically), and a 14.4 modem (later updated to 28.8!) … those were the heady days when Apple tried eWorld … and I gave it a shot, as well as jumping on AOL when they only had 25,000 members before leaving for a real ISP …
Like most of the world, I was PC only for most of the 90’s … I was a gamer, and already had a decent desktop – so I went as far as to buy Cakewalk and transitioned my home music studio to PC!
Oh – but in 1997 I *did* buy the Newton MP2000, perhaps the greatest PDA ever (yes, I waited until they worked the bugs out), and updated in 1998 to the MP2100 … and still have it lying around somewhere …
My next Mac was in 2000, when I bought the ‘Pismo’ Powerbook G3, which I then sold the following year to buy the new ‘Titanium’ Powerbook G4. That was one of my all-time favorite computers. Then I got the ‘AlBook’ 15″, and then later grabbed the 12″ Powerbook which I loved!
I have had pretty much every other generation since then – I still have a Core2Duo Macbook Pro 15″ from 2008 that my kids use (battery is useless), but my main computer now is a new 15″ Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM and Quad-Core i7. It is a beast!
Aside from the Newton, I have also had more than my share of iPods (did a post on that here – http://www.geardiary.com/2010/12/22/music-diary-notes-apple-has-a-gift-tree-i-have-an-ipod-tree/). I had the original 5GB (still do!), then waited and got the 40GB with the ‘touch wheel’ and buttons below the screen … which is still in my car! I got my wife an iPod Mini and later a 8GB Nano (fatty), which she still happily uses! My kids got 4GB Nano (also fat ones), then later my younger son bought a 3rd Gen 8GB Touch and we just got my older son a 32GB 4th gen Touch. I also had a 32GB 1st gen Touch and now have a 32GB 4th gen Touch.
I grabbed an iPad when it first came out, and now live my daily life through my iPad 2, counting it as one of the best products I have ever owned – part laptop, part iPod, part game system, part movie theater, part ebook, and so on.
As I look back, there are two stages in my ‘Apple Life’ – early on I depended on Apple products for a few core things. Then as the company lost its’ way I left it behind, but after Steve Jobs returned and the company refocused on delivering great products that felt like a great value for me … I started buying more than ever before.