One word, iPad. Ok, two words, iPad mini.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was a vehement iThing detractor. I sneered at Apple snobs, with their smug, turtlenecked design elitism. I actively advocated designing on any other platform, just because I despised the position, taken by a large part of the creative industry, that you needed a Mac in order to be taken seriously. Like the brand of tool you use could somehow improve your essential creativity. I saw Apple computers as the tool of choice for all those who needed the capabilities afforded by modern computing but were too scared or lazy to get their hands dirty with the mud of computers themselves. Posh toys for the brainless was my mantra and I secretly sneered it at everyone I saw drawing pretty pictures on their idiotic silver boxes.
Then one day, something odd happened. Something that turned my computer bigotry on its entrenched head. I met a programmer, a coding genius, a man who’s ninja like computing skills were to become the stuff of legend, in short the Kung Fu Panda of programming – or simply, Josh.
And, he used a Mac.
How could this be? Surely Macs were for flakey creatives. Real men – and design mavericks like me in defiance of the convention – used PCs.
But then, as I began to work more closely with Josh, I began to notice something. Every day he would come into work, calmly start up his mac and start working. This differed somewhat from my routine:
I would come into work; switch on my Dell; go and make a coffee; come back to check the pc had not crashed on boot up; wait for the various startup applications to populate the status bar; run a virus scan; go back to the coffee; check the screen again; quarantine the virus attacks; finally sit down; boot up photoshop; wait; wait; start doing some work; …… scream as I rebooted my crashed machine. And that was a pretty average to good day. On a really bad day I would be recovering hard drives or ripping cards out of motherboards to get them to work.
So that was it, I realised. The secret to mac user serenity. They just work. I had always said that at least you can ‘work under the bonnet’ on a pc. I hadn’t considered the joy of not having to.
It wasn’t long before I got my first (second hand) Macbook Pro.
I was an instant convert. Although I have avoided becoming a Mac Nazi, I am now a bone-fide Mac fan-boy. And, today saw me complete my conversion, as I completed my set. Today, to go with my 27″ iMac, my Retina Macbook Pro and my iPhone, I bought an iPad mini.
Job done.
All hail Steve Jobs (RIP)