It was the year 2000 and I was still on Christmas vacation at my Grandmother’s house in Florida. I booted up her Windows 98 PC and spent all day downloading Quicktime 4 on her dial-up connection. The Apple Event was going to be on the next day and I had to catch it! When I fired up the video stream, all I could see was pixelation as Steve took the stage in San Francisco and welcomed everyone to Macworld. I frantically quit Quicktime and switched to the audio only stream and sat glued as the voice broke up from time to time and buffered. I was listening to Steve Jobs live through the Internet as he unveiled the next big thing. I didn’t have Internet at my home so I had to wait for that months’ issue of MacMall to come to my door or I’d beg my mom to buy me a copy of Macworld Magazine just so I could see what they thought of iTools or the latest iBooks and their review of OS 10.1 and iTunes 2.0. Was the iPod worth it? Did the click wheel work as Phil Schiller had demoed? Was there really a “megahertz myth” between Apple’s Motorola G4 and Intel’s Pentium 4?
Fast forward to 2003 and I skipped my morning classes to watch the keynote from our school library. This was when Apple was still streaming events. I held my white headphones close as Steve detailed the new PowerBooks and iPod mini and explained the power of Apple’s G4 iMac. For WWDC that year, I had to use a computer at the library to refresh Macrumors constantly. It was summer break so I couldn’t go to school to get the latest Apple news and I still only had marginally okay dial-up at home. It was shared with our home phone line so I couldn’t be on fore more than 15 minutes. This is mostly why I’m so addicted to desktop apps these days and despise cloud based technology. Growing up, I had to download news to NetNewsWire, open multiple forum threads on MacRumors & Spymac and sync my email, then I’d go to my room and reply to the forum threads, read news, blog about that news, reply to emails and then sign back on for 15 minutes to submit all of the stuff I had previously worked on. I had a nice, well equipped iBook at the time but we just couldn’t afford DSL so dial-up was my only option. Those summers, I spent a lot of time at the library for faster connections. I’d sit at the library so long that my butt would start to hurt and the employees would come by to tell me they were closing. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was already 9PM. I was living at the library so I could feed my Macintosh hunger.
After graduating high school, I got a job at Apple and could get Apple news at the store. Being at the Apple Store when steve was keynoting was always the best. One of my co-workers was sobbing on our retail floor to the point of customers leaving in disgust after Apple announced they were switching to Intel. His black shirt was covered in tears and sweat and after punching boxes in the back room, he was asked to go home for the day. All of us felt a bit sad but I changed the ringtone of my Motorola ROKR E1 (the first iTunes phone) to the Intel theme for a few weeks just to piss off friends.
In 2006, at the age of 19, I finally moved out of the house and got DSL at my new place. Of course, this was long after Apple stopped streaming keynotes but, at this point, I was going to every Apple event in person on press credentials. I saw Steve Jobs live and in person from the 20th-50th row nearly 25 times since 2003. It was amazing to be a part of the Apple community for so long. I’m in a movie, a few Macintosh magazine articles, i was featured in some ads for a few companies I liked and linked to by all of the largest blogs in the Apple space including daring fireball, macworld, tuaw, techcrunch, Thinksecret, Appleinsider, macrumors and more.
In 2010, I watched my first streaming Apple announcement in a very long time. Not living in San Francisco anymore, I couldn’t hop on a plane for every little Apple event in Cupertino but, thanks to the iPad, I could watch the events live via their h.264 Quicktime stream. This made me happy and easily was far better than live blogging from Mac news sites. Seeing Steve in person and getting a handshake here and there was far better…obviously.
Today, it’s 2011 and I’m sitting on my couch drinking tea with my MacBook in my lap. The great thing about this year is that, on my huge Sony LCD television, I’m streaming the Apple Keynote that took place yesterday on my AppleTV. No holding an iPad, no constant refreshing of Macrumors for the latest news and no flight to San Francisco and definitely no crappy 28k audio only stream on my grandmother’s Windows 98 PC.
It’s breathtaking that in 10 years, the way I consume Apple news has changed so much and I feel so lucky that things like this have evolved so perfectly. To you youngsters out there, you have no idea how good you have it. No more audio stream and then waiting 45 days to see what Macworld Magazine has to say. You get the analysis instantly in full-HD with a buy now button. Man, what a world we live in.