My 26 out of 50 years of Apple

In preparing for this post, I went through the archives and I don’t have a picture of my first Mac. It was a Macintosh LC III which everyone referred to as “low cost” and I got it as a gift from a friend of the family in 1999. This computer ceased production in 1994 and had a 25Mhz processor and System 7. I purchased RAM and a larger hard disk and I used MacPaint primarily. We had a Windows PC in the house but I preferred using the Mac. I spent 1999-2002 reading Macintosh magazines at Barnes & Noble, cutting lawns, doing odd jobs and saving up to buy an Apple computer.

Why Apple? I was a creative child and even though I was only 13 years old, I knew Macs were different. They were stylish, well-built, used by smart people and more counter-culture than boring PCs. I liked that they were the underdog and I loved the products like the G4 Cube, PowerMac, tangerine iBook and other products. With a hoard of Mac shareware on floppy and CD disks from years of buying magazines, I was ready for a new Mac that ran MacOS 9.

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In 2002, I got a digital camera. The LC III couldn’t do much with the photos I was taking on this little Kodak DX6440 so I would check-out iBook G3 233mhz machines from my high school library and edit photos there and save them to a little USB thumb drive. This was an era where there were services you could mail physical photos to a place that would email you back digital copies in lieu of purchasing a scanner and it was great to have a digital camera and upload those images to MySpace and LiveJournal. Here’s the first image I captured on my first digital camera that still lives in Photos.app today:

It was our high school media center with blue iMac G3s that students could use to browse the web and find books and other materials. I preferred the iBook G3s because I could grab them via the pop-out grab handle and work from our sunny quad on the school’s Apple AirPort powered Wi-Fi. We had Wi-Fi and network printers throughout the school that were mostly used by teachers but this lit a fire for me to get my own iBook. I wasn’t a strong writer with pen & paper and knew I could be more efficient on a keyboard.

Around this time, I started writing about technology on my blog. LiveJournal then PMachine then Expression Engine and finally WordPress. I skipped Moveable Type but on 5 different domain names until finally settling on Adam-Jackson.net in 2007 which became AdamChandler.me when I changed my name in 2014. I was passionate about technology and started making a little bit of money blogging on my lunch break at school. My first advertisers were Rad-Tech (still around), SFBags (still around), Acme Bags (defunct) and Marware (defunct).

Christmas of 2002, my grandmother met me halfway and we split $1299 to get an iBook G3. This was a 500Mhz 12″ model with a 20GB spinning disk, 128MB of ram and I spent some savings to purchase an AirPort card for $129.

my dad gifted me an iPod for Christmas and my Digital Hub paired with that Kodak camera was nearly complete.

I was a sophomore in high school and I started bringing my iBook to school after Christmas break. It was me and John Regan as the only two students at school with laptops. His dad gave him a hand-me-down PowerBook G3 Pismo and I was so jealous of his dual batteries and I had the iBook. We used the school WiFi and did all of our assignments in AppleWorks or Office for Mac and would print them off in the teacher work rooms via AppleTalk and turn in crisp, well formatted and clean reports twice as fast as the other kids. We’d then connect via the Apple networking to play multi-player games on the intranet while waiting for the bell to ring. I spent 2-3 hours a day just chatting with John, playing games or poking around the computer in creative ways. My grades didn’t drop, I just became more efficient at getting my work done. the iBook was my bicycle for the mind and I blogged even more!

When I got my first car at 16, it had just one sticker on it, an Apple sticker I bought on eBay:

My at home setup was basic but effective:

and a few months later, my mom picked up an iMac G4 for the house which my sister and I loved using even though it wasn’t ours:

It was now 2004 and I was a senior in high school. I was blogging 2-3 hours a day on MyPersonalGetaway.com about Apple and Macs, reviewing iPods, cases, software and whatever people would send me for free and saving up to go to Macworld Expo. My mom surprised me with a plane ticket to go with the $1000 I had saved up for a hotel. I stayed with a 40 year old man I knew from the SpyMac & MacRumors forums named Craig Contardi and I was just 17 years old. He made it a point to talk to my Mom before agreeing to split a hotel with me and we’d walk from the Tenderloin SF to Moscone center every morning with our coffees.

I had a media badge thanks to my blogging, got to me a lot of Mac celebrities like Christopher Breen, Steve Wozniak, various podcasters / bloggers and authors like Scott Kelby and David Pogue:

The highlight was meeting Steve Jobs even though the camera snapped as soon as he walked away:

Here I was, media badge, blogger, not even 18 yet and I had visited San Francisco for the first time, met a few of my personal celebrities, visited Apple HQ and gotten a taste of the tech world as a kid from Florida who grew up on a farm with a mom and dad who worked general labor jobs. My life was forever changed.

Apple was 28 years old and the Macintosh was 20.

I returned back to Florida not caring at all about graduating from High school in 4 months but instead focused on developing my career around Apple. For the next 22 years I would:

• Start more tech blogs, have some independent writers and grow the empire of my properties like Macworldbound, DailyTechTalk and more
• January 2005, I started hosting events and parties at Macworld, charging admission, getting sponsorships and making this annual event something that made money in addition to my blogging. By day, I delivered windows and doors for a lumber yard / home building company from 5AM to noon so I could blog about Apple in the afternoons
• March 2005, I started working at Apple as an assistant manager of a retail store. They fired me 9 months later because who would have thought fanboys don’t make great employees but I kept blogging in secret and again went deeper into Macworld events in 2006 in addition to going to Macworld Boston
• March March of 2007, my events were huge. Hundreds of people at my Macworld parties, tours, keynote lineups and I was interviewed for MacHeads the movie as one of their 3 featured players
• Sometime in here, I upgraded to an 800Mhz iBook G4
• By March of 2008, I was moving to San Francisco to join the tech space officially and begin working at startups. I had gone from delivery driver to Apple employee to running an IT services company as the IT supervisor in charge of remote support and schedule management for 6 technicians in north florida.
• In the middle, I upgraded to a Core2Duo MacBook 13″ and got more stuff to attach to it
• I quit that job, sold everything except for the contents of an 80 liter dry bag and flew to SF to start my new life

Here are a few choice photos from that era (2004-2006) including tech setups, work, trips to Boston, San Francisco, New York, Apple Store, friends, adventures and more all surrounding Apple. I was a full on fanboy at this point.

In 2008, the iPhone was announced and I was there for the announcement and then I bought one on launch day:

…after, I also upgraded to a 15″ Core2Duo PowerBook:

When living in San Francisco, my love of Apple products did not falter. While I was working for Startups, I continued to put a lot of time and money into writing about Apple (something I was no longer doing for money after removing all ads from my site and blogging for the fun of it), but also using Macs to be creative and make money in new ways —business.

Also when Macworld SF was cancelled after a short stint at iWorld, I feel like a piece of that community died with it.

Mac User Groups (MUGs) were all but gone (although bless Chuck Joiner’s heart for keeping the MugCenter alive) – https://mugcenter.com

Then I attended WWDC 2010 which was my last Apple Event ever…as in ever. No more Mac user groups, Apple Events, parties, conferences. That was that.

I moved to New Hampshire in 2010, joined TomTom and in 2012, Apple became our client and I was asked to live in Cupertino for a month at a time every other month for a year to work on projects supporting Apple Maps:

From that point on, I continued to purchase Macs…LOTS of Macs and other Apple devices:

and Visiting a LOT of Apple Stores. I’ve visited over 70 so far in 8 different countries.

But since moving to New Hampshire in 2010 and after my time supporting Apple Maps in 2016 and then the move to Charlotte after getting into Volkswagen Auto Cross, then motorcycles and also collecting/trading/rating beer, I sort of ascended Apple Fanboy and became someone who leverages Apple products to make money. I don’t shy away from spending $6000 on a MacBook Pro because over 5 years, I will make a LOT more than that on working through hat computer. Apple products allow me to create, profit, express myself and they are also entertainment. I started my life as an Apple fanboy but now I just love Apple products because they enable me to do my best work.

The love isn’t lost but it’s changed into something different. A shiny beautiful box to the best way for me to get things done and be productive.

What started out as 26 of the last years with Apple in my life (of their total of 50 as a company) has now transitioned into more of how I grew and changed and became an adult (now at 39 years old) and through every moment of my growth as a person, Apple was a big part of it.

I really don’t know what’s in Apple’s next 50 years. I’ll be 89 years old on that occasion if I make it that far.

In going through these photos, I found a few that Heather took of me on our trip to Cupertino in 2021. It was the first time I had visited Apple Park and I kept thinking about watching the Cupertino city hall livestream as Steve talked about this amazing new headquarters and all of the work that went into it and how I was there when he asked for Cupertino’s approval and here I was standing in Apple Park and Steve wasn’t. Jon Rubinstein is gone, Steve, Sir Jony, Bertrard, Avie and many more leaders have left. Apple was still here and larger than ever.

Despite spending a full day going through and finding all of these photos, my favorite photo is the one below. Taken with an iPhone 17 Pro Max in Portrait mode by my wife. I’ve never stopped loving Apple. I’ve never stopped being a fanboy but….I think I’m a bigger fan of and have a bigger love in my heart every time I look at my daughter. Thanks Apple for enabling us to capture these moments for for creating tools that keep me employed and providing for my family:

PS: In case anyone is wondering, my favorite Apple product of all time? Whatever I’m currently using. I don’t get sentimental about devices I’ve owned. They get sold as soon as I’m done with them. The M5 Max MacBook Pro and iPhone 17 Pro are remarkable devices. Whatever replaces them will be even better.