I Made This on a Mac

Thoughts on inspiration and creation, 10 years after we lost Steve Jobs

I made this on a Mac.

That statement is pretty common these days. But there was a time I would have never imagined creating something on a computer. Sure, I had some friends type up one of my essays or a college application on their parents’ Compaq computer, the glowing green letters clicking across a deep black square. They typed. My words came out of the printer. But it wasn’t creation. It was typing. The actual creation couldn’t be done on such an uninspiring, lifeless machine.

When it came to creating, I stuck with my ballpoint pen and a pad of lined paper. That’s how it was until the ’80s when I got my first Mac and I saw how a computer could be a tool so powerful and yet so unobtrusive that it almost felt like an extension of myself. It was easier to use. It looked better on my desk. It was better. It was made by someone who cared that it was better.

I got rid of my pens. Everything I created from then on, I created on my Mac.

It seems so obvious now. Yeah, of course. You create stuff on your Mac. But back then, the people to whom that seemed obvious were part of a tiny club. We only made up a couple percent of computer users. We’d see each other at small, dank Mac stores and wonder…