How Steve Jobs got me through grad school.

Will is an engineer. I am a designer. When we first got married, I was a Mac, he was a PC *. My goal was to change that.

In February 2004 while I was finalizing grad school applications, he switched, ditching his ugly Dell for a 17″ aluminum PowerBook. He used it for a few months, but due to his PC-centric job and a persistent case of cognitive dissonance and misaligned mental models, he gave up. That summer, ownership transferred to me. Hello, beautiful Macintosh! Perfect timing, for I was just about to enter a period of my life when I would need a reliable computer more than ever.

Me in my Seattle living room, working on my MFA thesis. Photo by William Dixon, April 2006.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Me in my Baltimore living room, writing this blog post. Photo by William Dixon, Oct 2011.

It was a beautiful fall, I remember. One of my first assignments was a group project with Professor John Rousseau. I don’t remember exactly what it entailed, only that the end product was an environmental exhibit of sorts, combining threaded worms from cherry trees in the Quad with type on floaty bits of paper.

Next was taking two random fortunes from fortune cookies he passed out in class, combining them into something conceptually original. Thus began my love affair with experimental film and video. I used iMovie for the first time, not having to worry about a time-consuming learning curve and so free to focus on creativity and ideas rather than technicalities. It was an Apple product, afterall.

I think I still have that file on a hard drive somewhere; if I find it, I’ll let you know.

Over the next two years, that PowerBook served me well. Most of my MFA experience involved rigourous intellectual design sketches, tortured writing, endless kerning, soul-flattening critiques, all-nighter thesis planning, and at one point, a heartfelt plea to one of my professors to please, please make the toxic, abusive asshole in my class leave us all alone.

That PowerBook facilitated my introductions to blogging, Design Observer, Flickr, and Khoi Vinh, who at that time had just started as design director at the New York Times (it’s been my default homepage on every browser since then, even while I worked at NPR).

Alone late at night in the grad studio behind a little glowing white apple, I watched in anguished, Left Coast horror the scandalous 2004 election of George W.Bush. Then the devastation caused by the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami that December. That PowerBook went with me everyday; either on Bus #45 across the Hwy 99 bridge to the U-District or strapped to my back or nestled in my waterproof pannier while I biked the Burke-Gilman trail through Fremont and Gasworks Park to the northeast end of campus. I made books and posters and logos and movies and photos and sound clips and exhibits and interview transcripts and music and life and love and piss and vinegar on that Mac (remember that asshole I mentioned? I penned a few choice words to him).

Incredibly, because of Steve Jobs’ and Jony Ive’s relentless attention-to-detail in design, engineering, and aesthetics, I remember fewer than five instances during that two-year span that my PowerBook crashed. God knows I had enough to worry about with the demands of grad school, a new marriage, two rebellious teenagers sneaking into Seattle alleys to experiment with drugs, and two frisky Weimaraner puppies needing romps in the woods a few times per week. Luckily – and yes, I know this sounds like a pathetic first-world problem – computer problems weren’t one of them. I was able to do what I needed to do with this incredible tool when I needed to do it. Steve Jobs dropped out of school so I wouldn’t have to.

Today, I am on a 15″ MacBook Pro, plus iPhone 4, 1st generation iPad, a classic iPod with Bose speakers, and an iPod Nano. Will tried the switch again (the second time was a charm – that switch campaign worked!) and is now on his 4th Apple computer plus an iPhone 3G. We have no intentions of ever switching. Thank you, Steve. And Jony. And all the other incredible designers and engineers at Apple who helped Steve and Apple become insanely great.

* Since this writing, Will informed me that he had an Apple II briefly when he lived in Boston in the 90s.