I remember asking one of my middle school teachers why we used Apple computers. I thought they were way dumber than the PC I used at home, mostly to make drawings of TVs and monsters on Microsoft Paint.

Then one day my brother-in-law (who must have just been my sister’s boyfriend at the time) started talking about this iPod thing he had. I thought it was pretty cool and eventually he sold it to me for $100. I threw out my black and red Discman and the weird orange Mini Disc player I couldn’t quite get to work and used the iPod as my main device. I promptly filled it with custom playlists featuring mostly music I’d discovered through Garden State or Gorilla vs. Bear.

Eventually I started to hear my teachers grumble about the “white earbud headphones” all over the school, thinking it was

A) rich kids showing off how rich they were.

B) rich kids asking other kids to rob them.

“A CD-player is just fine for me,” they’d swear. I thought this missing the point. You can have ALL your music in one place. Did they not get that? On a cool little device that looked nice. In retrospect, they probably had a point.

By the time I graduated from high school, I was “over” PCs. The “search” on our family PC didn’t work that well, and my brother-in-law said he’d put a copy of Adobe Creative Suite on my computer if I bought myself a MacBook. Who needed Paint anymore? I saved a bunch of my wages and used my piddly grad party money (like I said before, I have about 8 people in my extended family, most of whom I never see), and bought a white MacBook.

When I started to hear about the iPhone, I felt like something I had always wanted since childhood was finally being created. As a kid, I bought all the dumb messenging/game playing gadgets, knowing somewhere that a magic, stylish device would one day come out that would let me make stop-motion drawing videos, text boys and leave myself drunk notes in a secret journal. I waited awhile, not wanting to get the first iPhone and seem like an awkward/rich/early adapter type.

Then Amazon made the Kindle. I looked at its clunky design and old-fashioned dim, black and white screen and thought, Apple will make a reader, and they’ll make it in color, and it will be able to go on the Internet. There was a lot of talk at the time about how doing so was impossible for this and that reason (remember that?) and I kept thinking, Steve Jobs will make it happen.

I started working at a company where everyone else had iPhones to the point that we sometimes forgot people in the world do not have smart phones. We regularly watched the Apple conferences together at work, and blogged about the impacts of what we learned. My perspective had gone from “Apple is dumb” to “humanity has earned its place on earth because we invented a magical, colorful flat thing that can help us, as a species, do many things that merit touching commercials.”

Now every morning my iPhone wakes me up and I get mad at it for awhile and then I open it and look at what people are saying on Twitter until I feel okay enough to wake up and get dressed for a day of MacBooking.

Steve Jobs really changed everything, and it’s sad to see him go. It kind of feels like Dumbledore dying. I hope he’s making shiny devices in whatever the agnostic equivalent to heaven is.

-Becky Lang