Your first half-century, dear Fruit Company

Apple Computers Inc. was founded on 1 April, 1976. 50 years ago on this day.

My first Apple product was an iPod touch my mum got me from California.

Apple, by just existing (and probably some of the following is to their dismay), was a significant part of my own digital upbringing. Installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my home’s Wintel computer, and later poking at the System/Library/LaunchDaemons folder of a jailbroken iPod Touch to see what new service would break upon each reboot (until eventually needing to restore the firmware) were irreplaceable experiences for middle-school FW to see a UNIX computer system’s organisation and function. They are critical foundations of my computation knowledge now.

To me the Apple spirit is captured, perhaps best in Jobs’s words that “the world is shaped by people no smarter than you, and you can change it … make things other people can use”, or Ive’s “you understand an object so much more when you understand how it comes to be”. Making a sense of empowerment a part of a product is indeed magical. And most of the time they had the engineering and production skills to deliver them in concrete forms. I appreciate this fully.

On the more approved aspects in which their products are used in my life, the Hackintosh Computer, which I later named Toliman¹ was the origin of many of my stories. Some of the earliest Iridium Point recordings were mixed on it enabled by a poorly patched up AppleHDA.kext². iPhoto taught me to organise a photograph library for the first time, Apple Keynote was a blessing to my presentation-making ventures in high school, and MacOS Grapher kicked me into advanced plotting long before I would find Desmos. Early 2010s Apple Keynote aesthetics still inform my presentations today. They play a role both in my professional work in science and in my art projects.

At one point during college I broke the digitiser of my first iPod touch (Mimosa, β Crucis). Before I could source replacement parts at reasonable prices in New Zealand, I flashed a custom firmware into it so I could control the interface with VNC — an iPod touch, navigated without touch. Eventually the device was fitted with a new digitiser and still works.

I recognise the complexity of Apple’s operations — a trillion-dollar corporation exists to take calculated risks and tell steering-committee-approved stories. Still, Apple to me represents a little more than its immense revenue. It is a fruit of, and a seed that promotes, the human drive to understand and shape the world around us.

If I had to chart a course for my existence (above the “career” talk level) it’s probably also not far from the intersection of Technology Ave. and Liberal Arts Blvd. On that note I’ll wave every time we cross paths in the future, Apple.

And happy birthday.

1. One of the common names of Alpha Centauri. I name all my computers after stars. ↩︎
2. Audio driver. ↩︎