He Had Me at iPod: How Steve Jobs Made a PC Person Into An Apple Adopter

I confess to feeling a bit like a member of an exclusive club when I enter the . 

But I was a late Apple adopter. I never really got the Mac "thing." In college (circa 1990), one of my journalism classes met in lab where we used Macintosh Classics. Thinking of a Mac-loving friend, I asked myself, "What's so great about this computer?" 

I remained strictly PC as technology advanced and streamlined through the 1990s and early 2000s, both at home and in the newsrooms where I worked.

First came the iPod

The watershed moment came when I was teaching at Florida A&M University in 2005: Apple gave the faculty members iPod Classics. 

The cool factor was immediately apparent: the design struck me as light years ahead of any previous devices designed for audio. Remember the Sony Walkman and Discman? Exactly. Even competing MP3 players seemed like also-rans.

I wish I could remember the first songs I stocked my iPod with. I do remember adding podcasts about books and greedily consuming them as I did housework or took long walks. 

Then came the MacBook

So, I was receptive to Apple when I arrrived at the University of Missouri for a new job. The School of Journalism is famous for strongly suggesting that students purchase Macs. The faculty computers are Macs, too.

At first I wondered if it would be difficult to learns the ways of the Mac; it was not. Because I had an HP laptop at home and the computers in the KOMU-TV newsroom (a teaching lab for Mizzou students) were PCs, I became computer ambidextrous, if you will.

Finally, the iPhone

But, the Mac's ease and elegance were subtley seductive. I put away my HP laptop for good around mid-2006, after six months of Mac-dom. In 2008, I got an iPhone for Christmas. Today, I use a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 4.

The latest iPhone iteration debuted Tuesday. Jobs did not appear for the unveiling and the buzz around the iPhone 4S seemed muted. Could it be that we've gotten blasé about Apple astounding us?

The cool factor of Steve Jobs's innovations remains undeniable: they work, they're fun, and they make our lives easier.

And then there's the true test of how revolutionary inventions are: The Jobs products make us ask, "What did I ever do without (insert device here)?"