iCon (or I Blame Jason)

Steve Jobs passed away on Wednesday. When I heard the news I felt supremely sad. A friend of mine asked me if I was going to write a blog post about it. Well, here it is, kind of.

Several years ago, I can't remember when exactly, my friend Jason told me he was going to buy a Mac Mini to see what the whole Mac thing was all about. You see, Jason was my go to guy for all of my Sony Vaio problems (and being a windows machine, there were quite a few). So for him to be jumping ship and telling me that if this Mac thing goes good he's going to forget all about Windows (translation, hope your POS Vaio doesn't give you more problems than you can handle 'cause I won't be there to help you out). He proceeds to buy the base model Mini and falls in love. A month later he's telling me this thing is so awesome that he's willing to go out and buy the souped up model of the Mini to get the best experience out of it. When I hear this I offer to buy his first Mini from him and I get a great deal on a hardly used Mac. I have tasted the Kool-aid and I'm hooked. Shortly after, our Vaio died a horrible Hard Drive crash. (It's a PATA drive and I have pictures on there still that I need to get off and have no idea how without losing a limb, but that's another story.)

I loved my base model G4 Mac Mini. It smoked my work computer. It held it's own against my wife's current HP Laptop that we bought 2 years later. It lived a great life and eventually suffered a hard drive crash of it's own and was retired while I'm out of commission (in a coma). My wife, who insisted on keeping something Windows (hence the HP laptop) went out and bought a new Mac Mini for the family. God love her. Not only was she nursing me back from Ray Liotta's - er - death's door, but she kept the Mac legacy running in the home.

My new Mini is now a couple of generations old but still destroys the HP and does heavy duty work in my house running my digital library of music and videos, storing all of the family photos (except those pesky ones still on the POS Vaio) and being the primary research computer for all of my kids school projects and homework. It feeds my Apple TV and keeps all of my iPods and iPhones synced and running smoothly. Everything is backed up on my Apple Time Capsule. It's a complete Apple/Mac ecosystem in my house with the two exceptions: My work computer and my wife's still chugging HP.

A couple of years after the introduction to the Mac Mini, the first iPhone came out. Jason is an early adopter but I hold off because I'm in the middle of a contract and those first iPhones were damn expensive! After playing around with his iPhone I'm hooked. This is the smoothest running smart phone with the first real Internet interface I had ever seen. My wife had a Samsung BlackJack from AT&T and I hated the Internet experience on it. It was practically unusable. The iPhone's Internet looked exactly like the Internet I was using on my Mac. Perfect. I was hooked again so I stood in line with Jason to buy my iPhone 3G. And my 3Gs. I started passing my old iPhones down to my kids. Everyone in the family now has an iPhone with the exception of my son who for some odd reason said he didn't want one. (He does now, but has to wait until someone upgrades to the iPhone 4s.)

So clearly, long story short, it's Jason's fault I felt so sad on Wednesday. Jason introduced me to all things Apple and Mac and I fell in love.

By the way, Jason also introduced me to the Harry Potter books. They, along with the audio version that I have, have gone on to become the most re-read and re-listened to books in my library. I have all of the movies on DVD (except #7 - which will be corrected when the 2nd one comes out on Blu-Ray).

Jason, damn you for being such an influence on me, or rather - thank you.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs. The greatest innovator of my time. You have changed the way I will forever interact with the world through your inventions. You have helped mold the world that my children see. I hold you in the same regards as Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky and Muhammad Ali. May your legacy be immortal.