Alright Tim, I'm Buying a Mac

Surrounded by Tweetbot on my iPhone, iMore’s live blog on one iPad and Apple’s keynote stream on another, and flanked by my inconveniently inoperable computer, I watched Tim Cook introduce iOS 7. Even now, I can’t quite quantify the feeling I had upon seeing iOS 7 for the first time: a mixture of surprise and relief at the departure from almost every previously-held design philosophy, amazement for reasons that anyone who watched the keynote or read one of the many blog posts recapping the event would find obvious, and perhaps even euphoria for some inexplicable reason. iOS 7 is beautiful, plain and simple, and the reason my next computer will be a Mac.

I have been moving in this direction for quite some time. Initially a die-hard PC fanboy in virtually every negative sense of the word, I refused to even acknowledge the Mac as a viable platform. But as time passed, I grew in many ways: I got older and, arguably, wiser; my workflow distilled and solidified until I used the same four or five applications every day; and I became more and more open-minded as I slowly fell in to the Apple ecosystem. It started with an iPod Nano and continued with an iPod Touch, an iPad, and then an iPhone. Even more instrumental in my prolonged and drawn-out conversion, however, than Apple’s own products was Dan Benjamin and the 5by5 network. Made up of podcasts hosted primarily by Apple nerds focusing on Apple-related topics, as the weeks turned in to months and the months turned in to years I gradually grew accustomed to the idea of owning a Mac, and then I began to want one. Prior to the WWDC keynote earlier this afternoon though, even as I loaded the live blogs and began streaming the event on my iPad and my iPhone, I still hadn’t made a conscious decision to purchase a Mac. The last vestiges of my anti-Mac PC fanboy days still lingered: Macs cost so much after all. For the amount of money I would spend on a new Mac, I could buy a PC with better specs and still have money left over. Or so my reasoning went.

And then Tim Cook introduced iOS 7, and it was nothing short of amazing; I was floored, curiously euphoric, for some reason. I laughed out loud not because I found any aspect of the redesign humorous, but because I was just so happy. I could spend an entire paragraph telling you how I felt seeing iOS’s UI overhaul but, as I said earlier, I can’t quite put it to words. I can, however, put to words the certainties I walked away from the announcement with: Apple is in no way unable to iterate and by no measure averse to change, as iOS 7’s complete overhaul and the new incredibly small Mac Pro demonstrated. This is a forward-facing company on the bleeding edge of technology; this is the company from which the next big thing will come. Not from Google, Samsung, Microsoft, or Dell, but from Apple. These are the truths the Apple nerds, and I use that designation only with the greatest amount of respect, have known for years, some even since the dawn of the Mac.

These are the truths I finally realized watching Tim Cook introduce the next-generation mobile computing platform; these are the truths that forced me to step back and realize that it was high time I bought a Mac.