Member-only story
My Relationship with Apple
16 Years of Upgrades, Regrets, and Unquestioning Loyalty
In 2007, I fell in love with an inanimate object for the first time. It was a second-hand iMac. It was a sleek, white device with a minimalist design, and it was love at first sight. Over the next few months, I learnt how to use the mysterious operating system and marvelled at its lack of base unit and wireless accessories. This was the start of a beautiful relationship during which I would often be caught admiring the stunning design of products we have come to know and love.
Like any relationship, we have had rocky patches, but previously, I always bequeathed Apple’s superior knowledge, like with the iPhone 4s, which had a signal that kept bombing out (often mid-call). I was relieved when Steve Jobs told me I was holding it wrong and gave me a free ‘bumper case’.
The 2015 butterfly keyboard on the MacBook Pro was awful, but it was a reasonable sacrifice because Apple needed to make the device thinner (until they made it thicker in 2021). About five years later, they kindly made amends, replacing the keyboard free of charge which felt like a gift.
