OK, the headline caught your attention, so you’re here. First note that i say “Hated” in the past tense, not “Hate” in the now.

I used to hate steve jobs, because he always seemed to promise much more than he delivered. I remember back in 1984 when my house mate bought a Mac that could display a full width page of text on screen and required him to swap out floppies everytime he tried to use any sort of function. It seemed to me it was an over priced and underpowered prototype, that wasn’t ready for prime time. Jobs continued to disappoint with the Lisa, Newton (though mr Pepsi - john sculley may be to blame on that). When Jobs left apple and formed Next, he once again promised a piece of hardware that he never delivered, specifically the lack of a rewritable CD. The Next venture was a financial failure, despite the fact that the OS, called nextstep was considered by many at the time, the best graphical software development platform, ever.

Nextstep was the first time i started feeling that mr. jobs was able to deliver what was promise, at least when it was software which didn’t depend on outside manufacturers. The point where Pixar released clips of disney’s Toy Story, was the moment that my steve jobs switch went from “doesn’t deliver” to “wow”. Since then he’s returned to apple to turn the MP3 player into the brand of iPod, the iphone and of course that mac that i laughed at 25 years ago.

Well when the mac moves to Intel, then os X, i was ready to consider the switchover. Everytime i ended up ready to buy, i ended up choosing a PC for 50-60% of the price of the mac. Well in june, my windows XP machine lost it’s mind and wasn’t usable and my hp laptop was running a broken install of Vista, which i hate. So after talking to a friend about how to use a Macbook with external keyboard and monitor, i took the leap. I paid the $2300 CAD, even settled for 250gb hard drive to get one in my hands immediately.

It’s now about two months on the Mac and it’s such a stable operating system that i rarely need to deal with a crash. The software updates seem to be smoother and take seconds, not the minutes that windows often does. I never thought i’d ever say I love my Mac, but i love my mac.

Did microsoft’s crappy OS drive to the Mac? Did John Hodgman’s “PC” character in the mac ads reminding me of all the BS over the years make me switch? Beats me, but Once You Go Mac, You’ll Never Go Bac!

That’s why I hated steve jobs, but now i’m over it. :>)