StefanClaypool.com

In 2005, I matriculated to Middlebury College. When I did, I took with me what I thought was sleek, sophisticated machine well-suited to my growing needs as a writer, musician, and student. The PowerBook G4 was, in theory, my dream machine. And yet, looking back on it, it is the one Mac I’ve ever owned that I can honestly say disappointed me. It ran hot. It ran slow. And within six months of purchase, it was made obsolete. I had jumped on board this train just before it derailed, just before Steve Jobs announced that the Mac platform would switch to Intel processors and abandon the old PowerPC chipset that had been the heart of Apple products for more than a decade. Suddenly, my sleek new machine was a dinosaur.

That’s not to say it wasn’t serviceable. I did a lot of great work on my PowerBook. I wrote my first radio scripts and had my first exposure to serious sound editing – Dad insisted on installing Pro Tools before I left for school. It also let me make my first real foray into computer gaming. I had grown up a Nintendo fan, but I installed StarCraft on my PowerBook during my freshman year, and spent many nights bonding with friends through our computers. (For the record, I play Protoss.)

But the whole experience was clunky, and in retrospect, un-Apple-like. I had a standalone iSight Camera that I used a few times to video chat with my parents, but it was so clumsy and miserable to set up that I rarely took it out of the box. The trackpad, small and unresponsive, was so bad that I resorted to using the single-button wireless mouse – itself a less-than-satisfying product. The only consolation was that the PowerBook was still a superior machine to the Windows-based that (increasingly few of) my classmates were carrying around. That’s a small comfort.

It was, in retrospect, a disappointing computer. Yet the experience of owning my one disappointing Apple computer taught me a very Apple-like lesson. I had made the upgrade because of a perceived need. I was going off to college, therefore I NEEDED more power, more storage, more everything. More, more, more. It didn’t matter that my iBook was doing its job exceedingly well, and would have continued doing so. I just had to upgrade, because, well, look how much better the specs were! It was foolish, but in doing it, I got a much better picture of what my needs actually were. And when I upgraded next, I did it right.

The result was the longest-lived computer I’ve ever owned.

My first iBook was also my first laptop, and the first computer that I could call my own. It was an iBook G4. For posterity’s sake, I wish I had spent more time learning about the machine. I couldn’t tell you what the processor speed was or how big the hard drive was or how much RAM it had or anything technical at all. I was too busy using it to pay attention to trivial details. It was fast, it was fun, and it did what I needed it to do.

I can’t emphasize how much this machine changed my life. My first iBook meant my first iTunes library. I remember when I finished ripping my CD collection (about 100 discs). I was just thrilled that I could carry that much music with me anytime I went on a trip. Fast-forward to today and I have more than 100 GBs of music sitting on an external hard drive, along with 200 GBs of video and god knows what else. But at the time, digitizing 100 CDs was a stunning technological achievement to my young mind.

The iBook G4 also introduced me to the defining digital device of the past decade: the iPod. Most people seem to have had an iPod before they had a Mac, but the halo effect worked in reverse for me. Once I got all of that music onto my laptop, I just HAD to have something smaller to carry around with me. So after scrimping and saving for months, I headed down to CompUSA (there’s that dinosaur again!) and got myself a 20 GB iPod – the first generation to include a Click Wheel. It blew my mind. Since then, I’ve owned five other iPods, including two more Classic models, two Shuffles, and one Nano (which I’m currently wearing on my wrist), but the love affair started with that bulky 20 GB model that redefined how I listened to music. Goodbye, CD player.

I did the typical things with my iBook. I surfed the web (on Safari, no less), I got email, I did homework. And I wrote. Oh, how I wrote. My prose was sloppy and unsophisticated, but I cranked out everything that I could. I wrote the stories that won my high school’s literary magazine contest two years in a row on that machine. I wrote my first stage play and my first radio play on that machine. I wrote short films, I wrote blog posts, and I built the first version of StefanClaypool.com on that machine. And as I did all of this, my relationship with my computer changed. Rather than just being some device I used to do work, it became an extension and enabler of my creative impulses. It gave me the canvas that I needed to grow artistically. It stopped being an amazing feat of technology, and became exactly what I needed it to be: a partner in a continuing creative enterprise.

My iBook G4 changed my life. It made me rethink longstanding assumptions about technology, redefined my work and recreational habits, and gave me a powerful tool to channel my creative impulses. In the end, though, you have to move on, and I did when I passed the machine on, first to my mother and then to my grandmother, who continues to use it to this day. I loved that iBook, but college was looming. My needs had changed.

Fortunately, there was a Mac for that.

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I remember clearly the first time I used an Apple product.

I was probably fifteen years old. It was an iMac G4 – you know, the lamp. I had never seen anything like it. It was love at first sight.

I was living in Naperville. My dad was beginning to put time and energy into building his recording studio. Although we had always been a PC family, he decided that a Mac might be better suited for this endeavor. It was meant to be a music machine only – something to sit by the guitars and nothing more.

To this point, computer shopping had always meant going to CompUSA or some local retailer. Not for this. For the first time, we drove to the Apple Store. From the moment we entered it was obvious: this was a whole different world.

Dad made the purchase and set the machine up downstairs with the family PC. He would use it when he was recording, but for the most part we all stayed on the family’s PC. I can’t even remember what it was – some beige box running Windows 2000, but an HP? A Dell? Who knows. What I do remember is that I had never even considered that there was another philosophy of personal computing. To put it tritely, I wasn’t thinking different.

But there sat the iMac, the art machine, purchased for a specific function and never considered for anything else. I had no reason to think anything of it, but every time I walked downstairs, I looked at it for a little bit longer. It was beautiful and new and I didn’t know how to use it. How could an adolescent resist?

I finally decided to try it out. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I realized that it was different from every other computer I’d ever used. Every time I went online, I’d use the Mac a little longer. Soon I wouldn’t even look at that ugly beige box.

One day dad found me on the iMac. I don’t know what I was doing – probably burning a CD or looking at something online. “Why are you using that?” he said. Without thinking, I knew the answer: “The Mac is a superior computing environment,” I said. I never looked back.

The family starting thinking differently about what we were looking for in our computers. And for Christmas 2003, we took the plunge: iBooks for all.

Image courtesy of This Is My Next

I’m two weeks into my studies at the Johnson School at Cornell after just over two years away from academia. One of the things that’s struck me about the way education has changed in that short period is the speed with which iPads have integrated into the classroom. When I was a college student, there was no such thing as an iPad. Now it seems that everyone has one – in fact, I’d wager that there are more iPads than Macs in the Johnson Class of 2013, and it’s not hard to see why. The iPad offers the opportunity to dramatically improve a student’s ability to manage his academic life, and I can’t count the number of times since my arrival that I’ve wished I could have had one at Middlebury.

Calvetica, Evernote, and Todo are indispensable elements of my grad school routine, but the one app that I don’t think I could do without is one of which I had not heard even a week ago: Kno. More than any other app, Kno is redefining how I function as a student, and hats off to them for it.

Kno is ostensibly a digital textbook retailer and reader. Its catalog is both broad and deep – every book I’ll require for the next semester is available for rental and purchase, and at substantially discounted prices, lower than the college bookstore’s and even Amazon’s. Used copies might run cheaper on Chegg, but are both heavy and contain annotations from another student. Kno, by contrast, weighs only as much as the iPad, and takes up practically no space in a crowded book bag.

Where Kno really shines is in course planning. A simple drag-and-drop interface enables me to create a customized curriculum, containing not only my texts, but also any additional readings such as PDFs I import. As long as digital copies of class materials are available (almost a given in this day and age), Kno completely replaces both my textbooks and binders.

Best of all, Kno knows notes. (That’s the worst sentence I’ve ever written.) What does that mean? It means that anything I highlight in any text, or any graph I tag as important, or anything I choose to bookmark is automatically copied into a digital notebook contained within the app. It’s amazingly simple and saves significant time highlighting and copying notes. Brilliant.

Kno is fantastic technology, and what I mean by that is it simplifies the tasks I need to do to such an extent that it almost doesn’t register. The results is that I can stop worrying about the things that don’t matter in the process of being a student and get down to what’s important: learning. Highly recommended to anyone going into a classroom. Check it out.