My "journey" with Apple and their ventures into "Hobbyist Hardware"
I've been stewing on these ideas for a while now. I wanted a forum to discuss it all, and I'm wondering if anyone feels the same way as me.
To preface this, I don't consider myself an Apple "fanboy" or anything like that. I proudly type this on my Galaxy S24+, and I have no allegiance to the Apple "ecosystem," nor am I blind to the real issues Apple has today (which would make this post even longer, so we're not going there):
I am a hobbyist creative. I'm into the history of technology, and I enjoy video editing short films and the like. I've been doing it for about 10 years. For the longest time, I regarded Apple products as being "stuck up," expensive, and snobbish, particularly when I was young. I still don't really understand why. It might have been my dad, who had an aversion to Apple as an IT guy at a college that probably didn't have the money to buy Xserves and stuff, but I also saw firsthand as a youth a bona fide true Apple fanboy in my life.
When I was in 2nd grade, a brand-new elementary school opened closer to where I was in the same district, and starting in third grade, I was in a brand-new school for 3 years. This school had brand-new MacBook carts filled with the 2009 polycarbonate white models with the rubber on the bottom, and they were great! In 4th grade, I occasionally had a teacher who was "The Apple Guy." I'm talking, he was going to Macworld, had framed copies of his "Apple Distinguished Educator" certificate hanging in his classroom, skipped our annual evacuation drill to buy the iPhone 4, and as a kid, we all thought this dude was married to Steve Jobs. He even had an after-school club with his own cart of the brand-new 1st-gen iPad minis, where we would make our own little iMovie productions and GarageBand songs. I used to think this teacher was very over the top, but I realized over the years that I was really privileged to have used all this brand-new Apple tech at such a young age, and that guy, while totally obsessed, saw at least in part what I see now in the company.
Fast-forward all the way to my junior year of college. I majored in history and media & communications, and I fell in love with video games and their history. I basically have an encyclopedic knowledge of it. Adjacently, that means computer history is an interest, and it was about this time I started watching Steve Jobs keynotes on YouTube. Actually hearing this guy speak painted a very different picture of what I had heard about the man, and like many YouTube comments under these presentations would say, he convinced you to buy his product even if it was something from 15 years ago.
For me, that was the 2012 Mac Mini. In hindsight, it was really a fool's errand to be interested in one in the year 2023, but I had this intro to podcasting class and some audio equipment from when symphonic band was digital during COVID, and I figured I can cobble together a pretty cool podcasting setup, and I can experiment with macOS again, which I hadn't done since I was in elementary school. I bought one off ShopGoodwill, threw in an SSD, popped the 16GB of RAM from my old laptop in, and boom! I had myself a great little machine. For its age, I was so impressed with how well things ran. I could watch YouTube in 4K on this machine from so long ago on an operating system that was 4 years outdated. I was really impressed, and it got me chronologically catching up on Apple's history from both a hardware and business perspective. I learned about Jobs' return, the stuff he did, and the products he championed, and very quickly I found myself trying to figure out how my creative interests could be quenched with Apple's devices rather than Windows.
When I graduated college, I started substitute teaching, and quickly found myself carrying around a bulky gaming laptop, which at the time I bought it, I thought was the ideal solution for my video editing passions. I said, "To hell with this," and bought an iPad Mini. I waited a couple months, watched prices, and finally, they announced the A17 Pro model, and on Black Friday it was mine! I started using Final Cut Pro for iPad and realized how intuitive it was. I started to realize what an investment I had made after I bought it, and how in such a tiny device I could video edit better than my $1,000 Windows laptop ever could manage. In hindsight, it almost felt like I was brute-forcing technological creativity. I affectionately referred to my new iPad as my "creative hub," and I took it to work with me every day. It distracted me from a semi-mundane job and got me thinking more creatively. It had a personality that was missing from tech for a long time.
Then they announced the M4 Mac Mini. Oh boy, time for an upgrade, I thought. After doing research, I really started to appreciate the Apple Education Discount, and finally gave my local Apple Store a proper visit. I was honestly really impressed with how friendly everybody was and how genuinely interested they were in what I was using the hardware for. I had the satisfaction of opening up another "investment" in my creative life. I bought the Pro Apps Bundle for Education and got on the full-fat Mac version of Final Cut Pro for the first time. As a hobbyist, I found myself wanting easy solutions to video editing dreams I had. Magnetic Masking, no joke, became the answer to all my problems. It's really incredible. I appreciate the ease of the software, and while it had a learning curve, I could always find solutions by hopping on YouTube and Reddit.
And now, finally, we get to modern day with the MacBook Neo. I was actively following all the rumors on the fabled "low-cost MacBook" and was reminded of the elementary school days again. How great would it be to have these three devices in tandem? Yet again, my wishes were granted, and I actually lined up on launch day to get one at my Apple Store. I love this damn thing, from the Citrus color to the powerfully nonchalant ability to edit anything I throw at it. It's really quite amazing. Sometimes I just take it out of its case and just look at it and feel inspired to be using such well-built hardware. This might sound cheesy, but I feel better using it—creating videos on Final Cut and graphics on Canva feels even more fulfilling from a technological perspective. I have a lot of admiration for the people who built this machine because of it.
Now, taking all that into consideration, here's my two cents on Apple's strengths in this period of time I've laid out:
They effectively, between these three devices—the iPad Mini, the Mac Mini, and the Neo—have created AFFORDABLE, well-designed, genuinely POWERFUL machines where ambitious and creative people can explore and make things so satisfyingly it's nuts. I affectionately have dubbed this "hobbyist hardware" that Apple silicon has made possible. Before the price hikes, for a very short period of time, I bought amazing products for like $1,500 that will last me 10+ years, as my 2012 Mac Mini proved to me when I bought it. That is the secret sauce Apple has right now and where they need to focus on. Their cheap products truly transformed my creative life, and are more true to Steve's vision of Apple than I think anyone at the company actually understands.