After completing my bachelor’s degree in December of 2004, I received graduation money from relatives and friends for actually making it through college.  I thought long and hard about what to do with my newly acquired wealth: buy books to complete my commentary library...purchase an acoustic guitar amp...put a down-payment on my student loans...hire Oprah to give an emotionally charged congratulatory speech at my graduation party...

After a while of this, I thought to myself, “Forget it...I’ll just buy an iPod.”  So I did.

From the moment I opened the beautiful packaging of my Special Edition U2 (my favorite band of all time) iPod, I was completely enthralled.  It was so easy to use, so handy to carry my music collection around in, and so...beautiful!  As a matter of fact, it made me want to see what other products Apple had cooked up.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I am somewhat of a hypocrite.  My good friend and roommate in college, Rick, had purchased an Apple computer our senior year and I had given him all kinds of grief about it.  We called it the “Gapple” (“Gapple”=“gay Apple” computer).  But, to be fair, I had used Apple computers before when I was on a newspaper staff and had hated them (what I didn’t know at the time was that the Apples I was using were ten years old; it was very unfair to compare them to a brand new PC...I repent of that sin!).

After loving my iPod for a couple of months, Emily and I checked out our local CompUSA to look for some iPod accessories.  In the back of the store they had an “Apple Center” with about a dozen different Apple computers.  
They were gorgeous.

A few weeks went by and I had to edit a short video clip from Good Will Hunting for a sermon I was doing.  All I needed to do was cut a segment out of a clip and mute some curse words.  It seemed simple enough.  I got out my laptop and managed to get the video file off the DVD and onto my PC.  What ensued was a 12 hour hate-fest between me and my computer.  I downloaded all kinds of trial and free video programs, all of which were unintuitive and ultimately unworkable.  My computer froze, crashed, laughed at me, and then did an Irish jig while singing Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire (I have no idea why that computer liked folk/country music so much...).  Bottom line: after hours of frustration I still had no video clip that was presentable to a church congregation.

The next week I went to an Apple store in Plano, Texas.  I told the guys at the store what had happened with the video clip and they listened with sympathetic ears.  I asked if an Apple would make my computing life easier.  They showed my a program called iMovie that allowed the user to drag and drop clips, easily cut and paste and adjust volume levels.  In five minutes they did what it took me 12 hours to not do.  They even imported a song from iTunes to the clip for good measure by dragging and dropping it into the timeline.  

So how much was this iMovie software?  It didn’t cost a cent; it comes standard on every Apple Mac computer.  I was impressed, but not ready to take the leap.

Two weeks later I saw Steve Jobs’ (the CEO of Apple for those of you who live in a cave...haha) keynote speech at MacWorld.  For  two and a half hours I watched as he showed off all the new features of the Apple operating system.  I sat there thinking, “Yep...my computer can’t do that, it can’t do that, it can’t do that...it definitely can’t do that!”  I was excited!  I took the plunge and bought a beautiful new 20” iMac.

Tags: Apple, iMac