I come from an Apple household. I’m not sure what it was that first attracted my dad  to an Apple Macintosh over one of its counterparts (aside from its clear superiority 😉 ), but once that choice had been made, it stuck.  From an endless stream of shareware disks (and later CD-ROMs packaged with Mac magazines), to Carmen Sandiego (the old ones, not the new ones that, you know, suck) to the death-by-dysentery march of the Oregon Trail (ditto), to the versatility of the ClarisWorks and the endless databases and records and newspapers I created with it, I took that small spark of our first Mac and ran with it. Me and Apple have been constant companions (and no, this isn’t a “but” post, really just stating a fact).

A few years back I posted about the then-new desktop addition to my Mac family (just click on the “Apple” tag and you should see it), at New Year’s I blogged direct from my (then) brand new iPad, and now I type to you from the full-screened browser from OS X Lion on my new laptop, a MacBook Pro (my second MBP overall). As I always do when I get a new computer, though, I immerse myself into the world of Macs and try to not only get them loaded with everything I need, but find out what they can do. In this case it included exploring the Mac App Store, since I’d never upgraded to Snow Leopard on my older computers (since rectified), and discovering the wonderful touchpad gestures that control Lion’s almost iOS like interface (reverse scrolling took some getting used to, but once I started thinking of the MBP as an iPad, it really clicked for me).

Between this, the iPod, iPad, Apple TV (a godsend for watching the latest season of Doctor Who sans BBC America), hell, even their Time Capsule external HD back-up system– clearly I’m a sucker for anything and everything Apple. It’s a rich history that I’m excited to have been a part of while the company was still growing and far from the monolith it is today.

That makes it a bit bittersweet to read yesterday that Steve Jobs was stepping down as Apple CEO. Now, my first decade with Macs I really had no idea who Steve Jobs was. I think my first exposure to him was when they came out with that Pirates of Silicon Valley movie with Noah Wyle and Anthony Michael Hall as Jobs and Bill Gates, respectively. But I came to know who he was after he returned to the company and launched the iMac (mocked for its ditching of the 1.3 MB floppy drive, a move that I think it’s safe to say actually showed amazing vision for the future of PCs in general). From there came Mac OS X, the iBook, iPod, iTunes, iLife package, Intel-chip Macs, Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, and everything else. And with Jobs’ role in shepherding Pixar into prominence and the merger with Disney… Steve Jobs proved himself to be one of those rare executives who not only had the creative vision to guide a company to great heights, but the business sense to navigate corporate America and get these aspects to work synergistically and give us the Apple we all know and love. His keynote addresses are one of the few business presentations I’ll willingly watch. I can still remember how he made me drool over the iPhone and the iPad, while dismissed by some at the time as a “let down”, wound up being even more revolutionary (IMO) than the iPhone.

So, with all that said, I’m sad to see Steve go as CEO but am heartened that he’ll still be able to provide creative input as Chairman of the Board. Apple exhorted us to “Think Different”, and for me, at least, I can’t imagine doing it any other way.  Mac user for life.