Tech Reflect

• Number of years of my life I wanted to live in California: 0
• Number of years I lived in California: 24

Ancient history

One of my brothers went to Stanford and worked at Genentech, so I had a chance to visit the San Francisco quite a few times. Loved it. Nice climate. Foggy. Clean city. Clean transportation although inadequate. It was a place that seemed a lot nicer than Chicago at the time

College

In 1996, I lived in North Carolina. Racist. Homophobic. A mix of educated and highly ignorant people.

I always loved technology but was too poor to buy any of it. I remember seeing a NeXT machine at the university bookstore and the education price was $10,000—at that time I made $18,000 a year!

I didn’t want to be rich, but being poor felt like I was unable to do things that were very important to me.…

A good pairing with my article about How I almost worked directly for Steve Jobs.

Prior to coming to Apple, I was browsing the Pixar jobs website. I would do this a couple times a year but I was honestly so unqualified for absolutely everything they had offered.

But in 1999, they had a job posted for someone to assist with migrating some of their traditional UNIX workstations to the Mac. Initially, it was more of an investigative role as Mac OS X had not yet shipped and they had no desire to switch the classic Mac OS.

At the time, I had a very scattered resume of support and consulting positions. However, this job was so right up my alley it almost made me laugh. It required experience in this eclectic mix of software that I either knew really well or I used the software of one of …

My school district offered interesting summer courses ranging from pottery to magic to computer programming. I never took pottery but I took the other two.

The summer before kindergarten I signed up for the computer programming class. Everyone was within a few years of my age so it wasn’t like I was some crazy prodigy or something.

Turns out we only had one computer (a mainframe), a keypunch, a punchcard reader, and a printer. I didn’t know what to expect so it all seemed pretty cool to me.

We learned BASIC and set to work on writing a short program. I decided I wanted to ask the computer for the size of a baseball field and have it print out the answer. I showed my program to the teacher and he told me I needed to add a line of code to print out the answer.

I was deflated. The …

When I used to interview people at Apple, I sometimes liked to ask them what they thought were the best and worst Apple hardware products of all time. It was a good way to test product knowledge, the ability to be critical without getting carried away, prioritization skills, and ability to keep things in perspective.

Sometimes the interviewee turns the tables on me and asks me for my best and worst. It’s something I think about a lot because the company has gone through so many highs and lows. I think it’s important to evaluate what went well and what went wrong in the past so the same mistakes aren’t made.

The worst hardware product

I started with the worst because it’s really easy. In my mind, it’s been the worst Apple hardware ever since it came out and was never topped. This product was so bad that:

• I had