Orland Park, IL

One of the first things I did when I got back to my own house for the first extended visit in a year, was to set up my old Macintosh Plus and see what I could still do with it. My cousins and I created many megabytes of adventure games and assorted other diversions, and I wanted to know how much I still had and how much could be salvaged. I’d love to make a CD containing all of our old games and some sort of emulation environment that would allow us to play them. That’s my must-preserve-and-encapsulate-everything instinct. Anyway, at some point the old Mac Plus mouse and my iPod got next to one another, and as I was packing up to go back to Green Bay, I saw them sitting there together like old friends. For a moment, I could feel the progress of one brilliant company’s industrial design over the course of almost 20 years. The two devices serve completely different functions and come from different decades, but the simplicity and sense of purpose that distinguishes Apple design are apparent in both of them. They are sturdy, with no unnecessary lines or excess features. You put one of them in your hand and within thirty seconds you understand what to do with it, and then you can almost forget that it’s there. I can’t even tell you how much I love Apple.