How Apple created MY perfect work machine

It was about 13 years ago when Steve Jobs famously opened an envelope on stage and pulled a laptop out of it. I was in my first year of college, coming from a small Romanian town and having absolutely no previous interaction with Apple products, besides reading stories about them. Where I was from no one had Macs, or even the newly released iPhone. I had no way of seeing an Apple product in real life.

I was rocking a cheap, heavy, 15" Acer laptop back then, which I would soon exchange for a gaming PC, as gaming was the backbone of social life in my all male dorm.

At the time I saw the video of Steve pulling out the MacBook Air, I distinctly remember thinking that that is what a laptop should be. Sure, I knew at that point about netbooks and taught that they would be fitting for on the road media consumption and maybe taking notes during class, but I knew at that point that those weren’t work machine. But the Air looked like a device that would actually be a computer on which I would be able to learn programming.

About 3 years would pass before I was able to afford a used 11" Air, the smaller brother of the one I saw Steve unveil. And it wasn’t a workhorse. It did everything I needed it to do, except gaming. And I didn’t start my career as a dev, so I didn’t even need it for development purposes. But it was what I always…