The world lost a genius today. He played a big part in chang­ing it for the bet­ter. I want to cel­e­brate him for the work he has done and most impor­tantly for how he had played an impor­tant role in shap­ing my life.

Steve returned to Apple in the late nineties after Apple bought NeXT, which he founded after resign­ing from Apple ten years ear­lier. It was dur­ing that time I left high school after being debarred from the O’ Lev­els. Shortly after leav­ing school I began to look for work. I didn’t have a com­puter then and I’ve only used PCs in school. A friend rec­om­mended I find work in Apple’s fac­tory in Sin­ga­pore because they were hir­ing oper­a­tors like crazy.

Back then my only knowl­edge of Apple was that it’s one of sev­eral types of com­put­ers and it’s espe­cially good for artists and graphic design­ers. I’ve never actu­ally seen one. Work­ing at an Apple fac­tory changed that. After Steve returned to Apple, Jonathan Ive, then a strug­gling under-appreciated designer in a pre-Steve Apple cre­ated the first iMac in 1998. My job as one of the fac­tory oper­a­tors was to assem­ble it. The com­put­ers we assem­bled included var­i­ous fla­vors of the iMac and the G4. I still remem­ber how orga­nized and pre­cise the fac­tory oper­a­tions were. It opened my eyes to the Mac­in­tosh. The iMacs were run­ning OS 9 and they were stun­ning machines. I was respon­si­ble for attach­ing the CRT mon­i­tor to the plas­tic cha­sis and the sta­tion oppo­site mine was respon­si­ble for cos­metic inspec­tion. As my elec­tric screw­driver hummed away, the iMacs danced around in the hands of my col­league, show­ing off its beau­ti­ful curves and through the flut­ter­ing of its rainbow-hued dress of clear and translu­cent fab­ric it hinted of its insides which I touched just a few min­utes before. I never grew tired of look­ing at it. The plas­tic han­dle fas­ci­nated me as well because I have never seen any­thing like it before.

I got my first com­puter when I was nine­teen. From then I was an avid PC user. I’ve even built my own PC from com­po­nents and played with things like over-clocking. My first seri­ous use of a Mac was when I joined a mar­ket­ing firm and they gave me a Mac Mini. It was run­ning OS X v10.4 Tiger. It was really easy to learn and I had no prob­lems design­ing brochures and web­sites with it. It appeared so much better-designed than Win­dows XP. I really liked how Exposé made man­ag­ing mul­ti­ple win­dows so easy. It was then when I first real­ized what user inter­face design really is about.

In between this com­pany and the next, I bought a sil­ver 2GB iPod Nano for my girl­friend (now my wife). She was using a Sony Eric­s­son Walk­man phone before and she absolutely loved the iPod.

When I left the com­pany I wanted to con­tinue using a Mac. Luck­ily there was a pro­mo­tion going on and I could get a free Mac­Book if I upgraded my broad­band sub­scrip­tion. I did it and became a proud owner of a 13-inch white poly­car­bon­ate Mac­Book. It also ran Tiger and I took it every­where I went. My girl­friend and I espe­cially liked watch­ing anime on it in McDonald’s. I upgraded to Leop­ard and con­tin­ued using it until it died recently.

My next Mac was a late-2008 17-inch Mac­Book Pro. I bought it when I was free­lanc­ing and got a lit­tle rich while work­ing on a pro­jet that paid well. Soon after that I bought my girl­friend a early-2009 15-inch Mac­Book Pro. I remem­bered how I was so jeal­ous of its “Pre­ci­sion Uni­body Enclo­sure”. Now my wife, she is still using the same Mac­Book Pro.

My friends were all using iPhones. I didn’t want to be like every­one else so I ‘thought dif­fer­ent’ and got myself and my wife a Prada phone. When the iPhone 3G came out, we couldn’t resist and bought 2 white 16GB mod­els for our­selves. We recently switched to white iPhone 4s.

I worked on my 17-inch for two years until I joined my pre­vi­ous startup which pro­vided me with a mid-2010 17-inch Mac­Book Pro. That was my first uni­body Mac. When I left the job I returned it and got my cur­rent Mac.

Now I’m using the lat­est 2011 Mac­Book Air and I absolutely love it. I also own a first-gen WiFi iPad. I will con­tinue to use Apple prod­ucts for their design and qual­ity. Thank you Steve for mak­ing tech­nol­ogy so acces­si­ble so I could become a designer. Thank you for the prod­ucts you cre­ated with your team so I could become bet­ter at what I do. Thank you for your keynotes, quotes and all other words of gold which taught me what com­mu­ni­ca­tion and lead­er­ship was. Thank you for show­ing me that it is pos­si­ble for relent­less heart to put a ding in the uni­verse. Thank you for remind­ing me to stay hun­gry, stay fool­ish. Thank you.

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