Today, I Bought an iPad

I remember this day 25+ years ago, when my mother came home with it. It was a box with a silver keyboard looking thing that said “TI 99/4a.” That big, blocky hulk of a purchase that was one of the best decisions of my mother’s parenthood.

She wasn’t always the best role model, my mother, but this decision was superb. It came with intent, a reason: She told us that she couldn’t afford this thing that she didn’t understand, but that she knew that it was the future. She wanted us to have access to this thing called a computer. She hoped that we didn’t get left behind like so many other children of The Projects would.

Over 25 years later, I own two software companies. They are small, barely worthy of the title “company,” but they are extant, and they exist, entirely because a small, poor, geeky kid in the projects had a mom who was smart enough to go out one day and buy a cheap computer she couldn’t afford.

I’ve been a programmer ever since that day.

Today, I bought an iPad.

I already own an iPad, as does my wife. Among other things, I’m an iOS developer. I didn’t buy an iPad for myself. Today, I bought an iPad for my sister, and for my sister’s children.

It wasn’t planned. It was impulse. Strangly, suddenly, I felt strongly compelled to buy it. Compelled to make an impulse purchase in a way that is rare, to say the least. For some reason, I wanted them, I needed them, to own this thing that they should have access to, this thing that defines what we think of when we say “the future.”

Today, I bought an iPad. At almost the same time, a man died.

He was a man who re-wrote our world. A visionary who didn’t wait for the future, but created it. The man who changed the way we think about computers, about music, about information, about movies. The man who changed the way we think about life. At almost the same time as I bought an iPad for the same reasons my mother bought a computer, the greatest visionary and CEO of the modern world passed away.

And so as my sister plays with her new “iFun,” and my niece plays Plants vs. Zombies on mine– as they discuss email settings and games and calendars, I find myself needing to periodically leave the room to hold my head and sob.

It had to happen. I wish it wasn’t so soon, but it had to happen, and he himself said why:

“No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs, by describing why death is so good, you described what it means to live. You changed entire industries that laughed at you while showing us all what we could achieve. You’ve touched us, you’ve inspired us, you’ve shamed us. For the forth time today I find myself weeping for you, a man I’ve never met. A man who has changed my life.

Today, I bought an iPad. I bought it for my sister, so that she and her family would not be left behind by the technology of the future– the technology you created. The future you created.

Today, I bought an iPad. I bought it for you, Steve, so that my sister’s children can grow to be the new that sweeps away the old that was you, the old that is me.

Thank you, Steve Jobs. You have changed me.

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