All the Apple Products I’ve Ever Owned

G4 Cube

Between Diablo II and the iTunes visualizer, I spent a lot of time in front of this computer smoking weed. I was very lonely, and would watch the Scarface DVD a few times a week. I would spend time with the other sons of middle-to-upper-class white people and we would talk about attractive women and video games. I grew dependent on anti-depressants, weed, speed pills, and cheap alcohol. I was rarely more than five feet away from my computer screen.

CDs were loaded into the top. You would pull up on the handle on the bottom, and the guts of the computer would slip out of the plastic frame. Along with tiny Nintendo Gamecube disks, use of this computer made me consistently feel like I was in the future in the very early 2000s.

The G4 Cube was an exceptional piece of hardware that ended as a mistake for Apple. It was beautifully designed, and very few people bought it. It was discontinued after one year of production.

I sold my G4 Cube to a Canadian in 2005 for $400.

iPod (x3)

After 9/11, the iPod came out. I was a 300 lbs. Republican living in College Station, Tx. I had a slightly overweight sorority girlfriend, and her mother passed away in our first month of dating.

The first iPod was a little thicker than a deck of cards and had a big moving jogwheel on the front. The back of the iPod was the same glossy chrome that the current model has.

I put a lot of Radiohead and Grateful Dead on the first iPod. I took the money my mother gave me to pay my fraternity dues and bought mainstream rock CDs from Best Buy. I ate at Chili’s and ordered chicken fingers. I have vivid memories of having doggy-style sex with my sorority girlfriend and looking down at her lower-back tattoo of a butterfly.

The first iPod, like all iPods, came with stickers, and I put one of the stickers on my truck.

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After I failed out of college, I moved back in with my parents, lost a hundred pounds, bought my second iPod, and had lots of sex with random partners.

There weren’t any physical buttons on my second iPod, which made it feel sturdy in the hand. It was also the first iPod to use a dock connector, which all iPhones and iPads use today. Before, iPods used a firewire connection, which was too thick to fit on this model.

In general, I started forming my own opinions about the world during ownership of my second iPod. I voted for John Kerry and contracted VD. I smoked opium and listened to Outkast on my second iPod with a Palestinian girl in my parents hot tub.

I was at a conference in Chicago for my job, and I went down to the hotel bar for a drink, sitting alone and listening to music. There was a prostitute working the room. She eventually made her way over to me and sat down, after not finding any interested men. She was Brazilian and did not speak English. I put one of the earbuds in her ear and, recognizing the song, she said “Pixies.” We spent an hour at the bar going through all of my music together.

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My third iPod was used in an art piece by my wife. It was an iPod dock made out of a Cadillac rim, electroluminescent wire, speakers, crystals, and flashing LED lights. The iPod played a screwed and chopped version of “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, and the light from the sculpture changed with the beat.

Apple Keyboard (x4)

I recently bought a thin wireless aluminum Apple keyboard for $10 off at a shitty electronics superstore. I use it as my travel keyboard, and used it to type this paragraph on my iPhone. It feels awkward typing stuff on my keyboard and watching it output on my phone. I’m not even sure it should be possible, but I already picture my desktop computer heating-up a Lean Cuisine and listening to Billy Joel alone.

The phone/keyboard combination has become my default setting for writing things. It’s nice to just stare at a wall or a tree and type, occasionally looking down to make sure there aren’t any red dotted lines below what I’m typing. It feels like less of a “future” thing, and more of something that makes writing less demanding mentally, for some reason. It feels like I just think about things, and they are recorded with 30-40% less sexual content.

iBook (2001 Model)

I spilled beer on this computer’s keyboard the second day I owned it. The computer was open on my bedside table and I was watching Fox News or something and getting really drunk, and I dumped a full Coors on it.

I ordered a replacement keyboard online from a third-party vendor, replaced it myself, and then sent the computer back to Apple for repairs. They fixed it for free.

This iBook was the first model to move into the more minimal white plastics that dominated Apple’s aesthetics in the 2000’s. It was bulky by today’s standards, and used the less-powerful-at-the-time G3 processor, which was shitty even in 2002.

Years later, I installed Linux on this computer and gave it to a friend who’s computer had broken. It didn’t run Flash, so it was useless to my friend, who’s primary use for a computer was looking at porn.