The Crazy Ones Were Right

Twenty-four years ago today, a man in a black turtleneck held up a beige box and changed what a computer was allowed to be. The Macintosh. January 24th, 1984. I wasn’t there—I was barely a thought—but I’ve lived in the downstream of that moment ever since, working on machines that trace their lineage back to that afternoon in Cupertino.

Apple has always known how to make you feel like you’ve joined something rather than bought something. The Think Different campaign—black-and-white portraits of Einstein, Coltrane, Amelia Earhart—wasn’t advertising a product. It was advertising an identity. The misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. The one thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they push the human race forward. The people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

I’ve bought into this mythology a little too completely. Enough that the title of this post is genuinely true—I’m not sure I could be with someone who uses Windows unironically. That’s tribalism at its most embarrassing and I know it. But the Mac has been part of how I think about design, how I work, how I understand the relationship between a tool and the person using it. It’s not just a computer. It’s a stance.

Happy birthday, Macintosh. Twenty-four years of making everything else look graceless.