Way back when—October 6, 1997, to be exact—Michael Dell was asked what he'd do if he were running Apple. His reply? “What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
As of the close of market today, Apple Computer, Inc. is worth more than Dell, Inc.
Apple is worth $161,720,000 more than Dell.
Tipping point or technicality? You decide.
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Apple's shares soared nearly five points yesterday. This is weird and I'm not sure what to do with it, because typically Apple could announce an anti-gravity fountain of youth at a Macworld Keynote and the stock price would waver and weakly fall a bit.
Yesterday, during the keynote, Apple's shares surged and mostly held on to the higher price til the close of the market. The closing price? $80.86
Yes, on the day that Apple announced Intel-based (x86) Macs, the price matches the very first x86 ever, the 8086. <spins propeller on beanie />
Oh, and Apple's up another 3 points today. Goooooo, stock options!
Oh, and also? Apple's ad heralding the arrival of Mac OS X on Intel chips...check it out...sassy and brill.
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Y'all think Apple will announce anything new tomorrow at Macworld Expo SF?
I'm hoping to maintain my going-on-ten-years tradition with my friend, Steve, by making it down to the show floor, but with everything that's happened, that may just not work out this year. Should be exciting, though...
I work for Apple and I have no idea what might be coming out, though based on what the rumor mills think, and the state of the industry, I'd say we're coming out with a Perpetual Motion Machine that travels faster than light. Yeah, that's what we're coming out with.
Oh, and? A pony.
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I'm reading a novel:
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (Stephen Chbosky)
It was lent to me by JP, who thought I might like it. I like when people think I might like things. There's that kind of “little intrusion” (this is where I wish I knew french: I always thought petit mort was a grand and fussy and silly and completely accurate way of describing an orgasm) that people surprise you with sometimes. The casual acquaintance who intrudes only enough to let you know they'd never intrude but that they wanted you to know they were there if you needed anything. The friend who stands within yourself who cannot intrude because you've invited him in but who nonetheless takes a chance on getting in further by asking new questions, covering a new topic, offering up a new dimension to themselves.
The book is written by a man from Pittsburgh, my first adopted hometown. I went to college at Carnegie Mellon University, which is geographically, literally across a short bridge from University of Pittsburgh, all in the Oakland section of town.
Pittsburgh often intrudes; so does Shavertown, PA, for that matter (my biological hometown). This happens more and more lately. Perhaps it's a step-function of age, or a natural consequence of adversity, or from the very large number of books I've read in such a short time. Or it's the index cards I carry around with me everywhere: some stuffed in my back pocket, in jacket pockets. In my backpack. On the end-table.
Homecomings, of a sort, which make me think of Homecomings of that sort: the real kind. The kind that you'd go back to CMU for, or to Dallas Area High School for.
The kind I used to imagine returning to myself, when I'd look at the few older “kids” who'd be around for the Homecoming Game. I was the escort of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Toni, for the Homecoming Court my senior year. No one knew I was gay, of course (and thank goddess that relatively fewer kids won't ever have to say “I wasn't out, of course”!), but I was the president of our class, sat on a vast number of cross-functional committees and panels, was well-respected by my teachers and by administrators—and even by the 'snakes' and 'hoods' in the class (in large part thanks to the “indefinite detention” I'd received towards the end of my junior year).
So yeah, the past intrudes as well. But only enough to dot the map between then and here, only intruding enough to say “remember me! I was on your path, too!”
It's a pleasant feeling, like the hum and thrum of body parts after sex, like random breezings of “San Francisco air conditioning” at this time of year, like hearing Sam's voice in the morning separate from everything else because I haven't quite opened my eyes, haven't quite awakened.
There may not have been only the one path from then to here—although given the more extreme places and events along my particular path, I am hard-pressed to imagine another route—but it's the path I took and it's indelible.
I am on Caltrain right now; the novel I mentioned is the reason for the writing, the reason for the gentle tug of memory, the piezo-electric snick of pattern gentled squeezed into place. On the train, I sit facing the City. I always do this. Going to Cupertino or heading back Home, I always sit facing Home, otherwise I get a bit motion-sick. Not the kind you get from moving backwards in the morning or even moving forwards at night, or the kind some get when reading in a moving car. It's more about focus. It's more about measuring distance to understand that which is not subject to the scorn of distance or the chill of Apart. Love of him. Love of City. Love of Family. Love of Self. Love of Life and all its self-made diversity, complexity and wonder.
But I digress.
I am a creature of habit. On the train I read. It's what I do. And yet today I write, for the same reason I always write: because the words are there and permit nothing to continue until they go from here (head) to there (paper/iBook).
Habits can be measured only when you're not performing for them. Otherwise, they're just what you're doing.
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I have read two books in the last 48 hours.
I never thought I'd say that again in my life.
The last time I'd done something like this was on a vacation Allen and I took in 1994. We went to St. Thomas. Allen had won the trip playing a phone-in version of the Scrabble TV Gameshow. Ironically, it was on the Family Channel. Yes, folks, Pat Robertson had sent a gay couple to St. Thomas for a week, all expenses (including airfare) paid! We had taken three suitcases: one for him, one for me, one for books. I read eight books in 'six days seven nights'.
The reason for the reads? The taking of a train! (A lot of alliteration for a literary allurement, no?)
Now that Frank is no longer making the daily trip to the Mothership (sound the chime of gratuitous rhyme!) I am taking CalTrain baby-bullet trains to the South Bay. It saves on gas, it saves on the expense of gas ($92.50/month for the train vs approximately $70/week), and I get a couple of hours each day of me-time. I've spent the last two commutes reading.
First was Necklace of Kisses, as I mentioned in the last entry, and then was “Ethan Frome (Enriched Classics)” (Edith Wharton). Technically, I had to read the last 10 pages of it when I got home, but Sam insisted. You see, he'd had to read it for a class last semester, and we had the movie adaptation of it from Netflix. I had wanted a “date night” with Sam, and he set it all up: he cooked, bought me flowers and chose a bottle of wine that he knew I liked.
So we watched the movie together, cuddled up on the sofa under a too-heavy comforter.
The movie was well-acted, but the adaptation was one of the worst I've seen (that said, Demi changing the end of The Scarlet Letter to a happy one is, by far, the worst).
Ethan Frome is a painfully well-written novella. Knowing up front that things don't end well doesn't stop you from wishing with every paragraph that it will be other than you already know it to be, and the more pages you read, the less chance that the fewer remaining pages will produce an unexpected happiness. That makes for an intimate dread! It's been a long time since I have been affected so deeply, personally by a book.
Well, except for the day before, with the Weetzie Bat book. But even that was an abstract idealistic, ethereal reaction rather than unavoidably having to endure the cold, wet, loneliness of Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver.
It feels like I'm finding that bit of daylight back into the world I want to be in. Not a nose buried in books, but rather a life lived with memories and sensations and imaginings that are motile, accessible, vibrant. An arable life, I've called it in the past.
I know from Sam and from Mikey and from my own distant-past experience that reading compulsorily does not bring with it the same joy as reading by choice, but I do now have the luxury again of having the space and time to read and to get back into my own headspace.
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No, not I'm Miss San Francisco. I miss San Francisco. I spend all day every weekday down in Cupertino at the Mothership and I don't get to spend much daytime in the City.
I'm at Sweet Inspirations in the Castro waiting for Sam. The sun is low, casting long shadows and blinding half the people walking this side of Market Street, but it's still kind of warm, the shop has its front doors open, and all manor of variety of people walk by, from older men in daisy-dukes to crazy Portuguese men wearing Superman muscle-tees, from FTM transsexuals to straight girls with their clutchy, overly-demonstrative boyfriends.
I miss this...
I love my job; I love the people I work with. I love it all, except that Cupertino—and most of the South Bay for that matter—feels largely soulless. No afflatus.
I wish Apple were in San Francisco. But then, as Marie always said, “Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which one gets filled faster.”
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I've got this 1970s crap pop psych going on in my head and I can't make it stop:
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Except that I've got it in reverse. In a sense, for all the years I considered going to work at the Mothership—even before there was a building called the Mothership—for all the times I looked for my place there, for all the times I'd decided I'd fare better on my own or at least at some distance from there, for all the weighing of the Pros (near infinite) and Con's (just a couple), in about an hour from the time I'm writing this, I'll officially be an employee of the Mothership.
So today doesn't so much feel like the 'first day of the rest of my life' (how goddamn trite were the 1970s anyway?) as it feels like the last day of The Long Flirtation.
Maybe there have been too many First Days for me, or maybe I'm one of those that believes we really only get one beginning and one end. Or maybe, just maybe, I'm one of those earthy-nutty-crunchy-Northern-Californians who doesn't like to rubberstamp things and call them absolutes.
No destinies. No ordained passages.
Or maybe I just have butterflies.
Who's gonna be a Software Architect at Apple Computer?
I can't imagine who.
When I was a wee boy back in college, at the beginning of my Sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983, I had just sold the TRS-80 computer, printer and floppy disk drives I had bought over the years prior. My computer buying had begun at the tender age of fourteen, when I got my mom to co-sign a bank loan for $600 so that I could buy a computer. I suppose that was also be beginning of my debt.
Money well-spent/well-borrowed, I say! After upgrading the BASIC ROMs on the computer, upgrading the memory—$99 for 16K of RAM—buying an “expansion interface”, an Epson Printer and 2 floppy disk drives to replace the already-past-its-limits cassette drive, and after acquiring several hundred dollars worth of software, I sold the whole mess in 1983 for about $2000.
One day, when CMU had just opened their campus computer store—an unheard-of thing in those days—a few of us decided to check it out. Not much to see, just an office in the “new” office building on campus, painted cinder-block walls stock office desks. We looked at the price list and I had almost immediately decided on an IBM PC with 2 floppy drives and 16K of memory. Oh, and with the IBM display (monochrome, green characters on a black screen). This was going to clock in at around $1600. Fair enough, I figured. I was getting a 6MHz machine for less than I'd sold my 1.77MHz TRS-80.
As we turned to walk back out of the store/office, there on a desk sat a little beige machine with a mostly-white display. With one of those mouse-things attached to it (now, mice I had seen before, down in one of the quasi-subterranean floors of Warner/Science Hall....I wasn't sure what they were for, but a small box with buttons attached to a strange-shaped computer workstation made quite an impression).
A paint program was running. I moved the mouse around and watched the cursor on the little screen follow. I clicked the button; it made a dot on the screen. I held the button down and moved the mouse, and an oval grew from the starting point!
I got the whole catastrophic beauty of this machine in less than a couple of minutes. And on February 7, 1984, just two weeks after the official introduction, I had one in my dorm room.
To this day, I have never regularly used a PC, never bought a PC for myself. I have, however, had upwards of a dozen different Macs.
Apple & the Mac have been significant yardsticks in how I measure the progress of my life, important memory-prods into very specific times in my past and quite a fine ongoing example of majority-minority patterns. In other words, I've learned a lot.
So, Happy 21st Birthday (January 24) to the Macintosh. Click on the young Steve Jobs above to watch a streaming video of the original introduction. You, of course, must have QuickTime installed on your machine—and shame on you if you don't already.
I'm going to go spin the propeller on the little cap on my big head, and try like hell not to shudder when I think of what might not have been...