Duh: Apple’s Out of the Woods
Last week I got to meet an Apple VP.
Meeting any sort of dignitary from Apple would make my day worth remembering, but this guy was the real deal. He was Apple’s VP of Education, John Couch. John goes far enough back at Apple to have been recruited by a 20-year-old Steve Jobs. This guy worked on the Lisa.
Like I said: the real deal.
Apple was at Full Sail to participate in the announcement of Project Launchbox, a program where students from nearly all our disciplines get MacBook Pro laptops and pro-level software like Logic and Final Cut Studio at very deep discounts. The announcement took place as over one hundred new students — the first of over 4,000 students in the next 12 months — unpacked their new Macs. The students were salivating as they waited to plunge their power buttons for the first time.
Why does our hip but small private college warrant this attention from Apple? It probably helps that Full Sail is the first college to try this on such a massive scale. But it goes deeper than that.
One of the most resonant things John Couch told the assembled mass of students and faculty during the announcement was that education was in Apple’s DNA. And this is absolutely true: so many of today’s most passionate Mac users have memories of the platform — and Apple’s attendant philosophy of user empowerment — that span the decades back toward their childhoods. My own elementary school was loaded to the gills with Apple IIs and eventually with LC 500s. These, plus the help of an SE at home, were the devices that taught me how to be creative.