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.

The impact of tying a brand with the formative years of a consumer can’t be underestimated. When a tool becomes an instrument of learning and adventure, the emotional bonds that develop are powerful and long-lasting. This is why we always remember our first car so fondly. In the warm embrace of that driver’s seat, we learn to navigate in traffic, to find new places, to meet new people in ways that are unlike anything we’ve ever known in childhood.

I had a moment to speak with John after the event and told him a deep truth that I am certain sounded absurd to anyone else who heard it: When I was young, some of the other kids had Christianity, but I believed in Apple. Growing up with a deep and abiding love for Apple in the 90′s wasn’t easy to do, either. “Beleaguered,” “troubled” and “embattled” were the most frequently applied adjectives for Apple by the business press in those days. My friends collected comic books but I collected Macworld and MacUser, despite the fact that the news was rarely good.

The tide changed, of course, when Steve came back. Yeah, it’s been comforting to watch the crazy earnings growth, all the white earbuds everyone is wearing, all the favorable press. Still, years of worry baked into your childhood aren’t easily wiped away. Just as the flowing cape of my loyalty to Apple followed me into adulthood, so too did the quiet, lurking shadow of my unease for its future.

Looking around a room last week to see a hundred new Macs washing the eager faces of our students in muted blue light was a stirring, powerful image. For the first time, Apple’s emergence from the dark clouds of mismanagement and obscurity was a sudden and visceral reality.

We’re making thousands of converts to the Mac faith here. We’re definitely not the only ones. This is barely the beginning. We’re minting a generation of creative professionals that are hooked on the Mac.

So what does it mean? For me, this is just the barest glimpse of a future dominated by Apple in ways we never could have imagined. Not just iPods, not just fun but ultimately inconsequential consumerism, but a real impact that permanently shifts how most people will use computers to change their worlds. In that room, surrounded by a hundred new Macs, I knew for the first time since I was a kid that Apple was going to be just fine.

Oh yeah, that video from awhile back?

Those were all for Launchbox.