2014 — Design changed everything
In this year
2014 changed everything for me through design. It also begins a pattern I can now follow through the photographs: finding something I loved, getting curious about what came next, and escalating.
I had already started wandering into Apple’s walled garden with a 2011 11-inch MacBook Air. After all my research, I was convinced I wanted a Mac. That little Air blew away the experience of every PC I had used before it. My 2011 Toshiba laptop was thoroughly shown up.
March · Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro #
The Samsung tablet was another part of my 2014 hardware story.
Spring · The HTC One M8 #
I had admired the original HTC One. To my eye, it borrowed some of the iPhone 5’s visual language, but made something distinct out of it: hard edges, broad curves, a big screen, and speakers that made the top and bottom of the phone part of its personality.
The One M8 made me reconsider my Nexus 5 hard. The Nexus’s body, display, and battery were wearing on me. After about six months, I traded it for the M8—and, by God, I loved it.
It felt like my MacBook Air: solid, beautiful, something I could grip without hearing it creak. Was that worth a couple hundred dollars? To me, probably. I liked its take on Android, its styling, and its experiments with depth photography. The M7 and M8 still stand out to me as a very particular moment in phone design. I never felt the same about what followed.
September · Switching to iPhone 6 #
Something else was building. The prospect of a larger iPhone, the look of iOS 7, and the apps appearing on iOS kept pulling my attention toward Apple.
The media was part of it. In the Twitter and podcast circles I followed, Apple attracted people who made the hardware and software feel like a shared culture. I found myself listening to more of them, appreciating my Mac more deeply, and loving the Retina iPad mini I had picked up in late 2013.
I wanted that ecosystem for my photographs. I wanted iMessage because it looked like a nicer experience, with FaceTime, iCloud, and Find My fitting around it. I wanted the apps. By the time the big iPhone arrived, I was thoroughly swept up.
Hello, iPhone 6. Goodbye, HTC One M8.
I thought I could get away with 16GB. I could not. That lesson would cost me another upgrade to a 64GB model in January.
More than another device #
The iPhone changed how I documented my life and stayed connected to friends and family. That fall, Tim Cook came out. At that age, seeing him do that helped me feel more secure in myself. It was a special moment, and Apple suddenly meant a great deal to me.
Thinking about it, the attachment had been building for years. I had wanted an iPad 2 so badly, but my parents thought a Toshiba laptop would be a better use of the money. Later, I wanted the Transformer Prime partly because it was trying to give me something I had wanted from the iPad all along.
I was learning a lesson I still come back to: sometimes you should just get what you actually want instead of trying to make a substitute fit. My father had a broader version: “Don’t beat around the bush, just ask for what you want.” I was always reluctant to bother people with my wants. I wish I had taken that advice sooner.
The iPad Air 2 announcement came just before my birthday. After somehow pulling off the iPhone upgrade, I pulled every string a kid could to get the 64GB iPad, too. I managed it. I loved that device until the iPad Pro took its place in early 2016.