David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

And that love relationship actually continued for a very long time.

I basically just became a Mac person for 20 years.

I didn't even care about looking at PCs.

It seemed irrelevant to me, whatever Microsoft was doing, which felt like such a relief because...

In the 90s, I felt like I couldn't escape Microsoft and suddenly I had found my escape.

And now I was with Apple and it was glorious and they shared so many of my sensibilities and my aesthetics and they kept pushing the envelope and there was so much to be proud of, so much to look up to.

And then that sort of started to change with the iPhone, which is weird because the iPhone is what made modern Apple.

It's what I lined up in 2007 together with Jason for five hours to stand in the line to buy a first-generation product where Apple staff would clap at you when you walked out of the store.

I don't know if you remember that.

It was a whole ceremony.

And it was part of that myth and mystique and awe of Apple.

So I just, I wasn't in the market for other computers.

I wasn't in the market for other computer ideas.

I thought perhaps I'd be with the Mac until the end of days.

But as Apple discovered the gold mine it is to operate a toll booth where you don't have to innovate, where you don't actually even have to make anything, where you can just take 30% of other people's business, there was a rot that crept in to the foundation of Apple.

And that started all the way back from the initial launch of the App Store.

But I don't think we saw at the time, I didn't see at the time, just how critical Apple

the mobile phone would become to computing in general.

I thought when the iPhone came out that like, oh, it's like a mobile phone.

I've had a mobile phone since the early 90s.