The iPod at 20: the one that started it all

Apple provided an unsolicited reminder on Monday of just how much disposable income I’ve channeled its way over the last 20 years. It wasn’t pretty. The company’s latest Event (grandiose capital E intended) opened with a slick video of a bespectacled youth in his garage (Silicon Valley, we presume) firing up old Apple devices to sample their start-up chimes, thumbwheel clicks and even the snap of an AirPods case being closed. The samples were then combined into a piece of vibrant groove music with which to fanfare CEO Tim Cook, apparently standing in a field outside the Apple campus in Cupertino, for his introduction to the company’s presentation of new MacBooks for, mostly, creatives.

As the 90-second clip spun past, I caught sight of an original ‘jelly-coloured’ iMac, and the first iPod, which was launched 20 years ago today. These were the gateway drugs that hooked me on Apple, committing me to at least three generations of iMac, four iPods and their natural successor, the iPhone, along with iPads, MacBooks-numerous, a MacMini, and an entire drawer full of accessories for all of them. All in the space of 20 years. I shudder to think how much it has all cost.

To go back a little further, I started using Apple products professionally in the early 1990s, learning the art of desktop publishing and layout work for magazines and print advertising on the job thanks to intuitive hardware and software that made it so easy. On my first morning in Sky TV’s Creative Services department I was sat in front of a Mac, shown how to use QuarkXPress and Adobe Illustrator, and six weeks later I was driving past a 96-sheet billboard for The Simpsons on the A3 that I’d designed myself. I would subsequently spend hours drooling at Apple laptops in the window of a high-end computer dealer in Chiswick, like Mike Myers coveting the white Stratocaster in Wayne’s World. Alas, they were all well beyond my pay packet. Then, in 1998, Apple launched the iMac, and instantly made home computer ownership fun, accessible and, to a certain extent, affordable. I eventually bought one in early 2001 when I moved to Silicon Valley myself. My apartment was a 10-minute straight-line drive from the Apple HQ in Cupertino, which meant that I was soon drinking the local Kool-Aid. 

Armed with a relocation allowance, I bought an iMac from the local Fry’s Electronics toy shed, the very first PC I’d ever owned that hadn’t been provided for me by an employer. By acquiring that iMac I’d bought into the “digital lifestyle” that Steve Jobs had started pitching. “Rather than just hear about megahertz and megabytes,” an Apple press release for the iMac trilled at the time, “customers can now learn and experience the things they can actually do with a computer, like make movies, burn custom music CDs, and publish their digital photos on a personal website.” In other words, a ‘digital hub’. All these things were still embryonic (especially the idea of uploading anything to this new-fangled thing called ‘the Internet’), but Jobs had the uncanny ability of envisaging the technology people needed - or didn’t know they needed yet - and unlike most major figures in the tech world, had the charisma to sell it to them. 

Even in 2001, some time after the Dot Com bubble had burst, Jobs was able to apply his quasi-rock star appeal (well, as close to rock star as a technology leader could resemble) to turning the functional business tool that most PCs were into a desirable piece of a consumer electronics. Key to this was a shift in connectivity that Jobs had foreseen, particularly enabled by the emergence of FireWire technology that could attach digital cameras and other peripherals to PCs, enabling content to be quickly extracted and then, with easy-to-use software, turned into something creative. Thus, he commenced the ‘consumerisation’ of professional applications, turning applications like Final Cut Pro into iMovie, which enabled anyone to make something polished of their holiday videos (the same philosophy was applied to making music with GarageBand, launched in 2004, providing anyone with a Mac - and, now, even an iPhone and an iPad - with the means to record their own compositions).

2001 was a significant year in many ways. Whether it was the arrival of the actual year of Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, or the first year-proper of the 21st century, in technology terms, it was the year that Apple moved into fifth gear. When I arrived in California in March that year, the previous decades consumer tech boom was already giving way to other things, like biotech and healthtech (“Tech of all kinds – we already sound like 15th century Mexico,”, if I can borrow Boris Johnson’s dad joke the other day…). Apple, however, was laying the foundations of the imperiousness that, by 2020, made it the first US company to exceed a market cap of $2 trillion. Today it has a higher value than the GDP of Russia, Canada, South Korea and Italy.

On 9 January, 2001, Jobs announced iTunes, an app partly purloined from elsewhere (SoundJam) which, in a music industry-baiting move, enabled CDs to be ripped using the latest version of the iMac’s optical drive, making it easy to build-up a personal digital music library, eventually allowing it to burn compilation CDs like mix tapes. I’d previously seen music stored digitally on a PC at former Skids frontman and TV presenter Richard Jobson’s house, and was enamoured by the idea of a digital jukebox. I didn’t care, particularly, about any perceived loss of sound quality from listening to compressed digital music as I just loved the simplicity of clickable access to music. 

What was missing, however, was portability. By the mid-1990s, the travelling music fan still had to pack CDs and even cassettes to listen to on clunky portable players. Sony’s MiniDisc at least attempted to miniaturise music into a smaller form factor, while Philips’ failed Digital Compact Cassette was merely a means of extending patent revenue from the humble magnetic tape with the addition of digital recording. Audiophiles gave both DCC and MiniDisc a notable swerve. The advent of the MP3 digital audio standard in 1994 led to various companies launching players, like Diamond’s Rio in 1998. Most, Steve Jobs told his executive team, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, “truly sucked”, and tasked Apple to produce one of its own. 

Jobs pulled together a team that included former Philips manager Tony Fadell (who’d worked on the Velo and Nino Windows CE devices I helped launch in the UK) and Apple’s hardware engineering lead, Jon Rubinstein, to come up with something better, challenging them to have something ready for an October unveiling ahead of the Christmas sales season. Isaacson’s seminal (and substantial) authorised biography Steve Jobs explains in forensic detail the process that saw the product take shape, with Jobs himself giving - as was his tendency - fastidious daily feedback on what he, as a music fan, wanted from the device, prescribing his desire to make the product simple to use, with navigation restricted to a “three clicks” maximum. Another of Jobs’ insights was that the device had to work with the iTunes app on the iMac, making the computer the primary interface for music library management. Further discussions were held, with Jobs now adding his views on the minutiae of things like the colour of the accompanying headphones, with Apple design chief Jonny Ive throwing in his thoughts on the product’s white-and-polished stainless steel colour scheme. Then came a back-and-forth about the device’s marketing, with the eventual execution of “1,000 songs in your pocket” emanating from one of the Apple CEO’s encounters with Toshiba in Japan, who first flagged the idea of a 5-gigabyte hard drive that could store such an amount of music.

On 23 October 2001, the result of all this rapid endeavour was revealed. Barely a month after 9/11, a world numbed by the atrocity was introduced to the iPod. This would be the device which, arguably, set in train Apple’s evolution and light the touch paper of a technology-led transformation of cultural life and even social behaviour. Journalists had been invited to Cupertino for what was, by today’s standards, a relatively modest Apple event, but one in which they’d been teased cryptically - “Hint: it’s not a Mac.” On stage, Jobs theatrically produced from his jeans a small white device to which he  declared: “This amazing little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.” 

Compared to the 160GB capacity iPods Apple would later offer, the 5GB hard drive of that first model seems modest now, but surely a music player capable of storing 1,000 songs had instant appeal? Not, according to some critics, who branded the device too expensive at $399 and limited in what it could do. Some even went as far as suggesting that Jobs and Apple had, once again, bitten off more than the brand could chew, the last time being the failed Newton PDA. But Jobs stuck to his conviction: “Music is a part of everyone’s life,” he said, “and because it’s a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries.” 

We didn’t know it at the time, but this was a very loaded statement about where Apple would go as it broadened out of being just the ‘cool’ computer brand. Sales of that first iPod, and the quickly added second, 10GB, model weren’t stellar, but in the months after 9/11 the world understandably had other things on its mind. Apple, though, had done it again, introducing something that already existed and created a category out of it. History has been more kind to the first iPods, with many believing that it was the first truly great MP3 player. Jobs’ instincts about the digital music player field had been right. The iPod was a milestone in portable audio, but more importantly, it sparked Apple’s transformation from relatively esoteric computer brand, somewhat secretly - and smugly - coveted by creative professionals, to become one of the biggest companies on the planet. 

That first iPod and its many descendants would ultimately give way to the iPhone (the iPod Touch is even a hybrid of both), in which Apple repeated the principle all over again and reinvented the nascent smartphone category which, in turn, would turbocharge the digital lifestyle Jobs had imagined with the iMac to begin with. It’s worth remembering that in October 2001 there was no social media as we know it today, and Napster had been a relatively momentary irritation to the music industry, so the idea of a pocket device that could connect to always-on streaming services over super-fast, low-latency mobile networks was a long, long way off. Facebook was, back then, just a college dorm idea, so people weren’t uploading their holiday photographs to the Internet as they do now. Television was still linear, so in 2001, the notion of binge-watching an entire season of, say, The Sopranos, while sitting on the top deck of a bus was, frankly, not even a concept.

The iPhone has, of course, coalesced many functionalities into one platform - music, camera, television, cinema, e-mail, Web browsing and so on - but without the iPod to begin with, Apple might not have gone anywhere near phones, AirPods, iPads, TV set-top boxes or any one of the myriad product lines that I seem to have spent a stupid amount of my hard-earned on over 20 years. And you know what? I don’t regret a single penny of it. At one point in time I had the crazy idea of buying several iPod Shuffles, the inch-square music players with a 2GB capacity that were available in six colours. The idea was to have different genres of music on each of them, to be chosen per occasion or mood, like Thunderbirds’ Virgil Tracy choosing a pod (that word again) for Thunderbird 2 to fit the mission. Ludicrous, I know, but this is Apple’s marketing strength for you. While I resisted that idea, I’ve certainly succumbed to the iPod’s appeal, owning four. 

© Simon Poulter 2021

At the beginning of September I was digging around in that drawer of Apple bits-and-pieces and found the second iPod I owned - a third-generation, 30GB model from 2003, a fifth-generation model with a whopping 80GB capacity, a 16GB fourth-generation iPod Nano bought, on a whim, in Los Angeles, and a even cuter seventh-generation Nano bought, again, on a US trip in 2012. While hardly Indiana Jones stumbling across the Lost Ark, the discovery of that later Nano found its way into my pocket for the start of my return to office commuting. The firmware or the Bluetooth or some such aspect of its performance needs upgrading, but it still works. That, though, wasn’t the attraction of reviving it: it was the fact that the neat little music player, just 9cm long and weighing little more than a stack of credit cards, was such a sexy piece of technology, with its anodised aluminium casing and flash memory replacing the weighty hard drive of the original iPod.

When the definitive history of Apple Computer gets written, it will no doubt be the iPhone that commands the most attention, but the iPod deserves its place. In fact, more than that - it deserves acknowledgement for its singular contribution to culture. It has become, according to Leander Kahney, who wrote The Cult Of Mac, “the signature technology of the digital music era” and “profoundly” changed music culture. While Apple’s appeal until the iPod and certainly the iMac had certainly been amongst professional creatives, the iPod had a universal appeal. The Queen, it is claimed, has owned one, and the late German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld reportedly possessed more than 70 containing his entire CD collection, transporting them around the world in their own suitcase. “We had no idea this thing would get this huge,” Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller once told USA Today. 

In his book, Kahney draws attention to how the iPod would impact music listening in general, arguing that it ripped up the decades-old custom of listening to entire albums from start to finish and (even if ageing hipsters like me have embraced the vinyl revival), and that record ownership could only be visualised by shelved libraries of albums on various formats. Apart from anything else, Kahney says, with those white headphones plugged in, and the library stored on that hard drive, no-one needed to know what you were listening to, though as we all know, aggravating sound leakage from headphones readily gives away someone’s musical tastes, especially on public transport. Kaheny does, though, make the interesting point that the iPod may have even opened up musical tastes as people started experimenting with genres they’d previously not dipped into. The iPod also became a replacement for radio programming; ‘podcasts’ derived their name from the device, becoming an online sub-culture in their own right, with professional and amateur productions of all kinds covering every possible niche and mainstream interest; DJs took iPods into clubs to play tracks from them instead of turntables, mixing between multiple devices; and you could say that the iPod proliferated the entire business of music being available legally online. 

Whether Steve Jobs’ intention, in 1998 when he unveiled the iMac, was to turn Apple into the giant it is today is not fully known. The iPod, though, gave that process a significant kick, although compared with today’s marketing expenditure for Apple products, the company only spent $25 million on launching the first player in 2001, building its market share largely through word of mouth. Experts agree that the iPod’s appeal grew somewhat organically - an incongruous point given how Apple markets its products today. But whether by instinct or design, Jobs revelled in the “disruption” that technology wizards like talking about. 

Apple started out challenging the notion that computers could only be beige, and that managing them had to be clunky. Steve Jobs saw that technology offered something more rewarding in people’s lives - ironically, a vision that has proven stupendously rewarding for Apple itself.  The iPod was, perhaps, the point of origin for that vision, and I don’t think it hyperbolic to say that has directly influenced much of Apple’s product development history over the last 20 years. I don’t think it hyperbolic, either, to claim that the iPod and its lineage has contributed to a single-handed transformation of modern life. Which, I know, is quite a claim.

When Sky was the limit

It's not often one can claim to be a part of history, and when you do it can sound ever-so slightly high-and-mighty. But 30 years ago today I walked through the central London doors of a relatively obscure satellite TV company that would, within five months, transform European broadcasting forever and later lead an even more dramatic transformation of football into the multi-billion pound business it is today.

The company I joined on 15 August, 1988, was Sky Channel, a pan-European station reliant on mostly cheap-and-cheerful reruns of syndicated American shows like I Love Lucy and, what was then, WWF wrestling (with huge, loyal and at times passionate audiences in Scandinavia, especially when the signal dropped during WrestleMania...), continental Europe - particularly cable-dominated countries like the Netherlands and Germany - and, randomly, Swindon and Milton Keynes. Two months previously, Rupert Murdoch, whose News International was Sky's largest shareholder, had brazenly announced the plan to launch four channels simultaneously under the Sky Television banner via the ASTRA satellite system, thus bypassing the UK government which had declined him a licence to operate on a new 'official' direct-to-home satellite frequency. The idea of launching four channels on the same day might, now, with hundreds on offer, seem a little arcane, but in 1988 it was a novelty in the UK, which had only had a fourth channel, Channel 4, added to BBC1, BBC2 and ITV in November 1982.

My appointment, in August 1988, to the Sky Channel press office as a junior TV listings writer was a blessing: I was still only 20, but had been mostly unemployed for the best part of the previous 12 months following the ending of my first proper job after leaving school when the newly launched magazine, LM, went bust in May 1987. Although I’d supplemented my meagre dole money by working occasionally as a freelance music journalist for Smash Hits, Record Mirror, Sounds, the NME and even the Mail on Sunday, as well spending the summer of 1987 helping out the Sport Aid charity, I was desperate for the consistency of a salaried job...and I just hadn’t broken into the somewhat closed shop that was the London music press. When the Sky opportunity came along - via an insider who knew my former deputy editor at LM - I felt like a great burden had been lifted. Unemployment, after such a brief period of living the high life as a teenage journalist, was no fun thing. I'd gone from an 18-year-old interviewing pop stars and hanging out in TV studios to a bi-weekly bus ride into Kingston-upon-Thames to sign on, followed by a contemplative cup of coffee in Next (crashing my £14 a week dole money already in the process), before heading home for Neighbours. Now I think of it, it was a soul-destroying period, and one I've vowed never to repeat again.

The job I took at Sky didn’t, at first, suggest the great portent of the whole venture. TV listings - usually episodic details of daily screenings of I Dream Of Jeannie or Gidget plus some hoary old Western at 8pm - were essential pieces of publicity information laboriously printed on an ageing dot-matrix printer and physically mailed out to TV listings magazines throughout Europe. Once a month an entire monthly package was produced, which would take most of the weekend to generate on that wheezy old printer.

Amongst all this industriousness was the countdown to 5 February, 1989, the deadline Murdoch had ambitiously set to launch Sky Television, which would augment Sky Channel (later renamed Sky One) with Sky News, Sky Movies and Eurosport. From our office in Foley Street, a couple of streets away from that Reithian bastion, the BBC's Broadcasting House, the foundations of what is now the vast £24 billion Sky empire (currently being fought over by Comcast and Murdoch's Fox for full ownership) were being built. Within this environment I gained my first experience of working within a labyrinthine corporate organisation, as executives from across the Murdoch companies were shipped in, from Australian TV channels or the 'fortress' at Wapping, where the News International newspapers were based (occasionally I’d be sent down there on errands, enduring the intimidating atmosphere that only a few years before had generated bloodthirsty riots as Murdoch had taken on and, it would appear, succeeded in challenging the hardcore print unions on the introduction of new production technologies).

The familial ties between Sky and the News International stable was a constant source of sniping from the non-Murdoch media, whom we in the press office still had to court as we geared towards launch day. Needless to say, the likes of The Guardian and Daily Mail, we’re less than generous. The satirical magazine Private Eye still occasionally runs its 'I-Sky' column, noting "Sky plugs masquerading as news in Murdoch papers", and to be fair, some of the pieces run by The Sun, News Of The World, Today and even The Times were a little close for comfort. At the same time Sky had to endure an acrimonious rivalry with British Satellite Broadcasting, which had been granted the very DTH operating licence Murdoch had missed out on, and were offering a bouquet of channels not dissimilar to Sky's. BSB played up their Britishness and their links to its broadcasting establishment and the London creative elite. We at Sky, on the other hand, were cast as classless Murdoch proles managed by brash, course Australian TV executives. In fairness, that wasn't a bad description, and it suited us. Over at Wapping, the intimidating legend "YOU ARE ENTERING SUN COUNTRY" thundered over the entrance to the tabloid's newsroom. There was a similar "no one likes us - we don’t care" mindset over at The Sun's television stablemate.

The image of a Sky staffed by rough-and-ready types targeting council house Britain wasn’t helped by the equally tasty 'dish war' that broke out: Sky's use of the Luxembourg-based ASTRA satellite system meant that it would be available to [initially] UK subscribers owning a 12-inch dish optimistically described as being the size of a dinner plate to assuage fears about dish 'farms' sprouting on rooftops (fears that later proved well founded). BSB had their own, nine-inch square dish, dubbed the 'squarial', which would be ergonomically more pleasing than the Sky product. The fact that both aerials and their accompanying set-top boxes were being manufactured by my later employer, Philips, at a factory near Le Mans, was cleverly kept out of the press by a line of potted plants separating the two production lines.

Alan Sugar's Amstrad also got in on the business manufacturing systems for Sky, eventually becoming its exclusive supplier. Still, though, Sky and BSB took out full page newspaper ads denouncing each other's dishes, sometimes quite wittily, as well as attacks on each other's programming. BSB had tried to play up the BBC-influenced quality of its documentary channel, for example. Sky responded with a piss-take suggesting that all BSB would be good for would be nature documentaries featuring "humping rhinos".

It was around this time that Rupert Murdoch himself, and his BSB rival Anthony Simmonds-Gooding, were engaged in a fierce bidding war with Hollywood to tie up film rights for blockbusters to be shown on the respective movie channels. On one occasion, Murdoch allegedly pulled up at the gates of a Hollywood studio demanding to see a senior executive who happened to be entertaining Simmonds-Gooding at the time, purely to disrupt the discussion. On another occasion, the head of Sky's corporate affairs team, the former Sunday Times media editor Jonathan Miller, gave an interview with Time Out's Alkarim Jivani in which he vowed not to "get into a pissing competition with a skunk". Fun times.

While the politics of establishing a completely new way of offering television to the British public were being fought, Sky was setting up a new HQ fifteen miles to the west of Foley Street, in Osterley...right under the final approach flight path to Heathrow. Whereas BSB had been installed in palatial offices in Battersea (we were later to discover that their office furniture was from exclusive Italian designer brands and included kid leather sofas), Sky was moving into three ready-made industrial units, one of which housing the Sky News newsroom and studios, the other two production and corporate offices. Meantime, the company was busy signing up on-air talent for the news channel, poaching the likes of Kay Burley and Adam Boulton from ITV's TV-am, and seasoned hands like Bob Friend from the BBC. Sky News was, then, and remains today the editorial jewel in Sky's crown. I'm immensely proud to have been its channel press officer towards the end of my tenure at the company, even if it was lampooned by Drop The Dead Donkey with storylines that bore a suspicious similarity to actual events.

Actually, looking back now, 30 years on, I’m actually incredibly proud of the five years I spent at Sky. The company has (and still does) come in for plenty of criticism, but the magnitude of launching those first four channels in February 1989 shouldn’t be disregarded in this modern digital era of infinite channel choice. Like it or not, Sky revolutionised football, not just in the UK with the Premier League, but in the way the Sky-subsidised Premier League has changed European and even world football. Sky News is still one of the world's greatest news channels, easily rivaling the BBC for breadth and depth, and perhaps - and surprisingly - for balance, too.

In those first few months before the full launch, we used to say to each other "No one's ever launched four TV channels on the same day and at the same time," and at the time, no one had. When, at 6pm on Sunday 5th February, 1989, almost six months after I’d walked in to 31-33 Foley Street, Alastair Yates and Penny Smith introduced the very first Sky News bulletin, those of us at a launch event in a Park Lane hotel felt a tremendous sense of achievement, of battling the odds, a prevailingly anti-Murdoch press and even the British establishment (though it was fun to take a call earlier that afternoon from "Number 10" with, what turned out to be Woodrow Wyatt - not Denis Thatcher, as I'd thought - asking how "one operates this Sky box thingy as Margaret would like to watch the launch"). This was only the start of a bumpy ride: when Sky TV and BSB merged in November 1990 the companies were losing a combined £12 million per week (an executive had once predicted that the two ventures would "haemorrhage red ink").

I would eventually fall victim to some of the nastier politics of the frontier spirit that infected Sky's uncompromising agenda (including the dreaded, late CEO Sam Chisholm, who took a dislike to me). But the five-year journey that began 30 years ago today taught me many of the skills I put into practice still today. The phrase "startup" wasn’t used back then, but that is exactly what Sky was. In the years I spent in its midst I went from churning out inch-thick sheafs of TV listings to learning desk top publishing on the job. I helped launch The Simpsons, met my hero Spike Milligan, stuck my hand up the bottom of a puppet called DJ Kat, hung out with a then-unknown Johnny Depp (who spent the entire time smoking and being moody), met Hulk Hogan several times ("Hey dude! Call me Terry!"), spent a Saturday afternoon driving around Moscow with Jon Bon Jovi and was part of the production team of an expletive-laden live broadcast with Ozzy Osborne on the steps of St. Basil's Cathedral. And, in my last role at the company, managed the PR for an exciting, young 24-hour news channel during tumultuous events like Nelson Mandela's first walk to freedom, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the senseless bloodletting that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. All of this in five years.

30 years on I’ve achieved much, much more - working abroad for 17 years amongst it - but today's anniversary brings back very poignant memories of a period early in my career where in a business environment not dissimilar to the chaos of war, I gained so much. I didn’t go to university, but I sometimes think that the life and professional skills I picked up after walking through that door on 15 August, 1988 more than equipped me for everything that has followed. And everything I’m about to experience. More of which on these pages soon...

20 years on: the rebirth of cool...and Apple

Last Wednesday Apple reported quarterly earnings of $61.1 billion, almost $10 billion more than the same quarter a year ago. Its 2017 annual revenue was $229 billion. To put that into perspective, the UK's annual defence budget is about £50 billion. That Apple is loaded is common knowledge. That consumers like me are still prepared to fork out for premium-priced products to keep that turnover going says much about the company's brand resilience, despite it lacking any true, must-have innovations for some time.

But at risk of sounding like a Apple fanboy, my ownership of multiple iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs (including the MacBook on which I write these words), is the product of an infatuation that began almost 30 years ago. In the very early 1990s I, like many others in the media professions, was introduced to the Mac as a production tool. Apple's desktops were in most newspaper and magazine offices as the digital, desktop publishing revolution transformed the business of ink. Working, first, on Apple's SE PCs, I migrated to larger machines as I moved from the Sky TV press office to the company's in-house creative services department. There, the ease and simplicity of the Mac I was provided with allowed me, completely untrained, to master the production of print advertising. Within my first week I'd mastered programmes like QuarkXpress and Illustrator, and had produced my first billboard - a poster for The Simpsons, which was about to launch on Sky One. Six weeks later, I saw the finished poster for real on a 96-sheet billboard on the A3 in New Malden.

Near Sky's offices in Osterley was an Apple reseller. Occasionally I'd go past it and, like Mike Myers in Wayne's World eyeing up that white Fender Stratocaster, would press my nose up against the glass window, drooling over an Apple PowerBook. Clever product placement of these laptops in various films had made them extremely desirable, which also made the one I kept drooling over completely out of range of anything I could afford. And, to be frank, there wouldn't have been much justification for me owning it. But it did look effortlessly cool.

Apple ownership arrived, eventually, 20 years ago, on May 6, 1998 when, under the leadership of the late Steve Jobs, the company unveiled the product that would, finally, satisfy my Apple infatuation, and at the same time, would set the company on the path to unprecedented riches that it enjoys today. That product was the iMac. Essentially a 15-inch portable TV with a computer built into it, that, however, wasn't the appeal, or the point. With its translucent 'Bondi Blue'-coloured casing around a 15-inch CRT tube screen, matching keyboard and mouse, it was everything the home PC user needed in one, neat unit. Even the grab handle led some eccentrics to treat it like a laptop.

The first model was somewhat rudimentary, and functional upgrades progressively followed, along with the expansion of more colour choices ('Blueberry', 'Grape', 'Tangerine', 'Lime' and 'Strawberry'). But that first iMac, however, was an instant design classic. Jobs and his team - in particular, Sir Jonny Ive - had brilliantly thrown away all the aesthetic norms of a PC - beige or grey boxes - and created something that looked good out in the open, not just hidden away in an office. Even the mouse and keyboard matched the 'fruity' colours of the computer itself. The iMac was (and, seven generations on, still is) an extremely daring move. It was also relatively affordable, too. $1,299 might not sound cheap, but that was half the price of most other Apple computers on the market. Finally, Mac ownership was within reach.

The iMac was an instant success. By January 1999 the previously struggling Apple had more than tripled its quarterly profit. Demand was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "insatiable". Moreover, the iMac reinvented Apple as a cool consumer electronics brand, and by introducing a machine with such popular appeal (the word "fun" had never been previously associated with computing) the naysayers who believed that Apple was just a niche brand selling to professionals were soon being proven wrong. Visit a coffee shop today - especially one within the catchment of a major university or college - and that ubiquitous, illuminated Apple logo will be glaring right at you from the lids of MacBooks. So much for niche.

I bought my first iMac in Amsterdam in 1999, a year after Apple had launched it. Now, I was not only owning my first PC, but I was also finally owning a Mac. At the beginning of 2001 I moved to Silicon Valley and bought my second iMac, a second-generation model front-loading CD slot and better connectivity. Soon I was embracing the "digital lifestyle", thanks to a USB-based 'hub' device as attractive as it was functional, colourful and, relatively speaking, powerful, too. With its convenient means of ripping and storing CDs, I now had a digital jukebox. The purchase of my first digital camera in the summer of 2001, followed by the iPod's arrival the following October (an introduction somewhat overshadowed in the US by the pallor left by 9/11 a month before) completed my conversion to the twin cults of Jobs and Apple.

It's not an exaggeration to say the iMac saved Apple. It turned a professionals-only computing business into a consumer brand. In the 20 years since that first iMac was unveiled, I've upgraded my Apple fleet in overlapping steps: the original iMac gave way to the first flat screen model, that gave way to sleeker and thinner models. The iPod gave way to larger capacity models, Nanos and then Apple's next masterstroke, the iPhone, followed by the iPad. There are parallels here to the tale of Trigger's "award-winning" broom in Only Fools And Horses - owned for 20 years, but with 17 new heads and 14 new handles. Of course, this continuing Apple fandom is partly the result of clever Apple marketing, but it shouldn't be dismissed, either, that Apple's design excellence - both inside and out of its products - has kept me on board all this time.

Apple has its justified critics (not least of which the mess it has made of iTunes - transforming what has been a brilliantly efficient music management program for the iMac into a morass of user-unfriendly layers designed to push consumers to the Apple Music platform). But much of what drew me to that first iMac, 20 years ago, continues to draw me to its products today - design, simplicity and, yes, just a little sprinkling of fairy dust.

America has just put Homer Simpson in the White House

In Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, one of the greatest of many great episodes of The Simpsons, Homer discovers that he has a half-brother, Herb, an auto tycoon. Seeing Homer as the epitome of Average America, Herb invites him to design the perfect car, believing that his suburban savvy will deliver the vehicle for middle America. The result - 'The Homer' - turns out to be a disaster: a Frankenstein's monster of bubble domes, three horns each playing La Cucaracha, supersized cupholders, shag carpets and tailfins, with a $82,000 price tag. Unsurprisingly, it bankrupts Herb's company, leaves him destitute and bitterly resentful of the half-brother he'd only recently discovered he had. The moral of this tale is clearly be careful what you wish for.

In essence, then, America has just voted for Homer Simpson to be its 45th president. Crass, uncouth, inexperienced, boorish - the list goes on. Trump is the braggart sat all night at the bar getting steadily louder and steadily more pissed, pontificating on everything and anything he thinks he has an opinion on. At some point in the evening he will make a crude pass at the pretty blonde sat a few stools away, not realising that her 6ft 6in cage fighting boyfriend is just coming back from the toilet. It won't end well.

But this is where, precisely, the United States of America finds itself. 2016, eh? The year of unprecedented disruption, of our musical icons leaving us and our political expectations going completely awry in the midst of simply awful campaigning. Brexit was hard to accept, given the toxicity that had gone into the campaign - the outright lies and personal ambition of the Leavers, and the anaemia of certain sections of the Remainers.

The Trump victory, however, is harder to take, but there are blindingly obvious parallels with Brexit, particularly the apparent reaction it represents from a disaffected and squeezed middle. However, the fears of post-Brexit Britain pale by comparison to the potentially dystopian nightmare that might come from Trump as Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest economy and third largest nation by population.

Forget, for a moment, his own personality flaws - the implied misogyny and casual sexism, the racism, the complete disregard for anyone who could consider themselves part of any minority. What kind of administration will he offer? What will be the effect on the global economy if he goes through with his pledges on trade reforms? What will be the effect on world peace with his relationships with both China and Russia? What if he does pull the US out of Europe, militarily, effectively removing NATO's backbone, with Putin sabre-rattling and circling his wolves around the Baltic states and maybe others in Eastern Europe? All this from a man who has never held public office before, whose history of business collapses is not good, and whose reputation was largely built on the personality cult of being the host of America's version of The Apprentice.

Of course, anyone can become president - that's the dream every American child is brought up to believe. And, today, 'anyone' has. Trump is hardly Everyman, even if he talks up America's working class as well as his own family backstory. He has talked throughout is campaign about inclusiveness, and yet he couldn't have done more to alienate large sections of the population. Even in official photographs of Trump watching the results last night at his campaign HQ failed to depict anyone who wasn't corn-fed white.

There is no denying that he has connected with a large segment of the country that isn't the college-educated, liberal, metropolitan elite who populate its coastal cities, but is a sizeable slice of the country's heartland. But the truly troubling thing is that he has also opened a portal to right-wing hell with his folsky rhetoric. One female Trump supporter interviewed yesterday on Sky News actually talked up the idea of armed revolution if Hillary Clinton got elected. No wonder Trump's shock victory has been so warmly embraced by a cavalcade of the far right, from the notorious David Duke to France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands' Geert Wilders. It's like that scene in Blazing Saddles where a queue of reprobates - including, Nazi stormtroopers - are queing up to join Taggart's band of troublemakers to wreak chaos on the town of Rockridge.

Picture: 20th Century Fox

This is where bar-room philosophising gets you if you're not careful. And the irony of all this is that not only has America voted Homer Simpson into the White House, The Simpsons actually predicted the possibility of a Trump presidency as long ago as 2000. The episode Bart To The Future imagines a future in which the ever-ambitious Lisa has become the US president - taking over from Trump.

"We predicted that he would be president back in 2000," Simpsons creator Matt Groening told The Guardian, "but [Trump] was, of course, the most absurd placeholder joke name that we could think of at the time, and that’s still true."

Dan Greaney, who wrote the episode, recently said in The Hollywood Reporter that the episode was meant to show a vision of America "going insane". "It was a warning to America," he said. "That just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. What we needed was for Lisa to have problems that were beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and that's why we had Trump be president before her."

Scarily precident - let's hope they don't prove to be too acurate. Only the next four years will tell us...