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Confessions of a Luddite

S M Chen
6 min readJun 6, 2020

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“Frustration is a distraction from your transition into a beautiful butterfly.”

  • Nelisa Moffatt

One brilliant marketing idea of Apple’s was implemented when my son attended high school. Apple donated a number of computers to the school he attended.

Olav Ahrens Røtne. Unsplash

A bright lad (on a family trip to the Caribbean in the 1980s, I observed him rearrange a Rubik’s cube with alacrity), he became computer savvy and developed a natural preference for the Macintosh platform.

When computers were introduced at my work (I was a hospital-based healthcare professional), they were PCs. I became conversant enough to do my job, but, for my home computer, I used a Mac. This was due in no small part to my son.

Apple, of course, went through iterations and improvement of their computers, which became not only faster and more capable but also cheaper.

The pattern of Apple’s computers roughly followed Moore’s law (named for Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel), which states that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every 2 years, although computer cost would be halved. This was a brilliant empirical insight made in 1965, an eon ago in our computer age. The actual doubling time turned out to be shorter than predicted: 1.5 years rather than 2.

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