Ten.
Ten years sure seems like a long time.
Ten years ago the iPhone got physically big for the first time. (In the ensuing decade, iPhone revenue has doubled.) Ten years ago Apple announced the Apple Watch.
Ten years ago I found myself without a job for the first time.
After leaving IDG (which, along with two predecessor companies, had offered me continuous employment for more than 20 years), I really should have taken some time off. But in their infinite wisdom, IDG’s bosses decided that the right day to lay off a huge chunk of staff was the day after an Apple event. (Well, technically they wanted to lay people off the day of the event, but I helped convince them that it would be a stupendously terrible idea.)
The iPhone event was then, as it is now, the biggest single Apple event of the year. And after it was all over, after we crammed into the Flint Center in Cupertino, and saw Bono touch Tim Cook’s finger as they gifted a U2 album to everyone whether they wanted it or not, and went out into the temporary building where Stephen Fry—Stephen Fry!—was admiring new Apple stuff, I was summoned into a back room and Apple’s PR folks gave me an iPhone 6 briefing and handed me review units under embargo.
“So, there’s something I need to tell you,” I said to my Apple PR contact. She knew immediately, and very kindly expressed shock and dismay. I told her we’d work something out and the phones would get reviewed somehow, and in the end I made a deal with the editors back at IDG to write them a review so long as they’d link to my first post at Six Colors, which was a supplement to the review. Apple got the Macworld review they expected, and I got promotion for my new thing.
But what it meant was that there was no way I was going to take time off. The truth is, the best time in the Apple sphere to launch anything new is probably iPhone time, because it’s the peak of attention for the entire year. So I took the phones, wrote reviews, recorded the first episode of Upgrade, went off to the XOXO Festival, and flew back home on September 16, 2014 to wish my wife a happy birthday and press the button that put Six Colors, the site I’d been working on in the background for about a month, into the world. (The next day, my past and future collaborator Dan Moren made his first post.)
Ten years ago I took a leap into working for myself, not working in corporate media. For most days since, I’ve worked in my garage, writing articles for my site, recording podcasts, and writing the occasional piece for other places (including my former employer, which I couldn’t ever have predicted). Lauren and I agreed we’d spend six to nine months giving it a try before judging if it was a success or a failure, but it all started succeeding so quickly that we never really even got to the point where we needed to have the conversation. All of a sudden, Six Colors and Upgrade were my primary jobs… and they still are, here in 2024.
A lot of the assumptions I made in 2014 don’t apply in 2024. It became clear pretty quickly that relying on advertising alone wasn’t going to work, and so we added memberships for Six Colors a year later. These days, direct support from readers and listeners makes up a very large proportion of my salary. Thank you all for helping me continue to do this. I honestly can’t imagine working for someone else.
I’m doing exactly what I dreamed of doing ten years ago. I got to be home when my son was in middle school and when both my kids were in high school. I get to collaborate on projects with all sorts of great people, including Dan, Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett, and the entire Incomparable gang.
My last few years in corporate media were deeply unhappy. The last year of my father’s life, he would keep asking me how my new job was going, and I told him it was fine—but I was lying and I think he could tell. Over the years I had shouldered more management burdens because I wanted the challenge and because I figured somebody had to do it, but by the end I had given up too much of what I got into this business to do, save the occasional new Apple product review. I should have walked away earlier—I even tried once, and was talked into staying by people who incorrectly thought things would get better.
What I’m saying is, my last ten years in this business have been entirely happy. I didn’t need to take time away to go from purely miserable to happy. That iPhone 6 review, which was originally just a way to keep myself connected to the one work thing I actually liked, transformed into the whole thing. It connected directly to my first post here, and to the first episode of Upgrade. I have been moving forward on its momentum ever since.
I’m happy to be here. And happy you’re reading this. Thank you for the last ten years. Here’s to thousands of new posts and links and podcast episodes to come.
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